A revolution in military affairs?

Abstract

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, the American military establishment feverishly debated the notion of a coming ‘revolution in military affairs’ (RMA), understood as an imminent transformation in the conduct of warfare brought about by new technologies such as precision-guided munitions and information and telecommunication technologies. Its most vocal proponents (Cohen 1996; Owens 2001) predicted a new era of military superiority for the United States if it grasped this epochal opportunity and modernised its armed forces accordingly. The performance of a putatively information-age military in the wars of the twenty-first century has however proven to be much less auspicious, particularly where it has involved confrontation with diffuse and resilient armed insurgencies. Excitable discussions of a revolution in military affairs and an associated military doctrine of network-centric warfare (Cebrowski and Gartska 1998) have accordingly become much more muted in recent years. Yet simultaneously the new figure of the drone aircraft, a weapons system drawing upon RMA technologies, has become the object of insistent debate and frequently seen as heralding the dawn of a new era of robotic warfare (Singer 2009).