Upward Spiral - Possible Reasons

Possible Reasons

Various possible reasons exist why military technology continues to rise in price. As military technologies are seldom if ever shared each generation of technology requires each nation or group of nations to undertake long term research programs independent of each other with no concrete knowledge of the weapons systems they will be expected to compete against but with the knowledge that completing a project before competing nations will provide a considerable advantage, while falling behind could be disastrous. These factors combine to encourage very extensive research spending, even if results are never delivered.

Secondly, military technologies are expected to have a long service life and to remain technologically competitive over the course of a decade or more. To achieve 'cutting edge' technology at time of delivery (and thus technology that will still be relevant in some years time), the advances used are almost certainly not mature technologies which necessitates their parts being custom machined instead of using off-the-shelf solutions. Within a few years, formerly cutting edge solutions mature to become readily available at greatly reduced cost, but by this stage a system has already been delivered, and the next iteration of a system seeks to be more advanced than the currently available off the shelf systems.

Thirdly, there are numerous technologies that are extremely expensive to develop and deploy, but once deployed by all nations the relative value of the technology is significantly lowered. Advancements are extremely valuable when only one nation or power block possesses them, but once all nations have access to similar technologies there is a requirement to deploy weapons that can defeat the original advance. This leaves the parties in much the same position as they initially were, but having increased the cost of the platform regardless. This forms a cyclical arms race where unit prices continue to increase but the balance of power remains the same. Reactive tank armor resulted in a number of different advanced anti-tank munition (top attack, tandem charge, deplete uranium penetrators) with the end result that all new tanks are required to have both advanced armor and advanced munitions, but relative to each other are no more powerful.

Finally, many advancements increase the cost of a system but reduce the risk to platform and human lives. This increases costs in monetary terms, but provides very significant value that is not seen by observers. Technologies like stealth aircraft have been extremely expensive to develop and they only deploy the same munitions as conventional aircraft, which to observers can imply that the system cost is wasted. However, as they allow for missions to be successfully flown with far reduced risk to the aircraft, the net result can be better overall value even at higher cost.