We have to make investments in technologies that provide a positive asymmetry. And only the military, only the national security, warrants the expend… - Bernard Adolph Schriever

Our development philosophy includes two elements: a philosophy of testing and a dual approach. Stated simply, the test philosophy requires a great deal of component reliability testing at the earliest possible test level in order to insure reliability of components before proceeding to subsystem testing, captive system testing, and on to launch.

But of course, during peacetime you don't have actual wartime data to go by, but we did have the data coming out of Korea and then later out of Vietnam. But analysis during peacetime, particularly with new systems, you have to crank in a hell of a lot of assumptions. And that's why you have to be a little bit skeptical, and look underneath what some of the assumptions are, to be sure that you have a credible conclusion.

Let's look now at the next ten or fifteen years in space and how it can impact policy, strategy and possibly force structure. I sincerely believe that space, from a military standpoint, is the new high ground. It hasn't arrived, but it will evolve into the new high ground. We've had predominance on land, on the sea, in the air, and now space is next in line. Land was predominant until a few centuries ago. Go back to Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan: it was land capability. The British took maximum advantage of seapower and were predominant for several centuries. I think World War I was an even split between land and sea. In my opinion, World War II could not have been won without air superiority. So airpower today, is the predominant means of applying military force. This was true even in Korea and Vietnam. We all know that from a military standpoint, they were not declared wars. They were a no win situation. They both could have been won with relative ease if we had applied the forces that were available--without need for nuclear weapons.