Author Topic: Nothing New: Why the 'Revolution' in Military Affairs Is the Same as the Old One  (Read 156 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

rangerrebew

  • Guest
September 2, 2019

Nothing New: Why the 'Revolution' in Military Affairs Is the Same as the Old One

Only the technology has changed.
by Adam Wunische

The technology-driven revolution in military affairs (RMA), first begun during America’s dominating performance in the First Gulf War, is upon us. This argument has come to be accepted essentially as common knowledge. Christian Brose recently argued in Foreign Affairs that, “a military made up of small numbers of large, expensive, heavily manned, and hard-to-replace systems will not survive on future battlefields, where swarms of intelligent machines will deliver violence at a greater volume and higher velocity than ever before.” This same old argument has been presented, and repeatedly repackaged, countless times since the United States’ impressive military performance in the 1990s. It was then that the term Revolution in Military Affairs was thrust to the front pages of foreign policy publications and it refuses to go away, even as we continue to wait for a revolution to actually occur. The debate has been given a renewed immediacy in the United States as a result of the shift in focus to great power competition. These proclamations of a technology-driven RMA are fundamentally flawed, however.

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/nothing-new-why-revolution-military-affairs-same-old-one-77266