Beyond the Missile: A Cost-Per-Effect Blueprint for the Future Force

The Pentagon's current process for building its forces often focuses on the tactical performance of individual platforms, failing to measure which investments deliver the best strategic return for every dollar spent. Adopting a "cost-per-effect" framework would shift this focus, evaluating military capabilities based on their contribution to campaign-level outcomes rather than just their isolated attributes. This requires a new, tiered analytical architecture that uses fast exploratory models to sift through countless options, followed by high-fidelity simulations to validate the most promising force structures. A final innovation tier would even leverage artificial intelligence to discover entirely new operational concepts, pushing beyond the limits of human analysis.