Just Out: Complexity, Stagnation and Frailty: Understanding the Twenty-First Century

Back in 2004 I published "Societal Complexity and Diminishing Returns in Security" in the journal International Security. (The journal is paywalled, but you can access a copy on my blog, here.)

The argument, which built on Joseph Tainter's thesis in The Collapse of Complex Societies, boiled down to its absolute basics, was that modern civilization was getting more complex, by and large in ways that were offering less and less benefit, leaving it more strained and more vulnerable to disruption, all as the costs of protecting it kept going up.

This sounds abstract, but there were fairly concrete ways in which this was the case. The ever-rising volume of trade, travel, communication, information production and processing show our society's increasing complexity. The profound slowdown in economic growth in recent decades, the routinization of colossal deficits, the explosion of debt, testify to a society whose resources are badly strained. And of course, the "tight coupling" of our contemporary systems, the preference for leanness in the name of "efficiency" (at the expense of resiliency) also suggested rising vulnerability. This was evident, too, in the standard deemed necessary for protection--with the old idea of nuclear deterrence giving way to an obsession with not deterring but neutralizing the abilities of "irrational" actors, which entailed such things as preventive wars and missile defense. Meanwhile, way below that threat level there was the burgeoning expenditure on law enforcement, emergency services, private security.

As is often the case with a piece of published research, it was a starting point for me rather than an end to a line of speculation, in particular the first aspect of it--the way society was getting more complex but stagnant and strained, as declining growth and rising deficits and debt suggested. One result was a more thoroughly worked out and heavily updated version of the argument in 2008 which I was releasing just as the mortgage crisis demonstrated the stagnation and frailty of the globalized, financialized, twenty-first century economy, with the paper. (You can find it here on my blog, a PDF version here at SSRN.)

Still, that was not the end of it. I returned to the same theme later, and more recently produced three papers, also published through SSRN--one offering a yet more thorough and more up-to-date version of that argument in early 2018; an accompanying piece which probed deeply into the multiple available data sets regarding post-World War II growth in Gross World Product; and finally one which endeavored to relate our economic stresses to the sharp deterioration of the "liberal international order" that respectable mainstream talking heads remark so much but do so little to help anyone understand.

My new book, Complexity, Stagnation and Frailty: Understanding the Twenty-First Century, brings this later research together in a single, convenient volume, in both Kindle and paperback editions, available at Amazon and other retailers.

Get your copy today.

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Bernie Sanders' Green New Deal: A First Take, Part I

As you are likely already aware, Bernie Sanders has released his document regarding a Green New Deal. In contrast with the resolution sponsored by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey earlier this year, which merely outlined the standards a plan of action ought to meet, but a detailed outline of the plan itself, presenting a comprehensive set of proposals.

As I write the plan has been available to the public for mere hours, and it is long and intricate, some 14,000 words. I do not claim to be anywhere near done close-reading and thinking about it, but it does seem possible to say some things regarding the plan in light of my earlier thoughts about such a Green New Deal.

I previously asserted here that any plan worthy of serious consideration must abide by four principles, namely scale, global thinking, pragmatism, and equity. This plan appears to abide by all four of them. The authors realize that serious action means nothing less than the production of 100 percent electricity from renewable energy by 2030, the fuller decarbonization of the energy and transport sector, and an overhaul of agriculture, which will not come cheaply, but will require that World War II-level effort of which so many speak but which few seem to actually understand. The plan acknowledges that the U.S. must do its part to solve the problem of climate change, but cannot do it alone, acknowledging the need to enlist the cooperation of the other major governments, and the revision of trade agreements, while aiding less developed nations in making the transition. Its authors do not hesitate to speak of the necessary means for carrying out such action, however squeamish orthodox opinion may be about them--going beyond pious talk of "supporting research" or somehow inducing business to do the job to public construction and ownership of the needed power capacity (via the Power Marketing Associations). And it is certainly attentive to equity, not only between rich countries and poor as acknowledged above, but in regard to working people who risk dislocation in the energy transition because of the sectors in which they happen to work; and the responsibility of the fossil fuel sector for the "externalities" it has generated.

