RECOGNIZING AND UNDERSTANDING 

REVOLUTIONARY CHANGE IN WARFARE:

THE SOVEREIGNTY OF CONTEXT

Colin S. Gray

February 2006

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iii

FOREWORD

 Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) was the most widely used, 

and abused, acronym in the U.S. defense community in the 1990s. 

Subsequently, transformation has superceded it as the preferred term 

of art. For the better part of 2 decades, American defense professionals 

have been excited by the prospect of effecting a revolutionary change 

in the conduct and character of warfare.

 In this monograph, Dr. Colin S. Gray provides a critical audit of 

the great RMA debate and of some actual RMA behavior. He argues 

that the contexts of warfare are crucially important. Indeed so vital 

are the contexts that only a military transformation that allows for 

flexibility and adaptability will meet future strategic demands. Dr. 

Gray warns against a transformation that is highly potent only in 

a narrow range of strategic cases. In addition, he advises that the 

historical record demonstrates clearly that every revolutionary 

change in warfare eventually is more or less neutralized by antidotes 

of one kind or another (political, strategic, operational, tactical, and 

technological). He warns that the military effectiveness of a process 

of revolutionary change in a “way of war” can only be judged by the 

test of battle, and possibly not even then, if the terms of combat are 

very heavily weighted in favor of the United States.

 On balance, the concept of revolutionary change is found to be quite 

useful, provided it is employed and applied with some reservations 

and in a manner that allows for flexibility and adaptability. Above 

all else, the monograph insists, the contexts of warfare, especially 

the political, determine how effective a transforming military 

establishment will be.

DOUGLAS C. LOVELACE, JR.

Director

Strategic Studies Institute 
iv

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF THE AUTHOR

COLIN S. GRAY is Professor of International Politics and Strategic 

Studies at the University of Reading, England. He worked at 

the International Institute for Strategic Studies (London), and at 

Hudson Institute (Croton-on-Hudson, New York), before founding 

a defense-oriented think tank in the Washington, DC, area, the 

National Institute for Public Policy. Dr. Gray served for 5 years in 

the Reagan administration on the President’s General Advisory 

Committee on Arms Control and Disarmament. He has served as 

an adviser both to the U.S. and the British governments (he has dual 

citizenship). His government work has included studies of nuclear 

strategy, arms control policy, maritime strategy, space strategy, and 

the use of special forces. Dr. Gray has written 19 books, most recently 

The Sheriff: America’s Defense of the New World Order (Lexington: 

University Press of Kentucky, 2004), and Another Bloody Century: 

Future Warfare (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2005; distributed 

in the United States by Casemate). In 2006 he will publish Strategy and 

History: Essays on Theory and Practice (London: Routledge). At present 

he is working on a text book, War, Peace, and International Relations 

Since 1800: An Introduction to Strategic History, to be published by 

Routledge. Dr. Gray is a graduate of the Universities of Manchester 

and Oxford.
v

SUMMARY

 Since 1993 at the latest, when Andrew W. Marshall and his 

Office of Net Assessment in the Office of the Secretary of Defense 

(OSD) introduced into public debate the concept of a Revolution 

in Military affairs (RMA), the idea of revolutionary change in 

warfare has gripped the official U.S. strategic imagination. All such 

master notions, or meta narratives, have lengthy antecedents. The 

provenance of RMA can be traced in the use of laser-guided bombs 

in Vietnam; in the 1970s “Assault Breaker” project to develop rocketdelivered smart bomblets to target Soviet armor far behind the 

front; in Soviet speculation about a Military-Technical Revolution 

(MTR) and the feasibility of “reconnaissance-strike complexes”; 

in the Discriminate Deterrence reports of the late 1980s (sponsored 

by then Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Dr. Fred Ikle, and 

inspired by Dr. Albert Wohlstetter); by the dramatic effects of stealth 

and precision in the Gulf War of 1991; and, “off piste” as it were, 

by a rising argument among academic historians of early-modern 

Europe.

 U.S. debate evolved into official commitment. RMA was to be 

realized as transformation or, for a scarcely less ambitious expression, 

as revolutionary change in the way American forces would fight. The 

fascination with revolutionary change persisted through the 1990s, 

survived, indeed was given “gravity assists” by the newly mandated 

Quadrennial Defense Reviews (QDRs), by a change in administration 

in 2001, and was scarcely dented as the dominant defense concept 

by September 11, 2001 (9/11). Truly it seems to be a big idea for all 

seasons: for the no-name post-Cold War decade, now for the Age 

of Terror, and prospectively for whatever the decades ahead will 

bring.

