Someone--at least as far back as Bismark's general Helmuth von Moltke--said "No plan survives contact with the enemy." It's consistent with the ideas of Sun Tzu although nothing quite like it appears in "The Art of War".
The US prevailed in WWII not by the superiority of its technology, although there was some of that, but by superior numbers. The US industrial base was able to produce more planes, tanks and ships than our enemies. That included producing a lot of them for our allies. The German Panzer tank was significantly superior to the US Sherman, but a plan was quickly devised where three or more Shermans could defeat a single Panzer, essentially by trapping it and forcing it into a crossfire. There were a lot more Shermans than Panzers so this tactic proved effective. Liberty ships were produced in such great numbers for such low cost that they were considered to have paid for their construction cost if they successfully made a single shipment.
Before the war, there was some design work and a little advance production by the US, but the real work didn't start until after Pearl Harbor. There were lots of big surprises. For example, before the war it had been thought that bombers needed to be able to defend themselves, consequently B-17s and B-24s carried a lot of guns. 5 or 6 of the 10 member crew of a B-17 were primarily there to man the guns. But it turned out it didn't work all that well and there were appalling losses of bomber crews, and work was quickly begun on a fighter with sufficient range to travel with them to the target. Once the P-51 came on line, the bomber losses dropped dramatically.
During the Cold War, lots of ideas about the enemy promoted lots of ideas about how we should defend ourselves, and this led to an ever escalating rise in complexity and cost. The various skirmishes that did occur: Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Bosnia, showed how completely inappropriate the Cold War ideas about weapons were for the conflicts we actually did have. B-1s, B-2s, F-117s, Nuclear Aircraft Carriers, etc., were all used in the Iraq conflicts, against enemies who were almost completely defenseless against those, and would have been almost equally defenseless against B52s and F4s, designed in the early 1950s. (not completely: surface to air missiles took down a number of planes, including an F-117 during Bosnia.). The most effective planes of the present generation, by far, are the drones, such as the Predator, which has performance not much more impressive than a WWI Sopwith Camel, but carries modern weapons and observation gear and can be flown remotely.
Recently, one of the more effective 1980s generation airplanes, the A-10 "WartHog", was retired in favor of the as yet undebugged F-35. Each F-35 costs more than ten times as much and cannot do any of the missions the Warthog proved so effective at very well. The F-35 program costs roughly the same amount each year as the SNAP "food stamp" program that feeds 5 million people every day.
We need national defense, no doubt, but we need to do it wisely. The over-reliance on extremely complex military systems does not keep us safe; it does the opposite. We are committing large portions of our treasure and talent to producing weapons that are not particularly useful. At the same time, we're offshoring our once formidable industrial base. Should we need to project force the way we did in World War II, we no longer have the industrial base that won WWII. It doesn't appear that we have any enemies who could take us on, but should we be surprised, with our absurd military, we will almost certainly lose.
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