The Illusion of Military Supremacy: How Technology Becomes a Burden During Wars

Can the most technologically advanced army be the one that collapses the fastest?

In 1983, Norman Augustine, the former CEO of Lockheed Martin (the manufacturer of the most famous and powerful American fighter jets), was sitting in his office, holding production and development reports and the company's expenses. After a long reading and analysis, he established a satirical law that later became known as "Augustine's sixteenth law."

This law states that by the year 2054, the United States will spend its entire defense budget on buying or developing just one fighter jet.

We are still twenty-eight years away from 2054, but the reality indicates that this prophecy is drawing closer, perhaps even more than Augustine anticipated at the time.

I'm not here now to talk about the corruption of deals or commissions; all those stories are superficial. But I will take you – if you will – on a journey to understand a terrifying economic phenomenon for any army seeking to possess the best types of armament.

This phenomenon is known as "Structural Disarmament", and it is a process that makes the frenzied pursuit of technological superiority in the army's armament a direct cause of the contraction of its real capabilities. To the extent that there are massive armies in form, but small, fragile, and incapable of waging a long-term real war at their core.

The fundamental problem in modern defense economics does not lie in budget shortages, but in that the cost of a single unit of weaponry is rising at a logarithmic rate, while budgets are rising at a linear rate.

Look, if you understand this sentence deeply and its details, you literally – without exaggeration – understand more than many of the employees and military officials working in sensitive positions related to defense industries, and this is not an exaggeration at all.

If we consider the cost of controlling the skies through generations of fighter jets, we will discover that we are not advancing militarily as much as we are horrifically regressing numerically.

In World War II, the legendary P-51 Mustang cost about $600,000 to manufacture one, meaning that $1 billion at that time could buy more than 1,600 aircraft — and that was truly a massive army back then.

Then we move to the 1960s to get acquainted with the F-4 Phantom, the symbol of the third generation, whose cost was estimated at around $20 million per aircraft, making the billion dollars barely enough to purchase 20 aircraft only.

And if we reach the golden age of inflation, we find that the most famous and powerful American fighter, the F-35 Lightning II, reached a cost, according to batches, of about $82.5 million per aircraft, meaning that a billion dollars buys only around 12 aircraft.

Wait a minute, we are not at the end yet... As for the sixth generation of fighters, led by the NGAD aircraft, the estimates have reached about $300 million per aircraft! Meaning today, a billion dollars provides for only three aircraft.

You might say: wait a minute, there has been significant inflation during that time. Yes, that's true, and for this reason, all the figures we discuss here are fundamentally adjusted according to the current value of the dollar, meaning that we are comparing the past with the present on the basis of a single currency and stable value.

Thus, we are talking about that the cost of a single weapon has increased at a much faster rate than inflation itself. To be more precise, defense budgets grow at a natural pace, while the cost of combat units rises at a much higher rate. This means that the number of aircraft, ships, and tanks available is continuously decreasing, even among wealthy nations.

However, the problem is not limited to the purchase costs alone, but the more dangerous reality is that modern defense industries have transformed from selling weaponry to selling a permanent financial commitment. Fighter jets or ships are no longer paid for only once, but rather there is an enormous financial subscription paid monthly throughout their operational life. I have explored this subject in detail in my article “The Economics of Readiness”.

Do you know why this talk is extremely important?

Because the United States, which has a massive defense budget in the literal sense, decided in 2025 to temporarily halt the NGAD fighter program because the math itself became absurd, and the economy tells them that it would be madness to send a fighter valued at $300 million to war, regardless of the gains from that war.

In the Cold War era, the U.S. Air Force had over eight thousand aircraft, whereas today, despite the budget doubling, the total number of aircraft is about only five thousand, a significant portion of which are not combat aircraft but rather training, support, and service planes.

This indicates that technology is advancing, but the combat mass itself is shrinking, which is precisely what I mean: higher technology means fewer numbers, and fewer numbers mean weaker attrition capacity.

So how can you cover a theater of operations the size of the Pacific Ocean with a number of aircraft that can be counted on fingers? And how can you risk a plane worth $300 million in an open battle? You are literally flying your budget in the air.

Therefore, 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 this the factor of logistical fragility, as a huge portion of the modern weapon components – such as advanced semiconductors, composite materials, and propulsion systems – are produced in very limited areas around the world. This means that any political crisis, trade war, or even the breakdown of a single factory could lead to the stoppage of entire armament programs.

