Basic research and defense developments

Planning defense developments ten or twenty years from now requires the prediction of the future progress in various fields of science. While such a prediction should be influenced by the experience gained from present and past progress it would be of little value to make a simple extrapolation from the present to the future. The future of scientific and technological developments will be what we make it. The best way to forecast them is to take into account the potentialities of rapidly advancing fundamental research. The best way to influence them is to increase those potentialities by close contacts between fundamental research, applied research, and engineering.