The Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA)
Randall Whitaker
November 1995
NOTE: All literature citations refer to materials listed in the
Information Warfare Bibliography at this site
It has been both fashionable and illuminating to analyze military history in terms of its co-evolution in parallel with progress with warfighting technologies. The most detailed of these analyses have focused on specific weapons, the course of their adoption, and the results of their introduction. An excellent example is Ellis' (1975) Social History of the Machine Gun . Studies of this sort have the advantage of addressing artifacts within the narrow domain of their military utility. This avoids the need to address ambiguities and confusions regarding reciprocal or parallel events outside the scope of the military enterprise.
On a broader scale, there have been analyses claiming that general technical innovations in the society at large have resulted in 'revolutionary' transformations in warfighting. This type of broad historical transformation is currently labeled a military technical revolution (MTR) . The label, attributed to Soviet military theorists in the late 1970's, denotes the phenomenon where '...extreme transformations in warfare occurred as a result of the exploitation of technology' to achieve '...operational and organizational innovations' (Lee, 1994, p. 3, credited to Krepinevich, 1992, p. 3).
In other words, an MTR is a technological event or event which alters, and hence 'punctuates', the course of military history. Unfortunately, there is no absolute agreement on the frequency or manner of the punctuation to date. Specific technical innovations credited for broader military transformations range from (e.g.) chariots to nuclear weapons (cf. Keegan, 1993), but few authors agree on a single set of candidates. Listings and classifications of the resulting 'military revolutions' vary with particular authors' specific mappings of technology to warfighting, their chronologies, the granularity of their categories, and the like. A representative illustration is provided by Krepinevich (1994), who outlines ten such 'military revolutions' occurring from the fourteenth century forward:
To attribute determinative causal power to technological innovation itself is overly simplistic. Technical innovation is only the seed of the process through which warfighting is revolutionized -- it changes the affordances or means through which combatants may pursue their ends. Technology cannot revolutionize any enterprise (military or not) until it is recognized, developed, and adopted. To give but one example, the employment of artillery (ca. the 14th century) occurred long after gunpowder's invention (ca. 950 A.D.) and far from its point of origin (China). The role of technology in war has, however, become so much a cliche that military planners no longer await -- but actively pursue -- innovation of means. In the twentieth century, the clear (but not decisive) relationship between technical mastery and military superiority has made technical innovation a focus of military planning and spending.
There is wide agreement that the form of warfighting is currently undergoing significant transformations constituting an MTR (cf. Fitzsimonds, 1995; Krepinevich, 1994). This transformation is typically analyzed with respect to the proliferation of advanced information technology (IT) in military operations. The label most commonly applied to this current MTR is the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) . The terms 'MTR' and 'RMA' are sometimes used to denote both a generic technical-military transformation and the currently perceived one. For clarity, I shall reserve the term 'MTR' for the generic case and employ 'RMA' to denote the present IT-driven change(s) of compelling interest to defense establishments worldwide.
The Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) is treated as an evolutionary advance or paradigm shift, with information technology (IT) as its catalyst. Given current widespread discussion of IT's current and future effects, the 'Information Revolution' will be taken as given, and no background review will be undertaken here. The point is that the proliferation of IT has had 'revolutionary' effects, and the RMA represents recognition of the military ramifications. Insufficient attention to the ramifications of some earlier military technologies has demonstrably led to disaster. This danger is well illustrated by Ellis' (1975) analysis of how European blindness and intransigence in adopting and deploying machine guns contributed to unnecessary carnage in WWI trench warfare. The intense interest in the current RMA is intended to avoid the same sort of mistake.
Visions of the RMA share widespread allusions to three sources of thematic inspiration. We should briefly review these three thematic exemplars in an attempt to sort out their relevance in understanding the RMA. The review will illustrate why IW is promoted as the harbinger of tomorrow's strategies, the final operationalization of longstanding wisdom, and the current best explanation for recent military success. These three themes are:
Exploitation of IT is taken to be the means of the emergent transformation in warfighting. On this much, the diverse analyses of the RMA concur. However, all consensus disappears when the subject turns to the operational ends to be served by this IT exploitation -- i.e., the specific types of military activities to be revolutionized through IT. The projected payoffs break down into two general categories:
These are not simply two sides of the same coin. Success in one can facilitate success in the other, but there is no necessity that they entail each other or that a given technology will be equally useful for both ends. As a result, projects to accomplish the one do not necessarily entail accomplishing the other. More to the point, military technical innovation may impact one or the other payoff foci more (and/or later) than the other. For example, the development of nuclear artifacts has most dramatically resulted in horrific weapons whose mere threat cast a pall over international affairs for a half-century. This induced an initial relative advantage impact which became problematical when other powers acquired similar capabilities and reduced that original lead to a nerve-wracking parity. However, one could make a case for the intrasystemic advantage being more important over the long term. If one considers nuclear technology generally, naval propulsion might reasonably be considered its most widespread payoff.
These two payoff categories circumscribe the primary approaches to justifying and evaluating technical innovation in the military. Interestingly, they do not map onto the 'offensive / defensive' dichotomy which is the prevalent explanatory framework for public discussion of such issues. Both 'offense' and 'defense' are framed with respect to relative (extrasystemic) advantage. Pursuing intrasystemic advantage (i.e., improving own-system performance without explicit regard for relative advantage) somehow doesn't fit into this conventional dualism. I emphasize this point because many of the innovations deriving from IT exploitation most reasonably fall into this latter category of intrasystemic improvement.
Furthermore, drawing this payoff or teleological distinction is necessary for untangling the subject of these Web pages -- the 'hottest' current catch phrase in Pentagon parlance -- information warfare (IW) . Much of the confusion surrounding IW derives from the fact that both extra- and intrasystemic advantage criteria are being lumped together in delineating and promoting its utility.