This, in turn, means that the more intelligent your weapon becomes, the more it turns into a complex manufacturing project that is difficult to sustain in wartime. In contrast, simpler weapons – even if they are not extraordinary – remain adaptable and quickly producible. Here we can understand why cheap munitions and drones have become the most important players in modern wars.

You might have an army that appears extremely powerful in its appearance, but it is numerically a very small army. The Ukraine war has provided a clear lesson to everyone about the importance of numbers and production density in the face of qualitative weapons.

At the heart of this problem lies a trap known as "the last five percent."

In military engineering, reaching 95% of combat performance is something that can be achieved at a relatively reasonable cost, but the problem always arises when the military institution decides that it is pursuing perfection, towards that last five percent.

For attempting to increase radar range by just ten additional kilometers, or reducing the radar signature from the size of a tennis ball to the size of a bee, doubles the cost of the weapon you have. Here, a very well-known concept in the industry appears called "Gold-Plating", which means to metaphorically cover your weapon with gold, meaning adding very small performance improvements but costing billions more.

And let’s take a real example from 2025: the U.S. Navy decided to build a new frigate named Constellation-class. The original idea was simple and smart: to take a ready and tested design – the Italian FREMM frigate – and make some light modifications to use it directly in order to reduce costs.

The ship was supposed to cost around $800 million only, but – as usual – demands for improvements and "the last five percent" began: higher survival standards, additional gear, and special American specifications. Suddenly, the cost surged to $1.6 billion for one ship according to 2025 estimates, nearly double.

Ultimately, in December 2025, the U.S. Navy had to scale back the program itself and cancel a significant part of it.

The pursuit of perfection ruined the entire project — not out of bad faith — but because the economy itself confirms that last-minute adjustments produce costs that exceed logical boundaries.

In the Middle East, this phenomenon takes on a more dangerous form. We are still following the old approach according to the traditional school, as we purchase weapons based on prestige, status, and media coverage, not based on economic efficiency in combat.

When an Arab state purchases Rafale or Typhoon fighter jets at astronomical prices, it is practically depleting operational and maintenance budgets for the next ten years.

The result is that the army appears imposing and terrifying in the military parade, but it actually suffers from combat fragility due to scarcity of munitions and the high cost of operating the weapon itself.

The Red Sea crisis of 2024–2025 was a tough test for this model because you are facing a primitive drone worth no more than $20,000, and launching an air defense missile costing between $2.1 and $4 million.

This is a logic that cannot withstand in a war that lasts a month, let alone a year, because you simply do not have the necessary funding for that, and even the companies do not have the sufficient production capacity to provide munitions, even if you had the money to pay the price.

And even the United States, with a defense budget of $900 billion, will not be able to continue a long war at this rate for more than several months.

Here the opponent does not need to defeat you militarily, they can simply exhaust your economy.

What we learned from Ukraine and the Middle East is that the battle is no longer between one aircraft and another, but between stockpiles.

The state that can continuously and steadily produce missiles and munitions – even if they are simple – is the one that will ultimately win.

And this is what made the United States discover that it needs to increase the pace of producing missiles like "Javelin" and "Stinger", after consumption in Ukraine drained stockpiles at a much faster rate than expected.

This means that industrial capability is essentially combat capability.

This is why the world has begun shifting to a new model known as "Affordable Mass" or "the consumable mass".

In 2025, a new concept emerged within the U.S. Department of Defense (the Pentagon) known as "Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA)".

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

In addition, modified commercial drones such as FPV are also used, costing no more than $500 to $1,000 each.

Here the rules of the game change. It is no longer important to own the best aircraft ever, but to possess a large number of sufficiently good aircraft, even if they are not perfect.

And Turkey is a very clear example of this trend through its projects like "Kızılelma" and "ANKA-3".

Therefore, the important question that every official and every citizen should ask is:

Are we buying weaponry... or are we buying future incapacity, whether financial or operational in times of conflict?

In military science, there is an old rule that is still valid today: quantity in itself is a type of quality.

The army that can sustain losses and continue fighting is stronger than an army that possesses extraordinary weapons but is rare and expensive, because the expensive weapon, once lost, is not quickly replaced, and with it, a large morale and economic capability is lost.

That is why structural disarmament is a present reality; every time we celebrate a very advanced and very expensive weapon deal, we should ask ourselves: What have we sacrificed in return?

Did we sacrifice numbers? Training? Readiness?

That is why the wise economic decision in defense today is not to buy the latest, but to buy what is most suitable and locally adaptable.

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