A Revolution in Warfare

Eliot A. Cohen

From Foreign Affairs, March/April 1996

Article preview: first 500 of 6,370 words total.

Summary:  The tools and techniques for waging war never stand still, but these are the early days of a revolution in military affairs as momentous as those wrought by the railroad and the airplane. This newest transformation is a consequence of developments in civilian society including the information revolution and postindustrial capitalism. Its satellite imagery and smart bombs will change the forms of combat and armies. Personnel and politics, as always, will be as crucial as technology.

Eliot A. Cohen is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, The Johns Hopkins University.

TECHNOLOGY STRIKES AGAIN

For almost a decade American defense planners have foreseen an impending revolution in military affairs, sometimes described as the military-technical revolution. Such a transformation would open the way for a fundamental reordering of American defense posture. It might lead, for example, to a drastic shrinking of the military, a casting aside of old forms of organization and creation of new ones, a slashing of current force structure, and the investment of unusually large sums in research and development.

Such a revolution would touch virtually all aspects of the military establishment. Cruise missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles would replace fighter planes and tanks as chess pieces in the game of military power. Today's military organizations--divisions, fleets, and air wings--could disappear or give way to successors that would look very different. And if the forces themselves changed, so too would the people, as new career possibilities, educational requirements, and promotion paths became essential. New elites would gain in importance: "information warriors," for example, might supplant tankers and fighter pilots as groups from which the military establishment draws the bulk of its leaders.

The proponents of this view have turned to history to illustrate--and in some measure to create--their theory of radical change. It is, therefore, proper to ask whether the historical record substantiates their claims.ffi

Most soldiers, in their heart of hearts, would agree with Cyril Falls, a military historian of an older generation, who noted in his 1953 work A Hundred Years of War, 1850-1950:

Observers constantly describe the warfare of their own age as marking a revolutionary breach in the normal progress of methods of warfare. Their selection of their own age ought to put readers and listeners on their guard. . . . It is a fallacy, due to ignorance of technical and tactical military history, to suppose that methods of warfare have not made continuous and, on the whole, fairly even progress.

The cautious military historian (and even more cautious soldier) looks askance at prophets of radical change, although by no means at change itself. Unquestionably, military technology has never stood still. In the eighteenth century, for example, minor improvements in the design and manufacture of gun barrels and carriages, coupled with the standardization of cannon calibers, laid the groundwork for the vastly improved cannonades of the armies of the French Revolution and Empire. At the same time, on closer inspection the apparently rapid rate of change in modern warfare may prove deceptive. Despite the attention the press lavished on "smart" bombs during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, for example, most of the ordnance in that conflict consisted of 1950s-technology unguided bombs dropped by aircraft developed in the 1960s or in some cases 1970s. This being so, whence comes the contention that the United States is undergoing a revolution in military affairs?

THE RUSSIANS SAW IT COMING

Beginning in the early 1980s Soviet observers led by Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, then chief of the general staff, advanced the notion of an imminent technical revolution that ...

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