Melmoth,
In many ways the Harrier deserves inclusion simply as a technical product. But I think the case is stronger because of the wider political and military results of its existence,
that otherwise would not have happened at all. Therefore it's world-changing nature is because of the wider political/strategic consequences. Some quotes are useful:
.........A second major effect was a reaffirmation of the special relationship between the US and UK. .... but the more obvious result was the common alignment of Britain and the USA in a more confrontational foreign policy against the Soviet bloc, sometimes known as the Second Cold War.
.........Militarily, the Falklands conflict remains the largest air-naval combat operation between modern forces since the end of the Second World War.
.......... For the Soviet and Warsaw Pact militaries, the Falklands War forced a re-examination of their estimates of the quality of Western troops, and particularly how well all-volunteer forces compared with conscripted forces. The Soviets became aware that the British relied heavily on the quality and training of its personnel
(from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afterm..._Falklands_War)
For the United States, there were lessons on three distinct levels...
One level was that of grand alliance strategy. Before the war broke out, Americans tended to assume that they led an alliance of completely like-minded governments against the Soviets; all other governments were neutral, leaning one way or another. ...
A second level was political. In 1982, many in the Soviet leadership believed that the West had lost so much of its morale that its end was inevitable, and perhaps even near. The Soviets themselves were in trouble, but they thought they could survive. The Argentinians clearly thought much the same thing about the British.......
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher didn’t agree. Like U.S. President Ronald Reagan, she did not think the West was dying, let alone dead. ........ In effect, Thatcher saw the Falklands War as the great test: Were the British locked into decline, or did they have a future? .......
The Soviet leadership was shocked. The West was still a serious threat. The Soviets found themselves taking Western initiatives, such as Reagan’s “Star Wars,” very seriously indeed. Thatcher’s was not, of course, the only demonstration of Western resolve; at about the same time, the Russians found it impossible to intimidate NATO governments that had decided to accept the deployment of U.S. Pershing and Tomahawk missiles on their soil. They, in turn, were probably much encouraged by Thatcher’s example.
..The impact on the Soviets cannot be underestimated. In 1982-83, the Soviets were increasingly aware that they had been caught up in a new revolution in military technology based on micro-computers. In the Falklands, the British fleet deployed far more computing power, for example, than the Soviets had in all their fleets. The Soviet problem was that their economy had been contracting for years. It did not have the stretch it needed to compete on these new terms with the West, particularly while continuing to pour out existing types of weapons. Within a few years, a new Soviet leader would be chosen specifically because he promised to clean up computer production: Mikhail Gorbachev. His attempt to solve the Soviet economic problem destroyed the Soviet Union.
...The third level, the one usually emphasized, was tactical. The Falklands War was fascinating because it was a miniature version of the war U.S. naval strategists thought they might have to fight. With their missile-armed strike aircraft and their submarines, the Argentinians were a sort of small-scale version of the threat the Soviets posed against U.S. naval strike forces in the Norwegian Sea. The British task force was a small-scale version of a U.S. striking force trying to go north, to execute the evolving U.S. maritime strategy. The Argentinians had to do much what the Soviets had to do: They had to detect, track, and attack the approaching British task force. Ultimately the British had to land troops in the face of Argentinian air and ground forces.
....If the war actually pitted a miniature U.S. strike fleet against a miniature Soviet force, the success of the British showed that the full-scale strike fleet had an excellent chance of carrying out its mission, a far better chance than critics of the evolving U.S. Maritime Strategy imagined. That mattered. The Maritime Strategy greatly raised the price the Soviets would have had to pay to prepare for a war, at a time when they were badly stretched. The need for a stretch, not just for naval but for other military purposes, forced the Soviets to take measures to change their economy and their political system. It turned out that the system did not have much stretch in it, either – and the edifice collapsed. The Falklands War mattered because in important ways it was the beginning of the end of the Cold War.
from
The Falklands War in Retrospect | Defense Media Network
Regards, pp