A revolution in military affairs (RMA) is a hypothesis in military theory about the future of warfare, often connected to technological and organizational recommendations for military reform.
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 irrecoverable change in the conduct of warfare. Furthermore, those changes compel an accelerated adaptation of novel doctrines and strategies.
Nikolai Ogarkov called the early idea of RMA the Military Technological Revolution (MTR). Pentagon officials in the United States changed the name of his original idea, which is how it became known as RMA.[3] Orgarkov's belief that the potential and possibility for new weapons was increasing rapidly led to the development of his initial idea.
At the time of the initial development of MTR, the Soviets anticipated that certain technologies, including energy weapons and robots, would be in use by 2015 at the latest.[3] They believed that the use of large ground forces would be minimized. In place of some ground forces, these new technologies would be implemented in order to establish dominance on the battlefield. Russians also believed that control of space would become essential for maintaining dominance in future conflicts. Soviets believed that it would be essential to control the satellite space around Earth, in order to more effectively relay information. They also anticipated the ability to use space as a medium in which they could deploy weapons.[3]
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 a lightweight 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.[4]
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’ 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 in order 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 that of the enemy, in order to achieve increased lethality, greater control of the tempo of warfare, and fewer instances of friendly fire via improved identification friend or foe.[5]
In 2002, Chris Bray described RMA as new ideas about "the use of information and automation on the battlefield" to make forces "more lethal" and "more agile."[6]
Areas of focus
One of the central problems in understanding the current debate over RMA arises from many theorists' use of the term to refer 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.
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. In 2021 the Chief of Naval Operations stated that it was a mistake to concurrently introduce 23 unproven technologies onboard carrier USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) before land-based testing, in particular the weapons elevators.[7] The Air Force also developed the F-35 concurrently with its production, and is now seeking another fighter that is less expensive to operate;[8] The cost penalty for concurrent development and production of the F-35 is estimated to be $2 billion.[9]
By 2021 the concept and capability for Long range precision fires had developed sufficiently to be able to schedule their initial fielding by 2023, in its various materiel forms, as well as to be able to communicate the necessary doctrine for their application by the United States.[10] In brief, no headquarters, no command center, no air defense, no missile battery, nor any logistics center of an adversary is safe in the event of war.[11] Moreover, the strikes will be precise enough to paralyze the adversary's massed military capability.[11]See: Artillery § Precision-guidance
In a conflict, friendly forces (denoted in black) work as an integrated force against adversaries (denoted in red). The force operates in Multi-domains (gray, yellow, light gray, dark gray, and dark blue) —Space, Cyber, Air, Land, and Maritime respectively— severally and simultaneously cooperating across domains. These operations will disrupt the adversaries, and present them multiple simultaneous dilemmas. The operations are designed to encourage adversaries to learn the advantages of a return to competition, rather than continuing a conflict, or avoiding conflict altogether (deterrence). A multi-domain task force (MDTF) can simultaneously operate across multiple stages of the conflict continuum, and engage antagonists at thousands of miles, for sustained periods.
In considering the implications of precision attack, it is clear that precision weapons, when coupled to recent developments in aerospace, have transformed warfare, and as a result, the question is not that "Does an RMA exist?" rather, "When did it begin, and what are its implications?" Tied to this are surprisingly persistent questions about the use and value of air power, now more accurately seen 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 precision attack's value 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, 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 reviewing a few points from the military history of the 20th 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 after the second world war for Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf, Bosnia, and other, lesser, conflicts. 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 Rommelin the Western Desert, or German armored forces trying to split the Normandy invasion at Mortain, or at the Bulge (where German commanders[which?] 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 Yugoslav Wars was not surprising because from the very earliest days, the NATO alliance saw air power as the linchpin of Western military strength and the necessary offset 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. A cease-fire in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war was brokered by the effective use of armed drones, loitering munitions which would lock-on to a ground target, and strike it while transmitting pictures of the kill.[18]
In 2009 the Future Combat Systems project was cancelled by the Secretary of Defense, as too ambitious for the time. The Decker-Wagner report (2011) in fact recommended the dissolution of RDECOM, the R&D arm of the US Army. De-layering of the commands of the US Army in order to speed up development of materiel was begun in 2017.[19]
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, some critics argue that RMA serves to further dissociate soldiers from the horrific realities of warfare, while others maintain that RMA restricts the overall understanding of warfare and its dynamics.[28] Scholars recommend gaining a critical understanding of RMA before implementing it.[20]
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.[28] Indeed, a number of epistemological issues have cropped up.
In the wake of RMA technologies such as drones, unmanned ground vehicles, and clean bombs there are several concerns about the distancing and disassociation that eclipse the realities of war. An analysis of tactical strikes reveals that while the number of ones own soldiers may be preserved as the number of long-range attacks increases, so does collateral damage.[28] Furthermore, by removing the soldier-on-soldier element of warfare, the natural reactions and consequences of wartime actions are 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.[28] Another critique argues that RMA's good intentions notwithstanding, the resulting collateral damage is unacceptable and thus urges more careful consideration in incorporating RMA technology.[28]
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 is technological progress, and that basic doctrine has changed little since the second half of World War I.[29][4]
The United States Armed Forces are the military forces of the United States. The armed forces consist of six service branches: the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, Space Force, and Coast Guard. All six armed services are among the eight uniformed services of the United States, along with the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps and the NOAA Commissioned Officer Corps.
