Rage Against the RMA
Just a quick recommendation this week to read Stephen Biddle’s latest at Foreign Affairs.
This raises the question of how different this war truly is. How can such cutting-edge technology coexist with such echoes of the distant past? The answer is that although the tools in Ukraine are sometimes new, the results they produce are mostly not. Armies adapt to new threats, and the countermeasures that both sides have adopted in Ukraine have dramatically reduced the net effects of new weapons and equipment, resulting in a war that in many ways looks more like a conflict from the past than one from an imagined high-tech future. U.S. defense planners should understand that the war in Ukraine does not portend a “revolution in military affairs” of the kind that has often been predicted but somehow never quite arrives. Policymakers and analysts should closely study what is happening on the ground in Ukraine, but they should not expect their findings to produce transformational change in U.S. military strategy. Instead, as has often been the case in the past, the best path forward will involve incremental adaptations, not tectonic shifts.
The war in Ukraine has seen the use of some of the most advanced military technology available, from hypersonics to AI to unmanned systems of every kind and homebrew precision-guided missiles. What it hasn’t seen is any technology or combination thereof producing revolutionary change.
That’s because we never see it. Revolutions by definition are phenomenon that change everything, leaving nothing unchanged in their wake. But every new technology developed for the battlefield takes decades- if not centuries- to proliferate and for its potential to be realized. It was true of the “gunpowder revolution” and the development of aircraft and tanks. Even though, one could argue that those two inventions merely replaced the horse cavalry that traditionally performed both reconnaissance and shock roles (with both taking on some of the artillery’s traditional destruction role.) They’re much, much more capable at those missions, but the role is the same.
What we do see is evolution and adaptation. Tactics evolve as new technology create new possibilities, but older technology and traditional methods are also adapted to new battlefield conditions. We see the coexistence of new and old, continuity and change consistence with war’s chaotic nature. Sometimes this evolution is slower, other times it is faster. This is process called punctuated equilibrium, a term first applied to military history by Clifford J Rogers. This idea fits much better with Clausewitz who believed every war needed to be analyzed in its own context because warfare changes constantly and John Boyd who developed the best model for military adaptation, the OODA Loop. We may be seeing a period of accelerated evolution thanks in no small part to the ingenuity of the Ukrainians, but we’re still not seeing a revolution.
Theorists like Clausewitz and Boyd are generally better on such trends than modern historians. Historians tend to focus on one time period, one war, or even one battle. Changes seem more dramatic from that viewpoint. But Clausewitz covered many centuries in just one extended essay in On War (Book VIII, Chapter 3b) and Boyd did the same in Patterns of Conflict. There are exceptions, of course, like the prolific Jeremy Black who tends to take the long view in his historical works and Sun Tzu, one theorist whose ideas were built on a very limited time period and a very limited data set.
The US especially continually chases so-called Revolutions in Military Affairs (RMA) promised by the next new gizmo. No wait, not that one, the next one. This one definitely. No, not that one either but certainly this one.
Maybe we’d be better at innovating if we didn’t chase every single shiny object.