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The traditional justification for building high-tech weapons is to defeat Soviet brawn with U.S. brains. The Warsaw Pact countries, for example, have more than twice as many tanks as NATO. To compensate, the U.S. Army is developing nonnuclear "assault breaker" weapons that can strike tank columns behind enemy lines. In theory, a single such "smart" bomb could scatter enough electronically guided warheads to disable 50 tanks. The hope is that if NATO troops could hold off the Warsaw Pact's superior forces with conventional weapons long enough, the superpowers could avoid "going nuclear."
Critics in the so-called military-reform movement wonder whether complex gadgetry that looks foolproof in design will actually work on the battlefield. Along with some marvels, like the cruise missile, the Pentagon has produced its share of clunkers in recent years. One, the Sgt. York Air Defense gun, has had trouble even hitting a stationary helicopter in field tests. But weapons systems die hard. "Programs are like freight trains," says Anthony Battista, a staffer on the House Armed Services Committee. "Once they get going, they are difficult to stop." Moreover, the military is notorious for duplication, caused in part by the five services' pushing their own pet projects. Congressional auditors once found 42 different programs to research infrared imaging, a tool for night vision. Says Battista: "Sometimes I want to ask, 'Aren't you guys going to the same war together?' "
The military also has difficulty getting weapons off the drawing board and into the field. Designs are constantly rejiggered to accommodate changing technology. The Soviets, by contrast, tend to go with what they have. For the past two decades, for example, the U.S. has dithered over the Patriot tactical air defense system without ever deploying it. In the same time, the Soviets have fielded eleven different air defense systems. Such anomalies predictably inspire the scorn of reform-minded defense experts like Edward Luttwak, a senior fellow at the Georgetown University Center for Strategic and International Studies. His view of weapons can be summed up in the words of Voltaire: sometimes "the best is the enemy of the good."