‘Our enemies are transforming. Will we?’

The Bush administration wants revolutionary, not evolutionary, changes in US defense technology, says Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld – so it’s canceling some new weapons systems to jump to the next generation of arms.

“Our enemies are transforming,” Rumsfeld writes in the Washington Post. “Will we?”

“We are witnessing a revolution in the technology of war,” President Bush warned as a candidate in 1999. “Power is increasingly defined not by size but by mobility and swiftness. Influence is measured in information; safety is gained in stealth; and forces are projected on the long arc of precision-guided weapons.”

“Resources are always finite, and we believe we must give preference to capabilities such as increased accuracy, more rapid deployability and ‘networked’ combat,” says Rumsfeld. Some big-ticket items must be canceled “to make room for more promising technologies that can accelerate the transformation of future warfare on terms the United States must dictate.”

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