The alarmist view of the Chinese and Russian buildup was that America needed a crash program to match the progress being made by its adversaries. That was the essence of Milley’s comparison to Sputnik: that this is a race we have to win, no matter the cost. But while that might have been possible in 1960, Sputnik moments looked different in the 2020s. There were so many technologies that the United States was competing for advantage in—hypersonics and space weapons, semiconductors and artificial intelligence, cyberdefenses and biodefenses—that you could have a Sputnik moment just about every
...more