All of that has naturally got my attention.

Bernie Sanders' Green New Deal: A First Take, Part II

As noted in my previous post, I was impressed by the extent to which Bernie Sanders' Green New Deal acknowledged those important principles of scale, global thinking, pragmatism, and equity. What does it really consist of, however?

The centerpiece of the plan is a shift to renewable power as the basis of the energy and transport systems of the country (and it is on this aspect of the plan that I will focus here). The plan specifically envisions a massive, rapid expansion of electricity production capacity, combined with a "smart grid"; the electrification of homes and businesses currently using oil and gas for such purposes as heating; and transport fleets, the latter with the help of grants for trade-ins for individuals, school districts, transit agencies, and trucking, and the funding of a user-friendly charging infrastructure. (The plan also includes a substantial investment in electrically powered public transit and high-speed rail; the weatherizing of buildings, which will entail the construction and modification of a great deal of housing stock.)

As renewable energy production increasingly meets the country's energy needs, the plan also curbs fossil fuels production and consumption, with the latter sector paying significantly toward the progress of the former. The elimination of Federal fossil fuel subsidies (including the massive military expenditures devoted to protecting oil supplies and transport routes, far vaster than the official subsidies) and divestment from overseas fossil fuel project financing, the penalties for violations of environmental laws that the crippled regulators from the Reagan era forward failed to collect, taxes on polluters, and suits against the oil industry (like those against the tobacco companies) will provide much of the funding for the transition--which will, over time, substantially pay for itself. The most obvious reason is that the Power Marketing Associations will build and operate much of the renewable energy-based power generation capacity, and collect the revenue--making this an investment by the government, rather than mere expenditure. However, there will also be the economic boost from rising income tax revenue (and falling social safety net payouts) due to the colossal stimulus of the plan, which it is intended will create 20 million jobs.

Alongside all this, the environmental destructiveness of the fossil fuel production that will continue as the shift is carried through will be minimized, with the plan explicitly calling for bans on offshore drilling, fracking, mountaintop removal coal-mining, and the import and export of fossil fuels, and on new fossil fuel infrastructure permits on Federal land. It also calls for the repair and clean-up of existing fossil fuel infrastructure, both that in use and that which has been abandoned, to minimize its negative effects. Beyond these objects the plan will also see government enlargement of recycling efforts, not least to minimize the resource consumption required by the construction of renewable energy-production systems.

In considering all this the plan is notable for its comparative technological conservatism--its emphasis on the use of existing, proven technologies. However, it also acknowledges the areas where further research and development will be required, or helpful, specifying programs in the areas of energy storage; the decarbonization of shipping and aviation; and the production of alternatives to petrochemical-based plastics. Notable, too, is the extent to which it addresses other problems related to this transition, and to coping with climate change, including more general redress of an infrastructure which must be made more efficient and resilient, from the supply of potable water to the supply of broadband Internet (here, too, public ownership will be part of the plan), the strengthening of firefighting capabilities, the expansion of Brownfield and Superfund cleanup, and the protection of public lands.

Considering all this I must admit that I was impressed by not just the scale of the program, as previously acknowledged here, but also its comprehensiveness, its audacity, or its rigor, not a single thing so far striking me as obviously infeasible or even implausible given what I know of the issue, whether in regard to its aims or the means for realizing them. No plan previously presented by a national figure even begins to compare with it in any of these respects--and whatever I make of the details as they continue to appear, and we all continue to study them, I think I will still think what I do now, that finally we are starting to see some real acknowledgment of just what this job will take.

The First Review is In! (The Military Techno-Thriller: A History)

My book The Military Techno-Thriller: A History hit the market earlier this month.

Fuldapocalypse Fiction has just reviewed it, and I am pleased to say its assessment of the book has been favorable.

