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29 Judge Advoc. J. 1 (1960)

handle is hein.journals/jajrnl31 and id is 1 raw text is: POWELL ADDRESSES JAA ON MUSCLES TO MISSILES The highlight of the 1959 Annual Meeting of the Association was the post-prandial remarks of Mr. J. Lewis Powell on what he called Muscles to Missiles. Mr. Powell, a member of the staff of the Assist- ant Secretary of Defense for Sup- ply and Logistics, is a wonderfully gifted speaker with the faculty of delivering a serious message in a thoroughly enthusiastic and enter- taining manner. All those who heard Mr. Powell enjoyed such an enter- taining and informative experience that they would feel the Journal remiss if it did not share with the membership, not present, at least the gist of his talk. At this belated writing, the Editor will undertake to summarize Mr. Powell's address, with a confession, however, that he was too engrossed to take notes and must here rely on recollection alone. At the outset, Mr. Powell observed that within the last few years a stampede of technology has changed the dimensions of the world. Many proverbs of yesterday have lost their meaning. For example, What goes up, must come down doesn't quite mean what it did before Sputnik. Accordingly, he pointed out, the problems of defense and the civilian economy both operate under condi- tions in which yesterday's tried and true answers don't necessarily apply. Time is no longer th e principal in- gredient in progress. There has been a collapse of time. To point this fact up, Mr. Pow- ell stated that most adults vaguely think this is an age of progress, little realizing that more technical progress has happened in their life- time than in the previous history of the world. Technology has ava- lanched. To place technical progress in perspective, he urged his auditors to condense man's 50,000 years of history into 50 years and came up with the startling compression of time and events that would have man now only 10 years from the existence of the cave man, only 2 years from the birth of Christ, only 20 days since the use of electricity, radio would be only 10 days from its invention and the jet aeroplane less than a day old. So, although man loves to fool himself into think- ing he is living in the age of science, in truth he is merely plodding along the way from caveman to space man -like a kind of Technological Adam on the threshold of an age of science and technology. In a few years today's tools will be made so obsolete by the avalanche of tech- nology that they will be regarded as primitive implements of elementary technology to be relegated to mu- seums. To illustrate the collapse of time, Mr. Powell used a huge blackboard on which he plotted a graph of technology that showed the fantastic concentration of prog- ress within recent years. On the 1

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