Revolution in Military Affairs

The military concept of Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) is a military-theoretical hypothesis, about the future of warfare, often connected to technological and organizational recommendations for change in the United States military and others. Broadly stated, RMA claims that in certain periods of the history of humankind, there were new military doctrines, strategies, tactics and technologies which led to an irrevocable change in the conduct of warfare. Furthermore, those changes require an accelerated adaptation of novel doctrines and strategies.

Especially tied to modern information, communications, and space technology, RMA is often linked to current discussions under the label of Transformation and total systems integration in the U.S. military.

History

The original theorizing was done by the Soviet Armed Forces in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly by Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov.[1] The United States initially became interested in it through Andrew Marshall, the head of the Office of Net Assessment, a Department of Defense think tank. It slowly gained credence within official military circles, and other nations began exploring similar shifts in organization and technology.

Interest in RMA and the structure of future U.S. armed forces is strong within the China's People's Liberation Army and incorporated to China's strategic military doctrine. Many other militaries have also researched and considered RMA as an organizational concept—e.g., those of Canada, United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Singapore, Republic of China (Taiwan), India, Russia, and Germany—but not all militaries due to the significant infrastructure and investment involved.

Renewed interest

The United States' victory in the 1991 Gulf War renewed interest in RMA theory. In the view of RMA proponents, American dominance through superior technology emphasized how the United States' technological advances reduced the relative power of the Iraqi military, by no means an insignificant rival, to insignificance. According to Stephen Biddle, part of the growth in popularity of the RMA theory after the Gulf War was that virtually all American military experts drastically over-estimated the coalition casualty count. This led many experts to assume that their models of war were wrong—that a revolution of sorts had occurred.[2]

After the Kosovo War, in which the United States did not lose a single life, others suggested that war had become too sterile, creating a "virtual war". Furthermore, the United States’s inability to capture Osama bin Laden or effectively combat the Iraqi insurgency led some to question RMA in the face of asymmetrical warfare, in which foes of the United States may increasingly engage to counter RMA’s advantages.

In 1997, the U.S. Army mounted an exercise codenamed "Force 21", to test the application of digital technologies in warfare in order to improve communications and logistics by applying private-sector technologies adapted for military use. Specifically, it sought to increase awareness of one's position on the battlefield as well as the enemy's, in order to achieve increased lethality for enemies, greater control of the tempo of warfare, and fewer instances of friendly fire via improved identification friend or foe.[3]

Areas of focus

One of the central problems in understanding the current debate over RMA is due to many theorists' use of the term as referring to the revolutionary technology itself, which is the driving force of change. Concurrently, other theorists tend to use the term as referring to revolutionary adaptations by military organisations that may be necessary to deal with the changes in technology. Other theorists place RMA more closely inside the specific political and economic context of globalization and the end of the Cold War.

When reviewing the gamut of theories, three fundamental versions of RMA come to the forefront. The first perspective focuses primarily upon changes in the nation-state and the role of an organised military in using force. This approach highlights the political, social, and economic factors worldwide, which might require a completely different type of military and organisational structure to apply force in the future.

Authors such as the RAND Corporation's Sean J. A. Edwards (advocate of BattleSwarm tactics, a type of military swarming), Carl H. Builder and Lt. Col. Ralph Peters emphasized the decline of the nation-state, the nature of the emerging international order, and the different types of forces needed in the near future.

The second perspective—most commonly assigned the term RMA—highlights the evolution of weapons technology, information technology, military organization, and military doctrine among advanced powers. This "System of Systems" perspective on RMA has been ardently supported by Admiral William Owens, former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who identified three overlapping areas for force assets. These are intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, command, control, communications and intelligence processing, and precision force.

Advanced versions of RMA incorporate other sophisticated technologies, including unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), nanotechnology, robotics, and biotechnology. Recently, the RMA debate focussed on "network-centric warfare" which is a doctrine that aims to connect all troops on the battlefield.

Finally, the third concept is that a "true" revolution in military affairs has not yet occurred or is unlikely to. Authors such as Michael E. O'Hanlon and Frederick Kagan, point to the fact much of the technology and weapons systems ascribed to the contemporary RMA were in development long before 1991 and the Internet and information technology boom.

Several critics point out that a "revolution" within the military ranks might carry detrimental consequences, produce severe economic strain, and ultimately prove counterproductive. Such authors tend to profess a much more gradual "evolution" in military affairs, as opposed to a rapid revolution.

Precision attack

Further information: Precision bombing and Surgical strike

If one truly considers the implications of precision attack, it is clear that precision weapons, when coupled to the other great revolutions of this aerospace century, have transformed warfare, and, as a result, the question is not really one of "Does an RMA exist?" but, rather, "When did it begin, and what are its implications?" Tied to this, of course, are equally-surprisingly persistent questions about the use and value of air power, now more accurately considered as aerospace power. If nothing else, given the record of precision air power application, aerospace power advocates should not still have to spend as much time as they do arguing the merits of three-dimensional war and the value of precision attack to it. Modern joint service aerospace forces offer the most responsive, flexible, lethal, and devastating form of power projection across the spectrum of conflict, employing a range of aerospace weaponry such as maritime patrol aircraft, attack and troop-lift helicopters, land-based long-range aircraft, and battlefield rocket artillery systems. Service-specific aerospace power can often be formidable and, as such, over not quite the last ninety years, has transformed conflict from two-dimensional to three-dimensional, and has changed the critical focus of conflict from that of seizing and holding to one of halting and controlling.

