Military Superiority Delusion.. How Technology Becomes a Burden in Times of War

In 1983, Norman Augustine, former CEO of Lockheed Martin—the maker of America’s best-known and most powerful fighter jets—sat in his office, holding production and development reports and the company’s expenses. After lengthy reading and analysis, he proposed a wry law that would later be known as the “Sixteenth Augustine Law.”

The law states that by the year 2054 the United States will have spent its entire defense budget to buy or develop just one fighter jet. We are still twenty-eight years away from 2054, but the reality suggests that that prophecy is approaching, perhaps more than Augustine himself anticipated at the time.

I am not here to talk about corruption in deals or commissions, as those stories are superficial. But I will take you—if you will—to a journey to understand an economic phenomenon terrifying to any army that seeks to possess the best kinds of weaponry.

This phenomenon is known as “Structural Disarmament,” or “Structural Disarmament,” a process that makes the feverish pursuit of technological supremacy in arming the army a direct cause of shrinking its real capabilities. To the point that there are huge armies in appearance, but in essence they are small, fragile, and unable to wage a long, real war

The core problem in modern defense economics does not lie in the lack of budget, but rather in the fact that the cost of a single weapon unit rises at a logarithmic rate, while budgets increase at a linear rate.

Look—if you truly understand this sentence and its implications in depth, you, literally and without exaggeration, understand more than many officials and military personnel working in sensitive positions related to the defense industry. And this is no exaggeration at all.

If we examine the cost of achieving air supremacy through generations of fighter aircraft, we will discover that we are not advancing militarily as much as we are declining numerically—and in a terrifying way.

During World War II, the legendary P-51 Mustang cost about $600,000 per aircraft to produce, meaning that $1 billion at that time could buy more than 1,600 aircraft — a truly massive air force back then.

Then we move to the 1960s and meet the F-4 Phantom, the symbol of the third generation, which cost roughly $20 million per aircraft. Thus, a billion dollars could barely purchase 20 aircraft.

When we arrive at the golden age of high costs, we find that the most famous and powerful American fighter, the F-35 Lightning II, depending on the production batch, costs around $82.5 million per aircraft. That means one billion dollars today buys only about 12 jets.

Wait a moment—we’re not at the end yet. With the sixth generation of fighters, led by the NGAD, estimates have reached around $300 million per aircraft! In other words, a billion dollars now provides only three aircraft.

You might say: “Hold on, there has been massive inflation over that period.” Yes, that’s true, and that’s precisely why all the numbers we are talking about here are adjusted according to the current value of the dollar. In other words, we are comparing the past and present based on a single, fixed currency value.

Therefore, what we are really saying is that the cost of a single weapon has risen at a rate far exceeding inflation itself. More precisely, defense budgets grow at a natural pace, while the cost per combat unit rises at a far higher rate. This means the number of aircraft, ships, and tanks available is continuously shrinking—even for wealthy nations.

However, the problem is not limited to the cost of procurement alone. The more serious issue is that the modern defense industry has transformed from selling weapons to selling a permanent financial commitment. A fighter jet or a warship is no longer paid for only once; it now comes with a massive ongoing subscription that must be paid monthly throughout its operational life. I discussed this topic in detail in my article “The Economics of Readiness.”

Do you know why this point is of such critical importance?

Because the United States, whose defense budget is literally enormous, decided in 2025 to temporarily suspend the NGAD fighter program, as the mathematical calculations themselves had become absurd, and because the economy now tells them that it is sheer madness to send a fighter worth $300 million into war—no matter how great the potential gains of that war might be.

During the Cold War, the U.S. Air Force possessed more than 8,000 aircraft. Today, despite its budget having doubled, the total number of aircraft stands at about 5,000, and a significant portion of those are not even combat aircraft—they are training, support, or service aircraft.

This means that technology is evolving, but the combat mass is shrinking, and this is precisely my point: higher technology means fewer units, and fewer units mean a weaker capacity for attrition.

So how can you cover an operational theater the size of the Pacific Ocean with a number of aircraft you can literally count on your fingers? And how can you risk sending a plane costing $300 million into an open battle? You are, quite literally, flying your budget in the air.

Thus, the core lesson here is that every new technological generation inevitably reduces the number of available aircraft—not because of corruption or mismanagement, but because of the economic equation itself.

Add to that the factor of logistical fragility, as a significant portion of the components of modern weapons—such as advanced semiconductors, composite materials, and propulsion systems—are produced in very limited regions around the world. This means that any political crisis, trade war, or even the shutdown of a single factory could lead to the suspension of entire armament programs.

This in turn means that the smarter your weapon becomes, the more it transforms into a complex industrial project that is difficult to sustain during times of war. In contrast, simpler weapons—even if not extraordinary—remain adaptable and quickly producible. And here we begin to understand why cheap munitions and drones have become the most influential players in modern warfare.