Its review praised the book's history of the field as a "multi-century tour de force" of "not only the books themselves but also the cultural context behind them," even as it manages to be "both long enough to be . . . and short enough to be easily readable, making it the best of both worlds." Altogether Fuldapocalypse rated it

an excellent book that examines an overlooked genre through a variety of interesting perspectives in a highly readable way. I cannot recommend The Military Techno-Thriller: A History enough for fans of the genre.

That's very high praise from any source--and the more meaningful because so much of his characterization of the book ("long enough to be comprehensive . . . and short enough to be easily readable, making it the best of both worlds") is exactly what I aimed for.

It's the more meaningful, too, for having come from this blog specifically. As a longtime reader (and fan) of Fuldapocalypse Fiction, and the affiliated Coiler's Creative Corner--both of which I regard as must-reads for those interested in military techno-thrillers, action-adventure ficion, and related thriller genres across the media spectrum from print to gaming--I have consistently found the author a deeply informed, incisive and tough (but fair) critic of work in the field.

The Regime Change Fantasists

Those who flatter themselves that they are statesmen, looking at a regime they hate and want to overthrow, always imagine that it is just so much rotting wood which a swift kick would bring down, with the population subsequently welcoming them as liberators, making it easy and cheap for them to do as they please. They never imagine that the regime they so dislike may nonetheless command its people's loyalty, rallying them round the flag in a time of national crisis (even as they count on exactly that in their own country); that given a choice between an indigenous government, even one they would like very much to change, and the foreigners dropping bombs on them or marching into their streets with ideas of their own about how they will live, they will commonly choose the former rather than the latter (even as, again, they count on exactly that same inclination in their own country).

This is called "extreme stupidity." History is littered with its disastrous results. And its prevalence (such that the neoconservatives whose stock in trade this is are back) is a reminder, if any were needed, that politics is not a meritocracy, that those in charge are never the "best and brightest" as their fawning courtiers tell them and the world, but careerist mediocrities who picked their parents well, and played the filthy game of getting ahead slightly better (or at least, with a little more luck on their side) than the other careerist mediocrities who made up the competition.

The Cheap and Easy Option Never Is

I have recently written here regarding the discussion of some hypothetical scenarios regarding U.S. military action against Iran. As appeared to be the case at first glance, and still more at second glance, Iran's size and population, its fragmented geography, its high level of urbanization and the distribution of its urban centers, and the lack of convenient entry points, as well as its relative demographic cohesion, make any attempt at invasion or occupation of the whole country a task difficult in the best of circumstances, and implausible on account of the sheer scale of the force required for it. (Instead of the hundred thousand troops who occupied Iraq, or the two or three hundred thousand who might be available in the event of a full mobilization of the reserves and National Guard, two or three million would be required--figures implausible outside a world war-like draft.)

That reality leaves the air and sea options. It would be relatively easy for the U.S. to neutralize Iran's air force and navy, while its ballistic missile forces appear to be of quite limited practical offensive capacity. At the same time its less conventional anti-ship capabilities, and its anti-air capabilities, if possibly more formidable than those of other recent U.S. opponents (especially if there proves to be some truth to the larger claims made for its indigenous systems), seem unlikely to make a prolonged U.S. air campaign and blockade against the country infeasible (even if they may take a toll heavier than the very light ones of past air campaigns). The U.S. could quite easily cut off Iran's trade, and inflict heavy damage on its armed forces and its economy.

Still, all these years later, there remains no substitute for ground forces in achieving regime changes through military means--while the prospect for blowback is considerable, and not solely through the most obvious sympathizers Iran has. A prolonged campaign of this kind will test the tolerance of the international community broadly, and not least, the patience of neighboring Russia, whose non-intervention cannot be counted on. The result is that the seemingly "easy" air-sea option is not so easy after all. It just about never is.

Funding the Sixth-Generation Fighter?

Some years ago I took up the subject of the sixth-generation fighter aircraft.

I discussed what features are thought likely to distinguish such an aircraft. (Think artificially intelligent, hypersonic, armed with directed-energy weapons.) I also considered whether these as yet hypothetical planes might or might not actually appear within the predicted time frame--the late 2020s or 2030s.

I offered three reasons to be skeptical of this.

