Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

by Chris Miller

what would happen if all these new sensors, guided weapons, and communications devices were integrated. Called “Assault Breaker,” it envisioned an aerial radar that could identify enemy targets and provide location information to a ground-based processing center, which would fuse the radar details with information from other sensors. Ground-based missiles would communicate with the aerial radar guiding them toward the target. On final descent, the missiles would release submunitions that would individually home in on their targets. Guided weapons were giving way to a vision of automated war, with computing power distributed to individual systems in a way never before imaginable. This was only possible because the U.S. was on track “to increase the density of chips ten to a hundredfold,” as Perry told an interviewer in 1981, promising comparable increases in computing power. “We will be able to put computers, which only ten years ago would have filled up this entire room, on a chip” and field “ ‘smart’ weapons at all levels.”