Analyzing the Technological Capabilities of a Target Country

If the most defining characteristic of the postindustrial age is the emergence of societies “organized around knowledge for the purpose of social control and the directing of innovation and change,”1 it should not be surprising to find technology—understood as the material instantiation of knowledge, methods, resources, and innovation—identified as the first and most important building block for the production of national power. The number of technologies possessed by a country at any given point in time are not only vast and beyond enumeration, they also span the spectrum of sophistication, ranging from primitive implements all the way to the most cuttingedge products, which can be generated only as a result of attaining mastery over advanced scientific concepts and having both the resources and the ability to translate these concepts, first, into new components and, thereafter, into a larger socio-technical system built around the introduction of these new components. The focus on technology here, as a building block of national power, is centered exclusively on understanding a country’s ability to produce the most sophisticated “critical technologies” identified today. The issue of “what is a critical technology” is itself a complex and much debated question, and it cannot be either addressed or resolved in this monograph.2 There is, however, a loose consensus in govern-