What Are They? How Has the Concept Played Out?
Revolutions in military affairs have had meaningful impacts on the way wars have been fought. A revolution in military affairs (RMA) constitutes a substantial change in the nature of warfare that comes from adapting new technologies with dramatic doctrinal and organizational changes that then alters the character and conduct of military operations. In that sense, RMAs require changes in three components to be successful: technology, organizations, and doctrine.
Nevertheless, according to Williamson Murray and MacGregor Knox, these RMAs have four characteristics that make them distinguishable: 1) Technology alone has rarely driven them. 2) RMAs have emerged from evolutionary problem-solving directed at a specific problem. 3) Requires coherent frameworks of doctrine and concepts built on realistic service cultures. 4) RMAs remain rooted in and limited by strategy givens and by the nature of war — they are not a substitute for strategy.
RMAs serve as critical components of broader military revolutions. The concept of “revolution in military affairs,” are “periods of innovation in which armed forces develop novel concepts involving changes in doctrine, tactics, procedures, and technology.” This is differentiated from great “military revolutions,” which are uncontrollable and “bring systemic changes in politics and society.” Regardless, most RMAs take considerable time to develop and require peacetime adaptation and innovation.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War at the cusp of the last decade of the twentieth century produced a “peace dividend” among Western powers that led to the shrinking of Cold War-era defense budgets at the same time that the world entered the microchip-driven and technology-dominated “Information Age.”
The U.S. military subsequently sought to transform itself so that it might, in essence, do more with less. Although new technologies were by no means cheap, they were cheaper over the long-term than personnel — especially in the post-1973 All-Volunteer Force era wherein the military had to compete against civilian employers to entice recruits. From the late 1980s to the early 2000s, the military underwent successive centrally driven “transformations” designed to embrace a purported “Revolution in Military Affairs” (RMA) that defense thinkers like Andrew Marshall were confident was necessary to respond to an Information Age “military revolution.”
The Arab-Israeli (Yom Kippur) War of 1973 had proven to the world that a successful high-tech approach to conventional warfare was possible without resorting to the use of nuclear weapons — shattering the opinion of many contemporary theorists that the existence of nuclear weapons had all but eliminated conventional state-on-state wars in the late twentieth century.
Russell Weigley had, during the same year, pronounced that the “use of combat” no longer offered any practical value for the United States within his monumental volume, The American Way of War (1973), As American involvement in the Vietnam War came to a conclusion during the same year, Americans as a whole, but especially the military, vowed never again to enter such a quagmire, insisting that next time they would think twice before attempting to combat an insurgency.
The Soviet Union had the first intellectual theories for what to do with emerging technology. The U.S. were the first to produce RMA equipment, but the Israeli’s were the first to put it into practice. Having studied Soviet military journals and kept abreast of American technological developments, the Israelis were the first to wage an RMA-style war. They successfully fused Soviet principles and American technology based on the lessons of 1973 in the First Lebanon War in 1982. Each country’s different strategic cultureplayed a role in this timeline of events and how these ideas were eventually put into practice.
As the U.S. military transformed to confront waning budgetary appropriations, recruitment shortfalls, and the worldwide “digital millennium,” alterations in everything from force structure to tactics shifted from a Cold War-era focus on defending against a nuclear attack or Warsaw Pact onslaught in eastern Europe to confronting the possibilities of a new “digital age” in conventional warfare.
These new ideas were marked by GPS-enabled surgical attacks by precision-guided munitions (PGMs), a high-tech combat force capable of rapid expeditionary deployment anywhere on the globe, and networked digital communications technologies that allowed for command and control solutions unimaginable just years prior. In the end, it was assumed, the types of “messy” conflicts of the past centuries of the American military experience were at an end.
Any global contingency could conceivably be remedied via the proper application of PGMs and hi-tech ground forces that all but reduced entirely the possibility of U.S. casualties. The combined experiences of Operations Desert Shield and Storm and the NATO air campaign against Slobodan Milosevic in Kosovo both seemed to validate this assumption. Both actions had been successfully brought to their conclusion with what seemed to be decisive American military victory at almost no U.S. loss.
Interwar military efforts to further embrace technological developments were hampered significantly by sharp budgetary reductions and associated cuts in manpower (though the U.S. military would consistently maintain a far greater post-war than pre-war size throughout its history). While military theoreticians deliberated over the potential use of developments like the tank and long-range bomber in wars of the future, most of these discussions were restricted to paper and imagination. The Germans put the latest technology into practice the best thanks to new organizational concepts and doctrine that took advantage of available technology.
World War II experience shows that adversaries eventually catch up or at the least develop an asymmetric counter. While the Germans enjoyed considerable success throughout the first few years of the war, both the Soviet Union and the British eventually learned to counter German combined arms warfare. Nevertheless, gradual technological dominance was but one factor in eventual Allied victory. Regardless, after World War II — especially after dropping two atomic bombs on Japan — it seemed there was nothing that the proper application of violence could not solve in a global war between industrialized nation-states, and therefore no reason to suspect that any more than the effective delivery of ordnance was necessary to win wars.
