The transformation we face in the nature and conduct of warfare is no less fundamental than that of Napoleon's time. A powerful combination of social, technological, and political developments is revising the role of military force in national policy and changing the way wars are fought. In responding to this dizzying pace of change, our challenge is the same as Napoleon's: to seize the opportunities of this new era in warfare, to make it work for us rather than against us. No true revolution in military affairs is a narrowly military phenomenon. It is, in the most fundamental sense, the product of a broad social and political transformation which gives rise to new military organizations and technologies. [1] Together, these changes demand substantial reforms in existing methods of conducting warfare. [2] The revolution in military affairs underway today is, of course, the revolution in information, sensing, and precision strike technologies. [3] Modern military forces can conduct their operations with an unprecedented, and revolutionary, degree of precision. Once able only to guess at where they were, today's soldiers can instantly determine their precise location through the Global Positioning System. Where once a commander might have little idea where his troops were, today military leaders can watch battles unfold on computer screens and issue moment-by-moment corrections. [4] One finds little discussion of these ideas in the U.S. Department of Defense's recently-completed Bottom-Up Review. [5] Former Secretary of Defense Les Aspin initiated the review with the laudable goal of rethinking the basis for U.S. defense planning. It placed emphasis in many of the right areas: readiness, keeping forces for more than one regional war, acquisition reform. And the review built a substantial consensus in the Pentagon behind the new force structure. Nonetheless, the review offers a classic example of military leaders planning to fight the last war. The report's proposed force for a single regional contingency-four to five Army divisions, four to five Marine brigades, 10 Air Force fighter wings, 100 heavy bombers, and four to five carriers-mirrors almost exactly the forces deployed in Operation Desert Storm. The review offers precious few thoughts on new technologies or techniques that might change the nature of war in coming decades. Such a limited focus was probably inevitable in the review, which focused on defense planning for the next 7 years, not the next 20 or 30. But deeper thinking is now called for, and is in fact underway throughout the Department of Defenses. [6] We are in the midst of a revolution in military affairs (RMA). It is a post-nuclear revolution, a return to an emphasis on nonnuclear warfare, both conventional and unconventional. It stems, among other things, from an increasingly decentralized, information-based society, an interdependent world economy, and the dramatic effects of new military and civilian technologies. And if we look carefully, the RMA can provide a coherent framework for thinking about the future of warfare and defense policy. It points to those principles of defense planning and military art that will dominate warfare in the coming decades. This monograph's purpose is to lay out that framework and those principles--to describe where the revolution in military affairs leads us in military planning. It begins by looking at the future of warfare and world politics, to determine what challenges will confront the U.S. military in coming years. It then offers four principles as the framework for future U.S. military strategy: information dominance, synergy, disengagement, and civilianization. Each represents not a new phenomenon, but merely the culmination of historical trends. Each alone embodies an evolutionary change in the nature of warfare; together their effect is revolutionary. One important question needs to be asked at the outset: Is the RMA a revolution in warfare or in the weapons, doctrines, and organizations which fight it? The answer is both, and in fact the two interact. The nature of war itself is indeed changing. Conventional, head-to-head clashes of high-technology field armies have been for several decades giving way to guerrilla conflicts, mixed regular and irregular wars, terrorism, non-state conflict, and a host of new information-based military efforts. Even traditional, high-intensity war has changed dramatically from the days when it consisted of a search for the single, decisive battle against the enemy army in the field. Modern war involves simultaneous, high-precision attacks across a range of civil and military targets to achieve a decisive result. This change in the nature of war is spurred by, but also somewhat independent from, a second revolution underway in the nature of the weapons, doctrines, and organizations available to the U.S. military. In some cases, the two revolutions are closely intertwined; thus the technology of information warfare changes the nature of large-scale combat. In other cases, however, a substantial mismatch may arise between the two parallel revolutions, as when high-tech U.S. information war units are unable to conduct guerrilla warfare. Any framework for defense planning must therefore address itself to this complex and shifting mosaic of the nebulous "revolution in military affairs." Our goal must be to understand the two layers of that revolution and build a military institution capable of responding to both. The four principles outlined below represent one effort to do so. Back to Table of Contents Revolution in Military Affairs Back to SSI List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 1994 by US Army War College. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com