The Revolution in Military Affairs Outside the West.

• Author: Hashim, Ahmed S.

The military gap between the West--symbolized primarily by U.S. military capabilities--and the rest of the world has widened in the twilight years of the 20th century, due to the latest revolution in military affairs (RMA). This paper is about the response of the non-Western world to the ongoing revolution in military affairs in conventional warfare. Specifically, it will explore what non-Western military powers are writing about the RMA.

This, of course, presupposes that their strategic analysts and planners have an understanding of what the RMA really is. There is still debate on this, and no consensus has been reached. In fact, a large number of these non-Western nations are analyzing the current RMA by deriving political, military and technological lessons from the Gulf War of 1991, which was seen as a harbinger of wars to come.

There is also the issue of whether these countries believe that their armed forces can exploit and benefit from the RMA. This raises a number of complex questions that can only be tentatively addressed here. To begin with, do these countries have the technological infrastructure and financial resources to devote to the development of high-technology conventional arms? And if they do, do their armed forces have the flexibility to revamp their strategic cultures, organizational structure and doctrines in order to allow them to exploit the RMA? Finally, if most of these countries cannot undertake these tasks, what other kinds of military options do they have? Revolutionary breakthroughs in the military arena in one country or group of countries almost invariably generate responses from other countries. Responses could be symmetric, emulative or asymmetric (i.e., to attempt to deploy a different set of weapons/technologies or develop new ways of fighting in order to offset or bypass the new capabilities of the breakthrough state).

Examining the responses of other countries to the RMA is an interesting research problem, even if we are to conclude, as is likely, that much of the rest of the world does not "have what it takes" to make and implement revolutionary changes in their militaries. It is interesting for many reasons: first, we advance our knowledge about other armed forces and how they think about military power; second, it advances our knowledge of the role of military capabilities in the conduct of international relations among the world's leading powers, both in the Western and non-Western worlds; and third, because the United States needs to be aware of how others may try to challenge its otherwise unchallenged conventional military superiority in the post-Cold War era.

So far, in the United States, we are only beginning to explore the impact of the RMA on the rest of the world. Even then, the overwhelming majority of analyses written in the United States deal with the RMA in just two countries, Russia and China, the so-called near peer competitors. Since much of the world will not be able to exploit the RMA for a wide variety of reasons, I am not writing about the response of the non-Western world per se, but rather of a limited group of countries that see themselves as influential regional powers with serious armed forces. Clearly, try as they might, countries like Burkina Faso or Paraguay are neither influential regional powers nor do they have armed forces and budgets that can be considered as agents for innovative change. Thus they will never be candidates for the exploitation of the RMA.

REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS

The nature of war never changes; "war," after all, "is an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will," as Karl von Clausewitz stated over a century and a half ago in his book On War. But the manner in which war is conducted has undergone considerable change over the course of human civilization. Sometimes these changes are so dramatic that war changes its form. In other words, a historical discontinuity, or revolution, occurs in the way war is fought. Hence, a revolution in military affairs occurs when a combination of technological, organizational, social, doctrinal and political-economic changes take place in conjunction and affect the way militaries plan, equip and train to wage war. Many analysts and strategic thinkers believe that a revolution in military affairs has been taking place in the last two decades of the 20th century, with the primary feature being the re-emergence of conventional weapons after 50 years of being overshadowed by the nuclear weapon buildup of the Cold War.

This current RMA is driven by technology, namely information technologies. The technologies in question--microelectronics, sensors, computers, telecommunications and data processing systems--are the key factors in bringing on the dramatic changes in conventional warfare. These changes are the rapid transmission of real-time intelligence and location of enemy targets, the deployment of a new generation of lethal and accurate precision-guided munitions, continuous 24-hour operations, improvement of the ability to engage in deep-strikes, better control of information flows and the development of the ability to deny the enemy information. In short, we follow the often-quoted definition by Andrew Krepinevich, which says that an RMA has occured when:

... the application of new technologies into a significant number of military systems combines with innovative operational concepts and organizational adaptation in a way that fundamentally alters the character and conduct of a conflict. It does so by producing a dramatic increase--often an order of magnitude or greater--in the combat potential and military effectiveness of armed forces.(1) There have been a number of RMAs in the history of warfare, and military historians and strategic analysts have engaged in long debates within their respective disciplines over what constitutes a revolution in warfare, what are its essential characteristics and how many revolutions there have been. Military historians were the first to address the concept of revolutions in military affairs. In 1955, the British military historian Michael Roberts attempted to explain the transformation of warfare in Europe in the early 17th century. He concluded that four things had changed: (1) tactics-- ranging from the square of the Spanish tercio to the line; (2) technological developments--firearms replaced the lance and pike; (3) armies--which had increased dramatically in size and (4) the impact of war on societies--the pool of recruits had to be enlarged and the need to raise and fund these larger armies enhanced the role of the state over society.(2)

There has been little cross-fertilization between the military historians and the strategic analysts who began writing about the latest revolution in military affairs. The latter probably thought that since military historians were writing on developments that occurred 300 to 400 years ago, they could offer little insights on current innovations. Soviet strategic thinkers and officers were the first to discern the outlines of what they deemed to be revolutionary changes about to take place in late 20th century conventional warfare. Arguing that the emerging RMA was technologically driven, they preferred to use the term "military-technical revolution." Soviet officers, such as Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, claimed that technological breakthroughs were about to give conventional weapons a level of precision that could only be dreamt of in the past and which would provide a level of effectiveness in battle approaching that afforded by tactical nuclear weapons.(3) In short, argued Ogarkov, new technologies would "make it possible to conduct military operations with the use of conventional means of qualitatively new and incomparably more destructive forms than before...."(4)

Despite their grounding in on-hands strategy, strategic analysts concerned with the current RMA would be remiss in not using the methodological assumptions of the military historians and extrapolating from the grand...