Revolution In Military Affairs

The campaign in Afghanistan, the Gulf war, and Kosovo show how advances in information technology are driving a high-tech revolution in military affairs (RMA). This text outlines elements of the RMA and examines efforts of the US, and NATO.

The remit of this study is to encourage further studies that make an honest and successful effort to achieve synergy between social science and history when analysing the impact of revolutions in military affairs (RMAs).

The liberal world order, a euphemism for American global hegemony, is crumbling at an accelerating pace. While its collapse is tangible, the outcome of such a collapse remains a matter of speculation and public debate. The US is desperately seeking to preserve the status quo, which rests primarily upon recognition of its military supremacy. For millennia, warfare has been a driving force behind changes in the geopolitical status of power configurations (whether of peoples, states or empires), and it remains so, today. Accordingly, short of actual warfare, the assessment (modeling) of relative military power plays an inordinate role in the determination of national status. Models of emerging changes in military capability range from relatively simple to extremely complex ones. Viewing the evolution of the current system of international relations outside the framework of actual, rather than propaganda-driven, military capabilities is not only useless, it is dangerous since states’ mistaken assessment of their own and other states’ military power can lead to misadventures and catastrophic mistakes. The United States’ efforts to preserve not just its dominance but the perception of its dominance are bound to fail for many important reasons, none more important than what is often misidentified in past American military-theoretical hypotheses about the future of warfare, known generically as the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). This book explains why those hypotheses are failing and will continue to fail, and addresses the real RMA. In the end, technological development in weaponry as a response to tactical, operational and strategic requirements defines not only a nation’s geopolitical status but determines the global order. Assessments of military capacity, if reality-based, serve as good predictors of the level of volatility in international relations and the level of violence globally. This book gives an insight into the evolution of weapons and the way they influenced international relations in the 20th and 21st centuries. It also defines Revolution in Military Affairs as manifested via policy, politics, and technology. It reviews some models which are useful in assessing the current geopolitical situation. This book also tries to give a forecast of the future development of warfare and the ways in which it is going to change the whole system of the international relations, hopefully towards a new geopolitical equilibrium.

A generation after the First Gulf War, and in the wake of a decade of counterinsurgency operations and irregular warfare, this book explores how the concept of the Revolution in Military Affairs continues to shape the way modern militaries across the globe think about, plan and fight wars.

The Dynamics of Military Revolution aims to bridge a major gap in the emerging literature on revolutions in military affairs, suggesting that there have been two very different phenomena at work over the past centuries: 'military revolutions', which are driven by vast social and political changes; and 'revolutions in military affairs', which military institutions have directed, although usually with great difficulty and ambiguous results. By providing both a conceptual framework and a historical context for thinking about revolutionary changes in military affairs, the work establishes a baseline for understanding the patterns of change, innovation, and adaptation that have marked war in the Western World since the thirteenth century - beginning with Edward III's revolutionary changes in medieval warfare, through the development of modern Western military institutions in seventeenth-century France, to the cataclysmic changes of the First World War and the German Blitzkrieg victories of 1940. This history provides a guide for thinking about military revolutions in the coming century, which are as inevitable as they are difficult to predict.

This book explores the idea of arevolution in military affairs (RMA), which underpins the transformational agenda of the US military, and examines its implications for smaller states.The strategic studies literature on the RMA tends to be American-centric and directed towards the strategic problems of the US military. This volume seeks to fill t

The contributors to this volume seek to explore the multi-dimensional (institutional, cultural, technological, and political) environments of several Asian states to determine the amenability of those host environments for the adoption/adaptation of the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMS).

The Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), unleashed by the integration of information technologies into weapons systems, military units, and operations is a phenomenon whose impacts have been felt well beyond the Gulf in 1991 or the Balkans in 1999. Technological developments lie at the center of these changes; however, the RMA is about more than technology. It includes the consequences of technological changes for defense and security. This study provides an assessment of the RMA that goes beyond a mere description of new defense-related technologies to deal with deeper, more fundamental issues. Through the contributions of American, Canadian, Chinese, and French experts, this book surveys the RMA from various perspectives and evaluates it from the standpoints of military history and military science. The authors conclude that, while the RMA represents a significant challenge for defense establishments, it may fall short of being truly revolutionary. Whether one looks at power projection or information warfare, it appears that emerging technologies will translate into significant improvements in capabilities, but not necessarily a revolution in warfare. From a comparative perspective, the United States remains well ahead in thinking of and implementing changes that stem from the RMA, although other nations may make selective use of the RMA to promote regional security goals.