• the Infantry Revolution where longbow technology and accompanying tactical innovations enabled infantry to displace cavalry as the dominant force on the battlefield;
• the Artillery Revolution in which longer gun barrels, metallurgical breakthroughs and changes in the form of gunpowder made artillery more powerful and cheaper, and accompanying organizational changes in siege warfare forced defenders to abandon their castles;
• the Revolution of Sail and Shot in which ships moved from oar-driven to sail-propelled power, enabling them to mount heavy cannons and transforming warships from floating garrisons of soldiers to artillery platforms;
• the Fortress Revolution involving lower, thicker walls that rendered artillery less effective and moved the advantage to the defence;
• the Gunpowder Revolution in which the technological innovation of musket fire was combined with a doctrinal change to linear (vice square) tactics;
• the Napoleonic Revolution where the Industrial Revolution and the mass production of weapons enabled the levee en masse – that is, the quantum leap in the size of field armies;
• the Land Warfare Revolution in which new civilian technologies like the railway and telegraph greatly enhanced strategic mobility, enabling military commanders to sustain large armies in the field and coordinate widely dispersed operations;
• the Naval Revolution wherein sail gave way to steam power, and ships moved from being wooden to ironclad, leading to heavier and bigger battleships and guns, and new tactics away from broadside artillery mounts;
• the Interwar Revolutions in Mechanization, Aviation and Information prompted by technological advances in mechanization and radio which ultimately enabled Germany’s Blitzkrieg tactics of joint operations involving aviation and mechanized forces; and
• the Nuclear Revolution of nuclear weapons which prompted significant doctrinal theorizing and, once coupled with ballistic missiles, also led to the creation of new organizations within the militaries of the superpowers.
See: Andrew F. Krepinevich, ‘Cavalry to Computer: The Pattern of Military Revolutions’, National Interest (Autumn 1994).
Other analysts were more specific in their meaning of ‘fundamentally alter’. Thinkers at the Center for Strategic and International Studies identified an MTR as a ‘fundamental advance in technology, doctrine or organization that renders existing methods of conducting warfare obsolete’,6 while Richard Hundley similarly stressed that an RMA involved a paradigm shift in the nature and conduct of military operations which ‘render[ed] obsolete or irrelevant one or more core competencies of a dominant player’.7 Krepinevich himself argued in his initial MTR assessment that change would be revolutionary if at some point the cumulative effects of technological advances and military innovation ‘invalidated former conceptual frameworks’.8 If, for example, advances in stand-off precision strike were to invalidate or render obsolete the former military advantage in having massive formations of even the best tanks, then this could be considered revolutionary. Or, historically, one could point to the Artillery Revolution, when the development of artillery rendered obsolete the former protection afforded by thick castle walls.
Members of the ONA were careful to emphasize that advanced military technologies did not constitute a revolution; rather, the full realization of an RMA required the three prongs of technological innovation, doctrinal or operational innovation, and organizational innovation. The ONA replaced the term MTR with that of RMA specifically to highlight the imperative of going beyond technology, and in one of his few publicly available publications Andrew Marshall underlined that the critical factor in past RMAs (for example Blitzkrieg) was ‘not technological surprise but the adoption of innovative operational concepts and organizations to exploit commonly available systems’.9 A ‘true RMA’, one US Army War College scholar echoed, ‘transcends technology, engendering changes in organization, doctrine and strategy’.10
In such a framework one could identify contemporary RMA technologies such as those specified by Perry, namely C4I, ISR and precision guidance. Doctrinal changes then made possible or facilitated by these new technologies included stand-off precision strike from naval and air platforms against land targets; ground forces that were both more expeditionary in the sense of getting to a theatre of operations quickly, and more agile and manoeuvrable on the battlefield, operating non-linearly and in dispersed locations; and, significantly, an overall increased jointness among services. Organizational changes centred on creating agile, manoeuvrable forces, which in turn translated into units that were smaller than in the past and more tailorable to a particular task at hand.
Despite the ‘not just technology’ statements of many RMA thinkers, critics took to task the technological orientation. Colin Gray, author of numerous works on military strategy, for example, argued that Krepinevich’s ‘requirement that an RMA functions, inter alia, with the application of new technologies’ represented a ‘fatal flaw’. Stating an RMA to be a ‘discontinuous increase in military capability and effectiveness’, Gray stressed that, above all, it was ‘vital not to require by definition that RMAs be triggered by new technology’. But while RMAs should not be taken to be triggered by new technology, it is difficult to dispute that they will normally include new technology. Of the ten revolutions identified by Krepinevich all but one, the Fortress Revolution, involved important technological advances while one, the Nuclear Revolution, was almost entirely technological in nature. ‘Occasionally’, Gray later admits, ‘there is a discontinuity in military affairs in which the cutting edge for change truly is, or certainly includes, technological innovation’.11
Eliot Cohen and the Tofflers
In fact, it was difficult for RMA proponents to escape the RMA’s technological origins. Eliot Cohen, a scholar noted for his historical perspective, pointed out in 1996 that the contemporary RMA, like many before it, had its origins in the civilian technological world and in the rise of information technologies.12 Indeed, this was the very argument put forward by futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler, in their 1993 book War and Anti-War. In their view ‘the way we make war reflects the way we make wealth’.13 Over the course of human history how people make wealth had gone through two ‘waves’ and was by then well into a third. During the first wave most people made their livelihood toiling by hand, whether by hunting or through agriculture; the means of warfare was hand-to-hand combat. In the second wave, launched with the Industrial Revolution, people made their living through mass production in factories; warfare, too, was waged en masse, beginning with Napoleon’s levee en masse, progressing through the American Civil War and the World Wars, and reaching its epitome with the development of the atomic bomb. In the 1970s a third wave began. The development of information technologies led to ‘de-massified’, precision, smart economies (rooms of computers replaced with personal computers and then handheld devices, products tailored to individuals and knowledge workers), and these changes were, by the late 1980s, starting to be mirrored in warfare.
