MILLITARY TRANSFORMATION

The idea of a "revolution in military affairs" (RMA) based on new information technology (IT) has sparked the imagination of defense intellectuals and policymakers for nearly three decades. In that time, it has also guided a sizable chunk of the U.S. Defense Department's experiments and investments in new technology. The related but ill-defined notion of a "military transformation" even found its way into candidate George W. Bush's campaign rhetoric in 2000. And transforming the U.S. military became Donald Rumsfeld's chief goal when he was named Bush's secretary of defense after the election.
Six years later, U.S. forces are mired in Iraq, fighting valiantly but without enough forces or the right weapons and operational concepts for the job. Rumsfeld is out of a job, and many pundits blame his vision of a small, high-tech fighting force for the problems U.S. troops now confront. The RMA seems to have ended before it got very far.
But the unpopular war in Iraq has brought more dishonor to the idea of transformation than it deserves. As Max Boot affirms in his splendid history, War Made New, RMAs have been critical to the success of various countries throughout history, and the U.S. government would be foolish not to continue pursuing the present one. As Frederick Kagan points out in his very different but equally stimulating book, Finding the Target, the more contemporary notion of "transformation" is problematic, in part because the term has come to mean almost anything, but more important because Rumsfeld's version incorporated a very limited view of warfare that made it relatively easy for the United States to get into Iraq but very hard to get out. Kagan himself makes no attempt to codify the term but rather uses it to mean simply "a big, important change." Armed with that definition, he offers a few transformations of his own. These are no less compelling for the lack of a capital T.
Between them, these two very different books offer fascinating insights for those seeking to understand how the U.S. military got where it is today: namely, bogged down in Iraq. The books also help explain the peculiar ways in which the Defense Department conceives of war and invests its money. Each book suggests ways forward. Neither has a plan for getting out of Iraq -- the books deal with overarching themes, not particular policies. But the authors' advice could well help Washington avoid similar conflicts in the future -- or at least handle them better if they do occur.
A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE
It would be unfair to expect Boot's lengthy book to offer solutions for all of today's dilemmas. His is a sweeping history of RMAs over half a millennium, and the current era occupies considerably less than half of its pages. Still, when he gets to the present, he has much to say about contemporary events in historical context.
Boot barely mentions the modern phrase "military transformation," preferring to focus strictly on the notion of RMAs, which he defines as "great change[s] in warfare" that occur when "new technologies and tactics combine to reshape the face of battle." Boot identifies four RMAs that have taken place since 1500, each grounded in the technological advances that marked the era in which it occurred: the gunpowder revolution, the first Industrial Revolution (involving rifles and railroads), the second Industrial Revolution (involving tanks and aircraft), and today's information revolution. In each case, he singles out a few battles to illustrate how war changed, how those changes emerged, and how they affected those who mastered them.
Although Boot's RMAs are all rooted in technological innovations, he makes it clear that a successful revolution also requires adaptations in military organization, training, and doctrine. And if there is a single dominant factor to explain why some states have managed RMAs while others have failed, it is not technical genius but rather "an efficient bureaucracy." Boot weighs organization and politics as heavily as technology, and rightly so.
As he shows, when states do manage change properly, the rewards are impressive. Successful revolutionizers, such as England in the 1500s or Germany at the start of World War II, have used the power thus unleashed to upset local, regional, and even (in the case of the nineteenth-century imperialists) global power balances. The rise of the West, Boot contends, cannot be explained without reference to the relatively substantial military lead that Western states acquired after 1500. Not surprisingly, he stresses "the importance of not missing out on the next big change in warfare."
The changes Boot documents are not limited to the military. Many of the successful states he describes were fundamentally reshaped by their military revolutions. Thus, the gunpowder revolution, by making standing armies larger and more lethal, hastened the development of the centralized state. And the enormous materiel demands of war in the early twentieth century hastened economic centralization, while the growing demand for conscripts encouraged the breakdown of old political structures and the rise of egalitarian systems.

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Military Transformation: A Strategic Approach

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Military Transformation: Intelligence, Surveillance and ...