Re-imagining Warfare: The ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’

Abstract

In recent years it has become fashionable to argue that the United States is in the midst of a ‘revolution in military affairs’ (RMA). Indeed both the academic and professional military literatures are now replete with analyses of topics such as ‘information warfare’, ‘cyberwar’ and ‘third wave warfare’, and such terms have come to figure prominently in both popular and professional military discourse.1 But while interest in the revolution in military affairs has been growing in recent years, this growth has been parallelled by a deepening confusion about the exact nature of this revolution, and indeed about ‘military revolutions’ in general. There is little agreement, for example, on the periodisation of military history, the causes of revolutions in military affairs and the nature and dynamics of the current revolution. The literature is also characterised by a dearth of comparative analyses of historical transformations in the nature of warfare, despite the fact that such comparisons have the potential to increase significantly the ‘visibility’ of the currently emerging mode of warfare by contrasting it with others. This chapter will attempt to address some of these issues, first by sketching a richer framework for studying revolutions in military affairs, and second by providing a focused comparison of the evolving mode of warfare and its predecessor, industrialised total warfare.