You may possess an army that appears extremely powerful in form, yet in numbers it is a very small army. The war in Ukraine has provided a clear lesson to everyone about the importance of quantity and production density when confronting high-end weapons.

At the heart of this issue lies a trap known as the “Last Five Percent.”

In military engineering, achieving 95% of combat performance is something relatively affordable. But the problem always begins when the military establishment decides to pursue perfection—to chase that last five percent.

Attempting to extend radar range by just ten more kilometers, or to reduce the radar cross-section from the size of a tennis ball to the size of a bee, doubles the cost of your weapon system. This is where a well-known concept in industrial design appears: “Gold-Plating.” It means, metaphorically, to cover your weapon in gold—to add very small improvements in performance that nonetheless cost billions more.

Let’s take a real example from 2025: the U.S. Navy decided to build a new frigate called the Constellation-class. The original idea was simple and clever—to take an existing, proven design, namely the Italian FREMM frigate, and apply minor modifications for direct operational use in order to reduce costs.

The ship was originally supposed to cost around $800 million, but—as usual—the “last five percent” improvement requests began to surface: higher survivability standards, additional systems, and special American specifications. Suddenly, the cost rose to $1.6 billion per ship, according to 2025 estimates — almost double the initial figure.

In the end, in December 2025, the U.S. Navy was forced to scale down the entire program and cancel a significant portion of it.

The pursuit of perfection had ruined the whole project — not out of bad faith, but because economics itself proves that final-stage adjustments generate costs that surpass all logic.

In the Middle East, this phenomenon takes an even more dangerous form. We continue to follow the old-school approach—purchasing weapons driven by prestige, status, and media display, rather than by economic efficiency in combat.

When an Arab state purchases Rafale or Typhoon fighters at astronomical prices, it is, in effect, draining its operations and maintenance budgets for the next ten years.

The result is that the army may look formidable and intimidating in military parades, but in reality, it suffers from severe combat fragility due to the scarcity of munitions and the high operating costs of the weapons themselves.

The Red Sea crisis of 2024–2025 was an arduous test of this model. Imagine facing a primitive drone worth barely $20,000, and responding by launching a surface-to-air missile costing between $2.1 and $4 million.

This is a logic that simply cannot survive a war lasting even a month—let alone an entire year—because you simply cannot afford it. And even if you could, industry capacity itself cannot produce munitions fast enough to sustain that rate, no matter how much money you have.

Even the United States, with a $900 billion defense budget, could not sustain a long-term war at such a tempo for more than a few months.

At this point, the enemy no longer needs to defeat you militarily—he can simply drain your economy.

What we have learned from Ukraine and the Middle East is that war is no longer fought aircraft versus aircraft, but stockpile versus stockpile.

The state that can produce missiles and munitions continuously and consistently—even simple ones—will ultimately win.

This is why the United States realized that it needed to ramp up production of missiles such as the Javelin and Stinger, after the rate of consumption in Ukraine began devouring inventories far faster than expected.

That means industrial capacity is, at its core, combat capacity.

For this reason, the world has begun shifting toward a new model known as “Affordable Mass.”

In 2025, a new concept emerged within the U.S. Department of Defense (the Pentagon) called “Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA).”

The idea is that instead of buying a single manned aircraft costing $300 million and fearing its loss in battle, you have a manned lead aircraft accompanied by a swarm of much cheaper drones that can be sacrificed when necessary—without major financial losses.

Alongside these, modified commercial drones, such as FPV models, are also used, costing as little as $500 to $1,000 each.

Here, the rules of the game change completely. It no longer matters if you possess the best aircraft in existence—what matters is having a large enough number of aircraft that are good enough, even if they are not perfect.

Turkey stands as a clear example of this new direction through its programs like “Kızılelma” and “ANKA-3.”

Therefore, the important question every official and citizen must ask is this:

Are we buying weaponry… or are we buying future incapacity—financially or operationally—when the next conflict begins?

In military science, there is an old rule that remains true to this day: quantity itself is a form of quality.

An army that can endure losses and continue fighting is stronger than an army that possesses exceptional but rare and expensive weapons, because once a costly weapon is lost, it cannot be quickly replaced, and with it, a significant moral and economic capability is also lost.

That is why structural disarmament has become a real and present phenomenon. Every time we celebrate the acquisition of a very advanced and very expensive weapon system, we should ask ourselves: what did we sacrifice in return?

Did we sacrifice numbers? Training? Readiness?

Today, the sound economic decision in defense is not to buy the newest, but to buy the most suitable and locally upgradable.

Because true sovereignty does not lie in possessing technology alone, but in the ability to produce and replace it when it is lost on the battlefield.