How rearmament can make us rich Europe must invest in high-tech weapons

On May 1, 1954, for its May Day air show, the Soviet Air Force flew a pair of four-engined Myasishchev-4 jet bombers over Red Square. With their ultra-modern lines, and dimensions large enough to suggest a sufficient range to reach Washington DC, they made a powerful impression. In those days, of course, there was no high-altitude photography — let alone the later satellite imagery that could reveal new Soviet aircraft in their prototype stage, long before they could be perfected or put into production at scale.

All the Pentagon had to rely on were CIA defector reports, rarely helpful and quickly outdated. But it was a second display, in 1955, that sowed panic in Washington. That July, 10 Mya-4s flew past the Tsushino airfield reviewing stand, before diving out of sight and returning with eight more, creating the false impression that the Soviets had 28 such aircraft overall. Wrongly assuming that Moscow had increased production from two to almost 30 in a single year and would continue to ramp up output, the CIA and Air Force Intelligence predicted that, by 1960, the Soviets would have 800 Mya-4s, enough to attack even smaller American cities.

In the meantime, the Mya-4’s Mikulin engines primarily designed by captured German engineers proved unsuitable for intercontinental flight: they were too fuel-hungry to reach Washington DC. But terrified into action, the US military establishment started down a path that would revolutionise technology for the rest of the century, while also turning the US into a computer superpower. So long as it pays for truly new technology with a broad scope, and not for more of the same, even unnecessary military spending can still prove very useful, turning the wealth it absorbs into innovation and economically important technological advances. It’s a valuable lesson for governments considering how to rearm in our own time.

From Britain to Germany, Europeans finally seem serious about rearmament. Given that will inevitably require cuts in pensions and other public services, the economic benefits of innovative military spending deserve special scrutiny. Certainly, this has been the secret recipe of the Israeli economy, which has grown very well over the decades despite colossal military spending. Even during the war year of 2024, with much of the labour force under arms, the Israeli economy still grew by 1%.

The key here is Israel’s focus on truly advanced weapons, mostly absent from Europe’s antiquated armed forces. The Iron Dome is one familiar example, but there is also the “Arrow” that intercepted Iranian ballistic missiles well above the atmosphere, in mankind’s first experience of space warfare. Soon, Israel will also launch the world’s first directed-energy weapon, much like the Martian “heat ray” that H.G. Wells described back in 1897.

What all these systems have in common is their very advanced software, whose broad commercial applications employ many of the 15% of Israelis who work in high-tech, the highest proportion of any nation on earth. These people are all members of a still-expanding profession — one ultimately sparked by the Mya-4 panic.

After those Soviet fly-pasts, the young Jack Kennedy, already campaigning for the White House, ferociously denounced Eisenhower’s lethargy on the so-called ”bomber gap”. The American elite and public had barely absorbed the huge shock of the first Soviet thermonuclear bomb, which had come just a year after America’s. It was therefore with broad support that the Pentagon decided to go all out in response to the perceived Soviet threat.

Even though the Korean War was over, and the Vietnam War had yet to start, the 1955 defence budget consumed 9.4% of the US GDP. Today, despite the collective groans over Pentagon spending, its budget comes to just 3.4%. One US response to the seemingly formidable Mya-4 threat was to build over 2,000 four-engined B-47 jet bombers, which needed forward bases across the Atlantic to reach Russia and back. Next came more than 700 eight-engined B-52s, which could fly anywhere in the world from bases safely inside the US. They still fly today, and remain the only aircraft capable of destroying an entire military base with a single bomb load.

Both bomber programmes were tremendously expensive — but nowhere near as costly as the defensive response to the Soviet threat, whose momentous consequences still linger.

The US Army had lately lost its air arm — in 1947, the US Air Force became a separate service — but strongly asserted its own air defence role. It spent hugely on German anti-aircraft missile projects, resulting in the Nike anti-aircraft missile system, whose batteries protected both home cities and US bases abroad. For its part, the Air Force produced jet interceptors, which just like the British Spitfires were designed to swiftly gain altitude and target Russian bombers. They were followed by the unmanned Bomarc, effectively nuclear-armed drones designed to destroy two or three bombers at once.

To detect approaching Soviet bombers, radar stations were built along both US coasts, and up in the Arctic along the “Distant Early Warning Line” spanning Alaska, Canada, the Faroe Islands and Iceland. But the principal challenge remained: how to direct (“vector”) interceptors all the way from take off, until they could detect Russian bombers on their own short-range nosecone radars, and then target them with their guns and air-to-air missiles.

That was not just difficult, it was mission impossible. True, the British had managed it in the Battle of Britain, when fighter pilots were informed by radio where enemy squadrons were arriving, to then see them through their windscreens — if the visibility was good enough. Later in the war, the first airborne radars could detect bombers a few miles out even in dense clouds — if they worked perfectly, as they sometimes did.

But this solution could not simply be scaled up. First, incoming Soviet bombers would drop thermonuclear weapons. That meant it was no use to intercept just some of the attackers, as the RAF did with Luftwaffe bombers on their way to London or any other target, in order to wear down enemy attackers over weeks and months. In the nuclear age, there would be nothing left to defend, unless all or almost all enemy bombers were successfully stopped.

Then there was the simple question of scale. The US and Canada are some 80 times larger than the United Kingdom. Unless fighter aircraft could very reliably be directed to the enemy over long distances, the entire defence plan would crumble.

The difficulty, then, was to integrate radar readings from many different stations, while ensuring that radars could distinguish between individual enemy aircraft. Informal gatherings of radar and early computer experts — so-called “summer studies” — provided the answer to this apparent mission impossible: giant computers distributed across the US and programmed to track Soviet bombers from first detection to interception. The problem of course was that no giant computer existed, nor any way to programme them.

With unlimited funds and the methods just invented in the “summer studies” both were developed in record time. The result was SAGE: the Strategic Air Ground Environment. There were 27 stations in all, each boasting a pair of huge AN/FSQ-7 computers. Doubling up was necessary as a failsafe: if even one of the 60,000 vacuum tubes in each computer failed, which happened often enough, the machine malfunctioned, but data processing would continue on its twin. Together, the twin computers weighed 250 tons and required an acre of floor space (and yes, my cheap old laptop is more powerful). Each was operated from 100 “system consoles” which included the already familiar circular radar display — and a lighter and ashtray because an entire intercept sequence might fail if the operator had to leave the room for a smoke.

IBM — already famous for typewriters and cash registers, but which also made mechanical punched card computers — built the electronic AN/FSQ-7s by adding some 7,000 engineers and technicians. They soon acquired the skills that would allow IBM to conquer the world. The company’s 360 “mainframe” model knocked foreign manufacturers right out of the market.

But it was the least visible part of this vast enterprise that proved most consequential. In order to operate, the computers needed detailed step-by-step instructions: in other words software. Because of its enormous scale, SAGE trained the first ever cohort of software writers, and indeed it was the mathematician Margaret Elaine Hamilton, who programmed for SAGE from 1961, who invented the term “software engineer” to describe her trade.

Given all the advantages the United States was to derive from its leap forward in producing both mainframe computers and software, it would be churlish to claim that SAGE was unnecessary because the Soviet bomber threat never materialised. The great lesson of SAGE is that rearmament can advance economies as nothing else — so long as the money is not spent mostly on the classic weapons that both generals and established military industries invariably want.

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Professor Edward Luttwak is a strategist and historian known for his works on grand strategy, geoeconomics, military history, and international relations.

ELuttwak