Thinking about revolutions in warfare

Abstract

The term “revolution in military affairs” (RMA) became decidedly fashionable in the course of the 1990s. It lies at the heart of debates within the Pentagon over future strategy and has gained increasing prominence in Washington's byzantine budgetary and procurement struggles. Yet few works throw light on the concept's past, help situate it or the phenomena it claims to describe within a sophisticated historical framework, or offer much guidance in understanding the potential magnitude and direction of future changes in warfare. This book is an effort to answer those needs. CONCEPTUAL ROOTS Current notions of revolutions in military affairs derive from two principal sources: early modern historians and Soviet military theorists. The closely related concept of “military revolution” emerged in 1955 in an inaugural lecture by the British historian Michael Roberts. Roberts argued that in the early seventeenth century, under the leadership of the warrior-king Gustavus Adolphus, Sweden had embarked on a military revolution that had swept away traditional approaches to military organization and tactics throughout the West. That claim provoked several decades of furious debate over the extent and nature of the changes in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century warfare. In the end, most specialists came to agree that Roberts had been correct in suggesting that European warfare in this period had undergone fundamental systemic changes. But until the 1990s, military historians focused on other periods of Western history had largely ignored the concepts developed in the debate that Roberts had opened.