It has become in vogue for leaders to argue that one of the lessons of the last decade of war is that “technology doesn't matter in the human-centric wars we fight”, as one four-star general put it; but that assumes a definition of technology as the exotic and unworkable. To paraphrase the musician Brian Eno, citing the inventor Danny Hillis, technology is the name we give to things that we don't yet use every day–when we use it every day, we don't call it technology any more. Whether it is a stone or a drone, it is technology, a tool that we apply to a task.

More challenging than the tools themselves in today and tomorrow's strategic context may be the pace of technological change. Many are familiar with Moore's Law, the notion first expressed by Gordon Moore, the cofounder of Intel, that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years. Moore's Law was originally intended to describe a phenomenon in the realm of computer hardware, but the broader exponential trends he outlined (where technology multiplies upon itself) have been found to have broader historic patterns, also described as the Law of Accelerating Returns.