The Tofflers identified a number of distinct aspects of third-wave warfare including smaller units, greater autonomy at lower levels and more highly educated and technically expert troops. But they also pointed to the increased importance of ‘systems integration’, a precursor to an accelerating tendency toward jointness that was being facilitated by technological advances, particularly advanced C4I which better enabled individual services to ‘talk’ to one another. As Eliot Cohen highlighted, a key military impact of the integration of civilian information technologies into military affairs was that ‘the new military would be an increasingly joint force … In militaries around the world the traditional division into armies, navies and air forces … has begun to break down. Not only have air operations become inseparable from almost any action on the ground, but naval forces increasingly deliver fire against a wide range of ground targets.’14
William Owens and the ‘system of systems’
Increased jointness among services faci
litated by technology was a central aspect of conceptual discussions surrounding the RMA in the 1990s. One of the first strategic thinkers to fully articulate a vision of resulting changes in the conduct of war was US Admiral (now retired) William Owens. Considered along with William Perry, Andrew Marshall and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General (retired) John Shalikashvili as among the RMA’s founding fathers,15 Owens arrived in the Pentagon in 1994 to take up his position as Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He soon became the most vocal military advocate of harnessing and accelerating the military technological advances that had taken place over the previous decade or more.
Owens is one of the few, if not the only, post-Cold War strategic thinker on joint warfare who has a significant body of literature to which one can point. In various articles from the mid-1990s onward he expressed his views on jointness and the RMA, bringing them together in his 2000 book Lifting the Fog of War. The title refers to the vast array of satellites, UAVs, reconnaissance aircraft and even SOF that were giving the US military an unprecedented ability to know the location of friendly and enemy forces on the battlefield, by day or night, in any kind of weather – harnessing at new levels the age-old requirement for commanders to ‘see over the next hill’. Historically, the lack of clear information about the enemy’s and one’s own military forces had hindered the effectiveness of military operations. But new technological advances were promising to ‘lift the fog of war’, giving commanders the ability to see and understand everything on the battlefield.
A second area of Owens’ strategic thinking centred on Clausewitz’s other well-known admonishment, the friction of war. Advanced military systems, Owens argued, existed in three different areas: those designed ‘to see’ (ISR), ‘to tell’ (C4I) and ‘to act’ (precision force). The problem, however, was that these systems were ‘stovepiped’ in their own categories and unable to ‘talk’ to one another. The challenge was to get these three broad circles of competencies to overlap and interact. If systems designed to gather surveillance information could transfer it in near-real time to those making the decisions, the result would be dominant battlespace knowledge or awareness; if commanders could relay their decisions in near-real time to systems designed to unleash precision force, the outcome would be near-perfect mission assignment; and if ISR systems could relay their information directly back to those which had ‘acted’, the result would be immediate and complete battle assessment.16 The idea of bringing three circles of systems together in this manner yielded the term ‘system of systems’ and represented the ‘synergy’ first identified by Perry several years earlier.
For Owens, the system of systems, and the RMA’s technological advances in general, were quintessentially linked to jointness in the conduct of war. ‘As this broad concept [the system of systems] emerges over the next decade’, Owens argued in the mid-1990s, ‘it will carry with it the revolution in military affairs (RMA) and a new appreciation of joint military operations, for this revolution depends ultimately on contributions from all the services’.17 The RMA, he later underlined, would ‘remain only a promise unless the Pentagon correctly rewrites combat doctrine to force truly joint operations’.18
John Shalikashvili and Joint Vision 2010
For strategic thinking about implementing joint operations in practice we can point to Joint Vision 2010, produced under the guidance of General John Shalikashvili. Much of the vision contains ideas that are particularly relevant to land forces, such as mobility, dispersion, de-massification and non-linearity in warfare. As a result, Chapter 2 included a discussion of the US military’s Joint Vision 2010 of 1996 and its follow-on document, Joint Vision 2020, released in 2000. But the overall conceptual emphasis of these vision statements is on joint capability and the need to achieve a seamless integration of service capabilities, if only to retain effectiveness with less redundancy in an era of constrained resources.
