Revolution in Military Affairs (idea)

A term used around the early 1990s to describe changes in United States military theory and practice, after the fall of the Soviet Union, and especially in relation to the overwhelming victory of Desert Storm. The term derives from the Soviet term Military Technical Revolution, which was applied by the Soviets to the World War I advent of military aircraft, motor vehicles, and chemical warfare such as mustard gas, and the World War II advent of long-range missiles like the V2, computers for batch mathematical calculations, and most obviously nuclear weapons.

Soviet doctrine during the 1980s was that technologies including electronics, communications, directed energy weapons to scramble electronics and radio transmissions, and Global Positioning Satellites to guide missiles and other objects, would radically change war and make conventional weapons as destructive as weapons of mass destruction. Rather than sending a single nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile to a city, the entire city could be saturated with evenly spaced conventional explosives, all on perfectly accurate, GPS-guided missiles. The effect would be like the Dresden firebombing, without any antiaircraft fire, since it would use missiles instead of planes.

Andrew Marshall, director of the Office of Net Assessment in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, suggested the term "Revolution in Military Affairs" rather than "Military Technical Revolution" in the late 1980s, to emphasize changes in organization and training, as well as hardware and equipment. In addition to specific technologies, discussion of an RMA has focused on making the entire military more flexible, creative, and better at learning, and overcoming institutional rigidity and resistance to change.

It's generally agreed that wars followed a pattern of nation against nation until Hiroshima, and then shifted during the Cold War to conflicts such as Vietnam or Afghanistan, where opposing superpowers armed and trained the opposing sides in civil wars, without being involved directly. The discussion surrounding the RMA has suggested that since the fall of the USSR, conflicts have shifted to the US opposing civil wars as in Bosnia, Somalia, and Iraq, drug trafficking cartels as in Colombia and Mexico, and terrorism training as in Afghanistan and Iraq. Changes in American law and attitudes, such as accepting more invasive police searches, may also be considered part of the RMA.

In addition to claiming that electronics had created an RMA, or claiming that the fall of the USSR had created an RMA, proponents of the term often made plans to create a deliberate RMA by policy. This required reorganizing the military and its spending to seize the opportunities created by new politics and technology in a sudden, revolutionary way, rather than a gradual way. This often included sharp reductions in the size of the military and spending on upkeep, with more spending on research and new projects instead. These pitches were made in the context of shrinking military budgets, which is perhaps the most dated aspect of the discussion today.