A similar concept is the idea of offense-defense balance in international relations. eg, large stockpiles of nuclear weapons strongly favor “defense” (well, deterrence) because it’s prohibitively costly to develop the capacity to reliably destroy the enemy’s second-strike forces. Note the caveats there: at sufficient resource levels, and given constraints imposed by other technologies (eg inability to detect nuclear subs).
Allan Dafoe and Ben Garfinkel have a paper out on how techs tend to favor offense at low investment and defense at high investment. (That is, the resource ratio R at which an attacker with resources RD has an X% chance of defeating a defender with resources D tends to decrease with D up to a local maximum, then increase.)
A similar concept is the idea of offense-defense balance in international relations. eg, large stockpiles of nuclear weapons strongly favor “defense” (well, deterrence) because it’s prohibitively costly to develop the capacity to reliably destroy the enemy’s second-strike forces. Note the caveats there: at sufficient resource levels, and given constraints imposed by other technologies (eg inability to detect nuclear subs).
Allan Dafoe and Ben Garfinkel have a paper out on how techs tend to favor offense at low investment and defense at high investment. (That is, the resource ratio R at which an attacker with resources RD has an X% chance of defeating a defender with resources D tends to decrease with D up to a local maximum, then increase.)
(On mobile, will link later.)