1. The turn from great power conflict to small wars, making quite different demands.
2. The rate of technical progress may be too slow to allow for the kind of aircraft imagined in that time frame (perhaps in itself, perhaps relative to other, more dynamic fields).
3. Economic stagnation may leave air forces unable to afford such aircraft.

It would be difficult to deny that great power conflict has resurged since I first wrote that piece (in 2010).

There is also more bullishness about technical development now than then. How many of the really relevant technologies will emerge remains open to question. Even where artificial intelligence is concerned expectations now seem more moderate as compared with a couple of years ago--while as the research into hypersonic weaponry shows, anything like a truly viable, multirole, production aircraft capable of hypersonic flight remains quite some way. I would not bet on such aircraft being anywhere near ready for service in the 2020s. Still, it seems to me precipitous to wholly rule out at least the technical possibility of such aircraft for a full generation.

However, the third reason, the matter of cost, seems at least as significant as ever.

Consider what came of the fifth generation of fighter. The Europeans decided not to bother, making do with the "generation 4.5" Eurofighter Typhoon and Dassault Rafale. The Japanese, Russians, Chinese only belatedly pursued programs. And even the U.S. Air Force, initially intent on 750 F-22s, cut back its order by three-quarters, making do with a mere 187 operational jets.

One can attribute much of this to the end of the Cold War, admittedly. The Russians and Chinese did not have the resources--the former because of economic collapse, the latter because if fast-growing, they were still relatively cash-strapped, and (wisely) prioritizing economic development. This let the U.S. and its allies take it easy there, the more so as they had other priorities in an age of sluggish growth and intensifying economic competition, and in which, at any rate, small wars seemed the principal concern.

Still, as noted earlier, if the Russians and Chinese only belatedly fielded their own systems, they did so all the same, and in an international scene that had grown much more aggressive in comparison with the 1990s. However, after developing the Sukhoi-57 the Russian government decided to hold off on actual production. This may seem understandable given Russia's attempting here to fund superpower capacities (cutting-edge aircraft production) on rather less than superpower resources (even in PPP terms, its GDP is about 20 percent that of the U.S., the European Union or China). Still, in the face of what American policymakers regarded as a more aggressive scene, the Pentagon has opted to buy brand new F-15s (upgraded, but still F-15s, and not even stealthy "Silent Eagles" either) to fill out its ranks. There has been much argument over the rationale, with many downplaying the question of cost savings--perhaps, too much so, in light of the uncertainty involved in the eventual cost of the more advanced F-35, and for that matter, the fate of the program more generally. (Production has only scarcely begun, a mere four hundred of those thousands of intended units rolled off the line to date, while criticism of the high cost and questionable performance of the aircraft continue.)

In short, even the fifth generation of jets has proven prohibitively costly. It seems a certainty that, if they do prove technically feasible, a sixth generation of fighters will be much more costly than these--the billion dollar fighter upon us if the trend holds--without necessarily offering value for the money (other systems might prove a more efficient way of doing whatever job is at hand), or the resources being there even if they do. (Our economies have been a stagnant for a decade now, and could easily remain so, while one does not have to incline to the more apocalyptic visions of climate change to see that worse may be in store here.)

Indeed, thinking of the talk of sixth generation fighters I am reminded of other high-tech roads not traveled, like the '50s-era visions of ultra-fast, ultra-high-flying, ultra-long-range shooting superjets (YF-12, F-108) that should ring very familiar to anyone who has actually considered the things a sixth generation fighter is supposed to do (be a hypersonic, near-space jet with longer-ranged missiles and even "frigging laser beams"). Instead fighter design traveled a more conventional, less spectacular, but arguably more practical course. So does it seem likely to do again.

A Return to the Draft? Crunching the Numbers

I recently considered the discussion of what would be required in the way of military manpower for a U.S. occupation of Iran, which suggested a force of 2-3 million personnel--and in order to generate that, U.S. forces at manning levels not seen since World War II (10 million, 12 million).

Given that even a full mobilization of the Reserves and National Guard would generate just a fraction of that, the conclusion of many analysts of the subject has been that a draft would be required.

