ABSTRACT
The United States chose the asymmetric approach of exploiting technology to develop very high quality weapons that, in theory, would substitute their quality for Soviet quantity. The most fundamental technological trend was that of micro-electronics. Competitive strategy is a substitute for the traditional American approach that, while recognizing that quality of weaponry could offset numerical inferiority, assumed that the only effective response to 'the threat' was overall parity in major components of the military balance, and qualitative superiority in every subcomponent. Instead of the traditional weapons system review process, which involved convincing superiors that, the threat would be too great for existing systems to defeat, competitive strategies would require that the Services discover "an exploitable tendency of the Soviets that is enduring. Military advantage shifts in major ways toward platforms and weapons with low observables. Richard Garwin argues that "the technologies associated with the Strategic Defense Initiative for the most part have no relevance to the conventional battlefield.
