Abstract
ABSTRACT Which ideas shape defense planning and why? The following paper builds on over 80 interviews with senior defense officials to dissect the origin, evolution, and fall of the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), a major post-Cold War US defense innovation paradigm. In studying the emergence and diffusion of the RMA concept, my research suggests a central role for collective actors sharing constitutive ideas about practice and competing for legitimate authority and influence in the defense establishment. The rise of the RMA as an organizing idea in U.S. defense planning is thus not reducible to bureaucratic competition, technological determinism, or strategic culture as an external set of norms. Rather, it can be portrayed as a social process involving boundary activation by bureaucrats and soldiers (re)interpreting their key tasks and core missions for future war.
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