Still, there are many ways of handling conscription--not least, in regard to the proportion of the population subject to it.

It may seem that, given population growth since the 1940s--more than doubling the size of the U.S. population--it should not be quite so difficult to come up with the numbers discussed here.

However, due to the lengthening life expectancy and lower birth rates characteristic of a modern, urbanized society, it is also an older population on average.

In 1940 the median age in the U.S. was 29.

Today it is 38.

In 1940 the 15-24 age group made up about 18 percent of the population.

In 2018 it was down to under 12 percent--a far from insignificant drop.1

This naturally shows in the size of the 18-24 cohort that would be eligible for the draft, some 31 million as of 2010, with the figure unlikely to have grown very much (and, it is not impossible, has shrunk a little).

At first glance 30 million or so potential draftees may seem like quite an ample pool for the kind of expansion discussed here--a mere fraction of it sufficing to fill out the ranks to the desired degree. However, it is never the case that the entirety of any group is actually up to the rigors of military service. According to recent reports a significant majority of those in this cohort (71 percent) do not meet the armed forces' current health, physical fitness, educational and other standards.

Twenty-nine percent of that figure comes to somewhere around 10 million.

The result is that, if seriously aimed at generating a World War II level force, a draft directed at this age bracket would have to take virtually every acceptable male and female into the armed forces, questions of deferments for education or other special circumstances wholly dispensed with; reduce its standards at the price of its efficiency, perhaps significantly; or cast its net more widely, drafting from among older Americans as well.

That such possibilities would even have to be talked about makes clear just how drastic such a course would be, such that even the most overheated neocon imagination cannot picture its being remotely acceptable to what even conservative commentators acknowledge is a war-weary American public.

An Occupation of Iran? A Second Look at the Numbers--and Much Else

In the discussion of the various estimates some observers have made of just what a territorial occupation of Iran would involve, I have seen some object that attempting to base one on an analogy between Iran and 2003 Iraq, for example, is a crude method--implying that these may overestimate the troop requirements.

The objection can run that Iran is not evenly peopled. Much of the nation is uninhabitable--a quarter of it nearly uninhabited salt flat and desert in the center. The twenty-one provinces to the west of this desert-dominated center, comprising less than half the country by area, contain about five-sixths of the population; while Tehran province, and four of its adjoining provinces (Qom, Mazandaran, Alborz, Markazi), a little under six percent of the territory, contain almost thirty percent of the population.

This may seem to make the task easier by suggesting less territory actually has to be covered. However, Iran--a country, again, comparable to Western Europe in size--is vast enough that even occupying a portion of it would be a daunting task. The densely peopled Tehran-centered area discussed above is by itself still markedly greater in extent and population than the U.S. occupation zone in post-war Germany.1 And the bigger western region discussed here is, in territorial extent, about three times bigger than the whole of West Germany then. (It is also twice the size of the portion of Iraq not consisting of uninhabited desert.2)

The result is that this area alone would still be enough to plausibly require millions of soldiers.3 And the fact remains that the rest of the country could not be ignored given the significant populations further east, not least the nation's second-largest city, Mashhad, near the border with Turkmenistan. The physical fragmentation of this vast territory by the large uninhabitable space in the middle, and its multiple mountain chains (in which Iran resembles Italy more than Germany, yet another complicating factor), is likely to pose particular challenges for a force coming in from the outside with heavy mechanized units, and attempting to use troops efficiently through a rapid-reaction plan rather than a wide scattering of garrisons. (It also does not help that the densest and strategically most significant population cluster, the aforementioned one centering on Tehran, is deep within the country's interior, hundreds of miles inland from the Iraqi border, or the Persian Gulf.)

