In the spring of 1977, William Perry walked into the Pentagon and decided the United States would not match the Warsaw Pact tank for tank. It would change the game. The bet that emerged — what later analysts would call the Second Offset — was not a weapon, or even a technology. It was a wager on a curve: that the integrated circuit's performance per dollar would keep doubling, and that everything else would follow.
Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, Chief of the Soviet General Staff, had been writing inside Voennaya Mysl' since 1978 about what he called the military-technical revolution. He understood, with greater clarity than the Politburo would tolerate, that the next war in Europe would be lost in the rear, by silicon the Soviet Union did not yet make.
On May 9, 1984 — Victory Day — Ogarkov published an essay in Krasnaya Zvezda, the army newspaper, arguing that new Western conventional weapons were closing on weapons-of-mass-destruction effectiveness. Four months later he was relieved of command and rotated to Legnica, Poland.
The doctrine he had written would be claimed, seven years later, by the country that defeated his.