AT: RMA (Revolution in Military Affairs)

AT: RMA (Revolution in Military Affairs)

Is a revolution in military affairs (RMA) achievable at the turn of the 21st century, and if so does it necessitate a radical change in U.S. military equipment, combat structures and warfighting doctrine? Or can the U.S. continue to make security policy, and arrange Pentagon budget priorities, in a more continuous and evolutionary way? The RMA debate is performing the nation a service by forcing it to confront these questions directly. Victorious military powers tend to settle into strategic complacency, allowing their influence and security to decline over time. The military services tend to be conservative, and to resist bold innovation. That said, the contemporary RMA hypothesis is unconvincing, and the technological basis for a radical RMA transformation of the U.S. armed forces and U.S. security policy is unsubstantiated. . . . Even if an RMA does happen sometime in the early part of the 21st century, its scope will probably be more limited, and the time scale over which it is carried out longer, than most proponents now believe. And it may well result from a sustained period of rapid evolution in military technology and doctrine -- already the norm in U.S. defense policy for decades -- rather than an abrupt remaking of the armed forces. Given this prognosis, robust research, experimentation and prototyping make more sense than attempts to radically transform military hardware, organizations or warfighting concepts.

The reasons for skepticism about an imminent RMA are straightforward. Most trends in defense technology are not as impressive as RMA proponents argue. It is true that an electronics and computer revolution is occurring -- with important implications for warfare -- but in other important areas, progress is far slower. The propulsion systems and the basic aerodynamics and hydrodynamics of ships, planes, rockets and ground vehicles are generally changing at modest rates. The explosive power of conventional ordnance per unit weight is advancing only modestly. Armor is becoming lighter and stronger, but in increments of 10% and 20% improvement per decade, not 50% and 75%. Equally important obstacles stand in the way of radically improving sensors, despite the goal of RMA proponents of achieving dominant battlespace knowledge. Sensors will progress in important ways, largely because they will become smaller, making it possible to place them in greater numbers on a wider array of manned and unmanned platforms. Their abilities to see through substances like water, metal, wood, soil and buildings will remain seriously limited by practical engineering considerations, however, and even more so by the laws of physics.

Three years after history's most sophisticated military demolished Iraq's armed forces, Americans keep falling victim to primitive killers with improvised explosive devices. That makes Max Boot's overview of changes in warfare timely indeed. It arrives just before the latest of what defense intellectuals term "revolutions in military affairs": the Pentagon's incredibly complicated "force transformation" from Cold War-era weapons and formations to a 21st-century military in which robot planes and ground vehicles would be controlled by new targeting, imaging and communication technologies in order to allow small teams of networked soldiers to accomplish tasks that before had required divisions. Boot, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of The Savage Wars of Peace, proposes to offer "fresh insights about the future" by demonstrating how technological advances have changed the course of landmark battles and campaigns -- from the early days of gunpowder; to the 19th century's extension of the Industrial Revolution onto the battlefield in the form of railroads, repeating rifles, the telegraph and mass-society armies; then to the 20th century's employment of radio, radar, blitzkrieg and long-range bombing; and finally to the military impact of today's ongoing information revolution. Boot follows five major themes: Technology by itself rarely brings conclusive military advantage, since organization, training and leadership are also necessary to achieve victory; countries that take advantage of military revolutions become "history's winners"; a winner must still "know the capabilities and limitations of its war machine"; no military revolution ever confers indefinite advantage; and innovation is speeding up. These are sensible but unremarkable premises: Yes, the next new thing arrives ever faster, and, no, technological advances alone don't dictate the fate of nations.

Some proponents of the Army plan characterize the widespread skepticism about the value of electronic surveillance technologies as “old think,” evidence of a failure on the part of some to adjust to new realities. “Change is hard,” one advocate of the modularity design told ITP in January. Conversely, those emphasizing boots-on-the-ground insist they are anything but dinosaurs. They say a new generation of elusive and adaptive adversaries will place a premium on well trained U.S. forces and quickly make almost any technology obsolete. “The intel enhancements designed to provide total situational awareness won’t tell a commander in an Iraqi-like environment whether the residents of a particular village are going to detonate a [roadside bomb] or just sit and watch the patrol pass because they may not know themselves until the last minute,” says one retired senior officer. “Assuming that high-tech sensors and [unmanned reconnaissance drones] will predict enemy actions seems a little optimistic in a theater where the very definition of ‘enemy’ is often an after-action determination.”