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Abstract
This dissertation contributes to the literature on the diffusion of military innovations and on the rise and fall of Great Powers. More precisely, it addresses the following questions: What factors affect the capacity of a country to maintain its technological-military superiority? Are there empirical and theoretical reasons to believe that, in the near future, the United States will lose its performance advantage in military hardware against its competitors? I argue that the complexity of military technology has increased dramatically over the past century. Such increase in complexity, I argue, has led to a change in the system of production, which in turn has made the imitation and the replication of the performance of military technology more difficult, despite globalization and advances in communications. To test my argument, I have studied the attempts to imitate the key designs of each generation of submarines since they were first introduced at the beginning of the 20th century as well as two cases of industrial espionage and transfer of technology of specific military aircraft during the same period. These cases permit me to rigorously test my argument. My empirical analysis suggests that while at the beginning of the past century, imitating foreign weapons systems yielded significant advantages, such advantages have progressively disappeared because of the increase in complexity of military technology. As a result, nowadays, innovating countries can leverage their know-how and experience, which in turn grant them a significant performance advantage over potential imitators.