Asymmetric warfare is a type of war between belligerents whose relative military power, strategy or tactics differ significantly. This type of warfare often, but not necessarily, involves insurgents, terrorist groups or resistance militias who may have the status of unlawful combatants against a standing army.
Electromagnetic warfare or electronic warfare (EW) is warfare involving the use of the electromagnetic spectrum or directed energy to control the spectrum, attack an enemy, or impede enemy operations. The purpose of electromagnetic warfare is to deny the opponent the advantage of—and ensure friendly unimpeded access to—the EM spectrum. Electromagnetic warfare can be applied from air, sea, land, or space by crewed and uncrewed systems, and can target communication, radar, or other military and civilian assets.
A military, also known collectively as armed forces, is a heavily armed, highly organized force primarily intended for warfare. Militaries are typically authorized and maintained by a sovereign state, with their members identifiable by a distinct military uniform. They may consist of one or more military branches such as an army, navy, air force, space force, marines, or coast guard. The main task of a military is usually defined as defence of their state and its interests against external armed threats.
Information warfare (IW) is the battlespace use and management of information and communication technology (ICT) in pursuit of a competitive advantage over an opponent. It is different from cyberwarfare that attacks computers, software, and command control systems. Information warfare is the manipulation of information trusted by a target without the target's awareness so that the target will make decisions against their interest but in the interest of the one conducting information warfare. As a result, it is not clear when information warfare begins, ends, and how strong or destructive it is.
The People's Liberation Army Air Force, also referred to as the Chinese Air Force (中国空军) or the People's Air Force (人民空军), is an aerial service branch of the People's Liberation Army. The Air Force is composed of five sub-branches: aviation, ground-based air defense, radar, Airborne Corps, and other support elements.
In military tactics, close air support (CAS) is defined as aerial warfare actions—often air-to-ground actions such as strafes or airstrikes—by military aircraft against hostile targets in close proximity to friendly forces. A form of fire support, CAS requires detailed integration of each air mission with fire and movement of all forces involved. CAS may be conducted using aerial bombs, glide bombs, missiles, rockets, autocannons, machine guns, and even directed-energy weapons such as lasers.
AirLand Battle was the overall conceptual framework that formed the basis of the US Army's European warfighting doctrine from 1982 into the late 1990s. AirLand Battle emphasized close coordination between land forces acting as an aggressively maneuvering defense, and air forces attacking rear-echelon forces feeding those front line enemy forces. AirLand Battle replaced 1976's "Active Defense" doctrine, and was itself replaced by "Full Spectrum Operations" in 2001.
Power projection in international relations is the capacity of a state to deploy and sustain forces outside its territory. The ability of a state to project its power into an area may serve as an effective diplomatic lever, influencing the decision-making processes and acting as a potential deterrent on other states' behavior.
The "Rumsfeld Doctrine", named after former United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, is a phrase coined by journalists concerned with the perceived transformation of the military of the United States. It would be considered Rumsfeld's own take on RMA. It seeks to increase force readiness and decrease the amount of supply required to maintain forces, by reducing the number in a theater. This is done mainly by using LAVs to scout for enemies who are then destroyed via airstrikes. The basic tenets of this military strategy are:
Peter Warren Singer is an American political scientist, an international relations scholar and a specialist on 21st-century warfare. He is a New York Times bestselling author of both nonfiction and fiction, who has been described in The Wall Street Journal as "the premier futurist in the national-security environment".
Precision bombing is the attempted aerial bombing of a target with some degree of accuracy, with the aim of maximising target damage or limiting collateral damage. Its strategic counterpart is carpet bombing. An example would be destroying a single building in a built up area causing minimal damage to the surroundings. Precision bombing was initially tried by both the Allied and Central Powers during World War I, however it was found to be ineffective because the technology did not allow for sufficient accuracy. Therefore, the air forces turned to area bombardment, which killed civilians. Since the War, the development and adoption of guided munitions has greatly increased the accuracy of aerial bombing. Because the accuracy achieved in bombing is dependent on the available technology, the "precision" of precision bombing is relative to the time period.
The Field Artillery Branch is the field artillery branch of the United States Army. This branch, alongside the Infantry and Cavalry branches, was formerly considered to be one of the "classic" combat arms branches, but is today included within the "Maneuver, Fires and Effects" (MFE) classification, in accordance with current U.S. Army organizational doctrine.
Network-centric warfare, also called network-centric operations or net-centric warfare, is a military doctrine or theory of war that aims to translate an information advantage, enabled partly by information technology, into a competitive advantage through the computer networking of dispersed forces. It was pioneered by the United States Department of Defense in the 1990s.
In military science, force multiplication or a force multiplier is a factor or a combination of factors that gives personnel or weapons the ability to accomplish greater feats than without it. The expected size increase required to have the same effectiveness without that advantage is the multiplication factor. For example, if a technology like GPS enables a force to accomplish the same results as a force five times as large without GPS, then the multiplier is five. Such estimates are used to justify the investment for force multipliers.
Unrestricted Warfare: Two Air Force Senior Colonels on Scenarios for War and the Operational Art in an Era of Globalization is a book on military strategy written in 1999 by two colonels in the People's Liberation Army (PLA), Qiao Liang (乔良) and Wang Xiangsui (王湘穗). Its primary concern is how a nation such as China can defeat a technologically superior opponent through a variety of means. Rather than focusing on direct military confrontation, this book instead examines a variety of other means such as political warfare. Such means include using legal tools and economic means as leverage over one's opponent and circumvent the need for direct military action.
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References
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