Still, for all the challenges posed by the country's large and mountainous territory, perhaps the most significant of all is the intensive urbanization at which this population distribution hints--already noted, but perhaps worth underlining here. Over half of the Iranian population lives in the country's nearly one hundred cities of 100,000 people or more; a quarter in just the eight cities home to a million or more. The capital Tehran has a population of 9 million, and 15 million in the metro area--nearly a fifth of the nation. No army has ever attempted a military occupation of an urban area this size. (Baghdad at the time of the invasion, for example, had a population just half the size of Tehran's--and on top of this Iran has two additional 2003 Baghdad equivalents, the Mashhad and Isfahan areas with 3-4 million each.)

All of this reinforces rather than debunks the argument that a force a multiple of what it would have taken to control Iraq, or which it did take to control America's portion of post-war Germany or Japan, would be required for an occupation of larger, more urbanized Iran--even before one thinks of the political complexities of the situation nationally and regionally, about which it might be appropriate to say another word.

Perhaps the most obvious matter is that Iran is considerably less subject to the kinds of ethno-religious divisions that Iraq was. This may seem an advantage given their contribution to the considerable bloodshed that followed regime change in that country. However, it made some aspects of that regime change easier. Certainly there is nothing comparable to the semi-detachment of Kurdistan from the rest of Iraq prior to the U.S. invasion, and the U.S. alliance with Kurdish forces there; or the conflict between Shiites in the south and the Sunni center, which did not translate to such easy cooperation as in the case of the Kurds, but which meant a less united opposition to the post-Saddam regime. Indeed, where in Iraq an ethno-religious minority (Sunni Arabs) was in control, in Iran the majority ethnic group (Persians, over half the country) is politically dominant, while the country is relatively homogeneous in religion (ninety percent Shiite).

There is, too, the situation outside the country's borders. As I noted previously, local opposition in the wake of a successful invasion could find support among populations in neighboring states like Iraq--which might provide refuge and much else. (As the situation stands now Iran is affiliated with militias in many a neighboring country. Can it be imagined that they would totally stay out of such a fight?) Potentially more significant, however, there is the question of Russia, too little acknowledged in discussions of such a scenario. Given Iran's sharing the shores of the Caspian Sea, and borders with Russian-aligned Armenia, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, it is very easy to imagine such a conflict becoming--like the wars in Georgia, the Donbass, and Syria--a proxy war between Russia and the U.S.. All of this would not only make any post-occupation conflict more difficult, but contribute to the continued worsening of U.S.-Russian relations, and the danger of their military confrontation escalating.

Still, what may be more significant than all this is, of course, the point that David Edelstein has made in regard to territorial occupations. Critics of occupations like that of Iraq in 2003 are not wrong to point to the lack of local knowledge, planning and inadequate resourcing of the occupying force that so quickly turned the situation disastrous (unreadable as anything but the extreme wishful thinking and extreme incompetence of the neocons and their fellow travelers) but (as Machiavelli pointed out in The Prince a half millennium before Edelstein took up the subject) the task of changing regimes is about as difficult as a political job gets. It is worse when the one changing the regime is an outsider who blew up a lot of stuff and killed a lot of people to get there, and has to do unpleasant things to stay where people did not want them to begin with.

Unsurprisingly, as Edelstein showed empirically in his two-century survey of territorial occupations in his 2004 article on the subject in International Security (same issue this appeared in, by the way) occupations--measured by the standard of whether they not merely keep violence to an acceptable minimum during their stay, but whether they achieve their political goals in more enduring fashion--usually fail, even when not being overseen by the likes of a Donald Rumsfeld and company. Indeed, just about the only thing that can make them work out (and this, Machiavelli did not anticipate) is if occupier and occupied are drawn together by a mutual fear of a third party greater than any hostility they have to each other.

This is pretty much unimaginable where Iran today is concerned. And no one who presumes to discuss the issue should forget it.

1. The U.S. had 1.6 million troops in Germany on V-E Day, over 300,000 in its zone a year later, while some four hundred thousand Western troops covered West Germany as a whole. Apportioning that to the areas discussed here, some half million would be needed for the densely peopled five-province west-central area alone, 1.2 million troops for the western part of the country.
2. Properly manning the occupation of Iraq in 2003 would, according to one estimate made at the time, have required 800,000 troops. Doubling that translates to 1.6 million troops for western Iran.
3. See notes 1 and 2.