Of the new operational concepts introduced by Joint Vision 2010, including precision engagement, full dimensional protection, focused logistics and dominant manoeuvre, it is the latter that most significantly pushed forward conceptual thinking on joint theory. The idea behind dominant manoeuvre was to use sea, land, air and space forces in synchronized fashion, operating with speed and agility from many areas of the battlefield, thereby achieving significant military advantage over an opponent. Joint Vision 2010 specifically envisioned forces operating ‘cross dimensionally’, such as air or naval forces against ground targets, or ground and naval forces against air defences.19 It also clearly reflected ideas put forward by Owens, particularly those of a ‘systems of systems’ and dominant battlespace awareness.
Critiques
The notion that advanced military technologies could reduce the fog and friction of war was a controversial one and invited criticism. The claims were seen as disconnected from historical experience, and from what adversaries may think, want and do – a perfect example of what Clausewitz called ‘war on paper’ as opposed to war as it really is. ‘As long as war involves human beings’, pointed out one scholar, ‘no technology can completely eliminate friction, ambiguity, and uncertainty’.20 Against the optimistic talk of technological advances reducing the fog and friction of war, Major General Robert Scales (see Chapter 2) warned in a 1997 article that warfare remained ‘an inherently uncertain enterprise in which chance, friction, and the limitations of the human mind under stress profoundly limit our ability to predict outcomes’.21 To be fair, Owens in his writings and Shalikashvili in Joint Vision 2010 in some ways preempted these critiques. New technologies would not fully dissipate the fog and friction of war, they argued; rather, they would mitigate their impact, introducing a disparity significant enough to render the United States dominant in warfare.22 Nonetheless, not long after the release of Joint Vision 2010 one could sense a palpable swing away from the earlier revolutionary rhetoric. In a seminal work from 2004 Stephen Biddle convincingly argued that any ‘sweeping consequences’ promised by a potential RMA were misplaced. Rather, the significant increase in battlefield effectiveness on the part of some nations could be traced to changes in force employment, i.e., the doctrine and tactics by which forces are actually used in combat. These changes dated to World War One and their value would continue well into the twenty-first century (see Chapter 2).23
Military Transformation
By the late 1990s the notion of an RMA was starting to be seen as too dramatic, as promising too much. Moreover, the term itself seemed to indicate a definitive end-state, a point at which the revolution would have finished its course, and yet most foresaw several decades of continuous change. In its place started to seep the term Military Transformation, or simply Transformation. In fact, the designation was not so new. Early on Marshall referred to the RMA as a ‘process of transformation’,24 and others, such as Colin Gray and even Owens, simply equated RMAs to ‘transformations of war’.25 Consistent with scholarly work from the early 1990s explaining military innovation (see below), the change in emphasis from RMA to Transformation was not promoted by any particular war or international event but happened in the relative peacetime of the half decade before 9/11.
Arthur Cebrowski, network-centric warfare and Military Transformation
By the early years of the Bush administration the term RMA had all but disappeared in the United States, replaced with that of Transformation. But while the terms and timeframe changed, the substantive content did not. If anything, the war in Afghanistan in late 2001/early 2002, and later the 2003 Iraq War, seemingly vindicated the promises made by mid-1990s RMA proponents. Highly mobile, dispersed army SOF called in precision air strikes from air force and navy platforms. Advanced command and control, surveillance, and precision guidance systems were used extensively, and jointly, throughout the war. Thus although Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld spoke and wrote in early 2002 of ‘Transforming the Military’, his expressed ideas echoed earlier discussions of the RMA: smaller, more mobile forces; precision engagement; i
ncreased battlespace awareness; and, above all, the imperative of jointness.26
Into these changed yet not so changed circumstances stepped Arthur Cebrowski, a revolutionary-minded thinker who had first put forward the concept of NCW in 1998. The idea behind NCW was to focus more on the combat capability achieved when different platforms are linked together, than on the attributes of an individual platform. ‘We are in the midst of a revolution in military affairs unlike any seen since the Napoleonic Age … [and the] levee en masse’, Cebrowksi and John J. Garstka argued in a seminal U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings article, ‘a fundamental shift from what we call platform-centric warfare to something we call network-centric warfare’.27 Eliot Cohen put the revolutionary nature of this shift into perspective:
From the middle of the nineteenth century until very recently, platforms dominated warfare: the newest ship, plane, or tank outclassed its rivals and in most cases speedily rendered them obsolete … The wheel has now turned again. The platform has become less important, while the quality of what it carries – sensors, munitions, and electronics of all kinds – has become critical.28
In promoting the potential of networked warfare, Cebrowski and Gartska took their cue from the civilian commercial world where, they observed, the power of the personal computer grew exponentially once it was part of a network. ‘It is not so much about the computer as it is about the computer in the networked condition’, they pointed out.29 In their view, NCW – ‘with all apologies to Clausewitz’ – was a new theory of war, in that it identified new sources of power, showed how those new sources pointed to new structures and organizations, and pointed to new political and military strategies.30
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