In this regard, it is worth quickly reviewing a few salient points from the military history of this century. Within roughly a decade of the first flight of an airplane, aircraft were having an occasionally decisive effect on the battlefield. Within four decades, a nation—Great Britain—secured its national survival through air warfare. By the midst of the Second World War, three-dimensional attack (from above and below the surface) had become the primary means of sinking both vessels at sea and destroying the combat capability of armies on land. In fact, for the United States, this trend of inflicting losses and material destruction primarily through air attack continued into the postwar years for Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf, Bosnia, and other, lesser, contingencies. In particular, air attack directed against land forces has been especially powerful in blunting and destroying opponents on the offensive, whether in older experience—such as confronting Rommel in the Western Desert, or Nazi armored forces trying to split the Normandy invasion at Mortain, or at the Bulge (where German commanders credited Allied fighter attacks on fuel trucks and supplies as being the decisive factor in halting their drive), in the opening and closing stages of the Korean War, and confronting the 1972 North Vietnamese Spring Invasion—or, more recently, in destroying the Khafji offensive of Saddam Hussein in 1991. NATO's reliance upon air power in the present Balkan crisis should not be surprising, for, from the very earliest days, the NATO alliance saw air power as the linchpin of Western military strength, and the necessary off-set to the Warsaw Pact's huge military forces.

Given its historical underpinnings, we should not be surprised that the revolution in warfare that has been brought about both by the confluence of the aerospace and the electronic revolutions, and by the offshoot of both—the precision guided munition—is one that has been a long-time coming, back to the Second World War, back, even, to the experimenters of the First World War who attempted, however crudely, to develop "smart" weapons to launch from airships and other craft. Used almost experimentally until the latter stages of the Vietnam War, the precision weapon since that time has increasingly come to first influence, then dominate, and now perhaps to render superfluous, the traditional notion of a linear battlefield.

Criticism

The revolution of military affairs is the inclusion and expansion of new technology—e.g., drones, satellite imaging, and remotely operated vehicles—within current military tactics. RMA has generally been praised for its ability to reduce casualty rates and facilitate intelligence gathering. On the other hand, critics argue that RMA serves to further dissociate soldiers from the horrific realities of warfare, while other maintain that RMA restricts the overall understanding of warfare and its dynamics.[4] Scholars recommend gaining a critical understanding of RMA before implementing it.

Operation Desert Storm is considered the first major global conflict successfully implementing RMA and is considered a paragon of future military operations due to the low casualty rate and the U.S. military's speed and precision. On the other hand, others claim that RMA technology severely inhibited the U.S. military's ability to respond to guerrilla tactics and that efforts to incorporate advanced weapons like patriot missiles were unsuccessful.[4] Indeed, a number of epistemological issues have cropped up.

In the wake of RMA technology such as drones, unmanned ground vehicles, and clean bombs, there are several concerns about the distanciation and disassociation that eclipse the realities of war. A gendered analysis of tactical strikes reveals that while the number of one's own soldiers may be preserved, as the number of long-range attacks increases, so does collateral damage.[4] Furthermore, by removing the soldier-on-soldier element to warfare, the natural reactions and consequences of wartime actions is impacted, which has been frequently referred to as the removal of humanity from war. RMA technological advances have resulted in a dehumanizing of warfare, which negatively effects the decisions made by officers, as well as individuals in the field.[4] A feminist critique argues that RMA's good intentions notwithstanding, the resulting collateral damage is unacceptable and thus urges more careful consideration in incorporating RMA technology.[4]

Stephen Biddle's 2004 book, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern War, discounts the idea of RMA. He argues that military doctrine and tactics are far more important to battle outcomes in modern warfare than technological progress is, and that basic doctrine has changed little since the second half of World War I.[5]

See also

US military-specific:

References

  1. ↑ Steven Metz, James Kievit. "Strategy and the Revolution in Military Affairs: From Theory to Policy" June 27, 1995
  2. ↑ Biddle, Stephen (2006). Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. p. 20. ISBN 9781400837823. Retrieved 9 November 2014.
  3. ↑ The United States Army 1995 Modernization Plan. Force 21
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 Blanchard, Eric M. (2011). The Technoscience Question in Feminist International Relations: Unmanning the U.S. War on Terror. London: Routledge.
  5. ↑ Cohen, Eliot A (June 2005). "Stephen Biddle on Military Power". Journal of Strategic Studies. 28 (3): 413–424. doi:10.1080/01402390500137259.

Further reading

External links

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