Space Age Super-Fighters

In the half century or so after the Wright Brothers' first flight the performance of aircraft with regard to speed and altitude advanced exponentially. At the start of World War I, a scarce decade after that first flight, planes could fly as fast as seventy-five miles an hour and reach altitudes of twenty thousand feet. By the end of the war four years later those figures had doubled, and they doubled again during the interwar period, while World War II accelerated the advance once more. The conflict saw prop fighters doing four hundred, close to five hundred, miles an hour, and the first jets flying into action even faster than that. In another decade, the top speed of those jets was mere cruising speed for the fighters becoming standard in air force inventories, which could do Mach 2 or better on afterburner--while even passenger travel looked set to go supersonic (with Britain and France collaborating on the Concorde).

It seemed natural that planes would continue to become faster and higher-flying--the more so for the even more dramatic progress in the field of rocketry. The World War II-era V-2s led to rockets that could reach escape speed (twenty-five thousand miles per hour) to leave the atmosphere entirely in the same time frame, putting into orbit unmanned satellites, cosmonauts, and beyond that, who knew? Meanwhile, those rockets' smaller cousins revolutionized the field of air defense--surface-to-air missiles meaning in the view of many that planes would have to become faster and higher-flying to escape them. Scarcely after their production run had begun the B-52 Stratofortress no longer appeared stratospheric enough in the eyes of U.S. Air Force planners, the coming years apparently demanding planes that could fly at Mach 3 at 70,000 feet or higher--and in turn, interceptor aircraft that could match that performance, for when Soviet bombers became equally capable. Thus the B-70 Valkyrie, and the F-12 and F-108 fighters.

Of course, none of these projects amounted to all that much, and nothing comparable was ever set up in their place. Instead of the B-70, canceled after the expenditure of over ten billion dollars in today's terms (which works out to about five billion per prototype), what the Air Force got was the modestly supersonic B-1, and the subsonic B-2, the emphasis placed on sneaking under radar, and then hiding from it in plain sight with the help of stealthy shaping and material, rather than somehow trying to get beyond its reach.

The F-108 never even made it to the prototype stage, while the spectacularly expensive F-12 (for the cost of one of which the Air Force could purchase a half dozen Phantoms) was also cancelled. Only the latter had much of a legacy, in the form of a small fleet of spy planes based on its airframe, the SR-71 (32 jets total), while the fighters of the third, fourth, fifth generations were pretty much the same as those of the '50s-era second generation with regard to speed and altitude.

This was even the case with those planes' intended missile, the AIM-47. It did pave the way for the AIM-54 Phoenix, but that, too, appears underwhelming in hindsight. Because the TFX fighter program supposed to use it also came to naught, the Air Force never even fielded them, while just a single Navy plane carried them, the F-14 Tomcat. That fighter almost never used these missiles in combat, and perhaps never successfully (the few launched over Iraq apparently missing their targets), before their retirement as the more modest Sidewinder and Sparrow (and the much later AMRAAM) proved the real instruments of U.S. air superiority.

The same went on the Soviet side. Their aspirations toward a B-70 equivalent of their own, in the T-4 program, likewise amounted to little. More did come of their fighter programs, in the form of the near Mach-3 MiG-25 and MiG-31 interceptors--but these were arguably a detour from the main line of fighter development, as attested by the small numbers produced compared with other, contemporaneous models. (The Soviet Union built over 10,000 MiG-21s, and some 6,000 MiG-23s and MiG-27s--but only a little over 1,000 MiG-25s. Later the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation would build over 1,600 MiG-29s, and counting all variants, a similar number of Sukhoi-27s, but just 500 MiG-31s.)

Considering the visions of versatile, near-space-flying hypersonic combat aircraft (a different technical problem from the hypersonic missiles getting so much press now), and the other wild-seeming possibilities so prominent in talk about sixth generation fighters, I wonder if a half century later those speculating about these matters are not equally far off the mark--and never even suspecting it because they are more ignorant of the history than they realize.