Jules J.S. Gaspard
© Military Strategy Magazine (AI-generated using ChatGPT)
To cite this article:Gaspard, Jules J.S., “Lasers Will Not Win Wars,” Military Strategy Magazine, Volume 10, Issue 3, fall 2025, pages 24-31. https://doi.org/10.64148/msm.v10i3.3
Dr Jules J. S. Gaspard is Senior Lecturer in Strategy and Technology at the Centre For Future Defence and National Security, Canberra.
“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”
“A slow sort of country!” said the [Red] Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, Chapter 2
The relationship between technology and military strategy can be understood as a race—an international competition to develop superior arms. It is, however, either an odd kind of race or a category error. A race, be it a 100-metre dash or a marathon, makes sense if one can win. If one cannot win, what sort of race is it? As such, is the relationship between strategy and technology, in ordinary language, best understood as a race? Well, yes—but closer in kind to the race Alice encountered on the other side of the Looking-Glass. A world where things are reversed, where running helps one remain stationary. This is the world of strategy and technology, both in general and specifically here with high-energy lasers.[1] Not for the first time, lasers are being heralded as “game changing.” But in our world, Through the Looking-Glass, will they “change the game”, or do they simply help one “keep in the same place”?
High-energy lasers are not strategic game-changers. Instead, what they exemplify is the Red Queen’s race—adaptation without advantage. More profoundly, in the history of war and technology, lasers have come to represent a deeper failure to think politically about the relationship. First, I show that claims about lasers being truly “game changing” often fall prey to the technicist fallacy—the belief that tactical or technical performance translates directly into strategic effect. Second, I argue that this misdiagnosis has a concrete effect: it leads to the Red Queen’s race, escalation without resolution. Rather than winning a race, lasers will—like adaptations before them—provoke new forms of adaptation from adversaries, maintaining the treadmill of mutual adjustment. Third, I show that the recurring mistake of taking a metaphor for a mechanism stems from a deeper intellectual failure. Strategy shares much in common with biology, but it is not biology. By its nature, strategy is a political struggle, and without situating technology politically, we mistake technology for strategy and fail to see when it is time to stop running and actually time to start changing the game.
The Technicist Fallacy
From press clippings (reflecting press releases), the discourse is that higher-energy lasers will be a “game-changer.” [2] The idiom is a fitting one for our time—it captures the seepage of sports punditry into strategic theory.[3] High-powered lasers will be to strategy as Michael Jordan was to basketball.
On the one hand, high-powered lasers can be “game-changing”. Speed, precision, a huge reduction in cost per shot, unlimited ammunition—at the tactical level, the confluence of these effects can be transformative. Further still, getting to the point we are at now is no small technological marvel. In 213 BC, Archimedes’ supposed use of the Sun and mirrors, acting as a collective parabolic reflector to burn attacking Roman ships during the siege of Syracuse, has for centuries held the fascination of philosophers and scientists alike.
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