 This monograph provides an audit, a not-unfriendly critical 

review, of the concept of revolutionary military change. It offers 

a review of what those who theorize about, and those who are 

committed by policy to execute, such a revolution ought to know 

about their subject. As the subtitle of the analysis announces, the 

leading edge of the argument is the potency, indeed the sovereign 

importance, of warfare’s contexts.
vi

 The monograph strives to clarify the confusion over definitions. It 

points out that the concept of RMA, though less so the even grander 

idea of military revolution (MR), is eminently and irreducibly 

contestable. The RMA debate has provided a happy hunting ground 

for academic historians to wage protracted internecine combat. All 

definitions of RMA present problems, a fact which is of some practical 

consequence for a U.S. military now firmly taking what is intended 

to be a revolutionary path. This author prefers a truly minimalist 

definition: an RMA is a radical change in the conduct and character 

of war. The more detail one adds to the definition, the more hostages 

are offered to reasonable objection.

 The first of the three major sections poses and answers the 

most basic of questions, the ones that really matter most, about 

revolutionary change in warfare. It asks: Does the RMA concept 

make sense? Is it useful? Does it much matter? Is not military change 

more a product of evolution than revolution? Are not continuities at 

least as important as changes in their relative contribution to military 

effectiveness? And, is revolutionary change the high road to victory? 

By and large, though not without some rough handling, the RMA 

concept, the notion of transformation, or simply the descriptive idea 

of revolutionary change, survive the ordeal of question and answer.

 The second major section, the heart of the monograph, seeks to 

advance understanding of revolutionary change in warfare, the core 

purpose of this enterprise, by explaining that war (and its conduct 

in warfare) is dominated by, indeed what it really is all about—its 

contexts. To the best of this author’s knowledge, to date no other 

analysis has taken such a holistic view of warfare’s contexts with 

reference to RMA. This analysis breaks new ground. The thesis here 

is that context provides the key to recognizing and understanding 

revolutionary change in warfare. The argument is presented through 

the explanation of the significance of six contexts: the political, 

the strategic, the social-cultural, the economic, the technological, 

and the geographical. While each context is vitally significant, the 

occurrence of war, as well as its course in warfare, its outcome, 

and its consequences, derive their meaning only from politics. As 

this author argued in a recent monograph for the Strategic Studies 

Institute, Transformation and Strategic Surprise, American strategic 
vii

performance is apt to disappoint on occasions because the strategic 

bridge between military behavior and the political context is not 

always in good enough repair.

 The concluding, yet substantial, section assembles the arguments 

and insights from the previous discussions into seven broad findings, 

and it draws out the implications of each for the U.S. Armed Forces 

in general, and the Army in particular. The seven findings are 

effectively self-explanatory.

1. Contexts rule!

2. Revolutionary change in warfare may be less important 

than revolutionary change in social attitudes to war and the 

military.

3. Historical research shows that there are vital conditions 

for success in carrying through revolutionary changes in 

warfare.

4. Recognition of change in warfare is one thing, but 

understanding the character, relevance, and implications of 

change is something else entirely, given the sovereignty of 

the political and strategic contexts.

5. When we effect a revolutionary change in the way we fight, we 

must do so adaptably and flexibly. If we fail the adaptability 

test, we are begging to be caught out by the diversity and 

complexity of future warfare. If we lock ourselves into a way 

of war that is highly potent only across a narrow range of 

strategic and military contexts, and hence operational taskings, 

we will wound our ability to recognize and understand other 

varieties of radical change in warfare. Moreover, we will be 

slow, if able at all in a relevant time span, to respond effectively 

to them.

6. Revolutionary change in warfare always triggers a search for 

antidotes. Eventually the antidotes triumph. They can take 

any or all of tactical, operational, strategic, or political forms. 

The solution, in principle if not always in practice, is to carry 

through an RMA that is adaptable, flexible, and dynamic as 

recommended in 5. above.
viii

7. Revolutionary change in warfare is only revealed by the 

“audit of war,” and not necessarily reliably even then. And if 

it is to be conducted competently, review of that audit must 

take full account of war’s complex nature.
1

RECOGNIZING AND UNDERSTANDING 

REVOLUTIONARY CHANGE IN WARFARE:

THE SOVEREIGNTY OF CONTEXT

War is more than a true chameleon that slightly adapts its characteristics 

to the given case. As a total phenomenon its dominant tendencies always 

make war a remarkable trinity—composed of primordial violence, 

hatred, and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force; of 

the play of chance and probability within which the creative spirit is free 

to roam; and of its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, 

which makes it subject to reason alone.

 Clausewitz, 18321

[A]ll wars are things of the same nature . . .

 Clausewitz, 18322

[T]he only empirical data we have about how people conduct war 

and behave under its stresses is our experience with it in the past, 

however much we have to make adjustments for subsequent changes in 

conditions.

 Bernard Brodie, 19763

Introduction.

 It is 12 years since Andrew W. Marshall lent his formidable 

personal authority, as well as the weight of his small but influential 

Office of Net Assessment in the Office of the Secretary of Defense 

(OSD), to the proposition that a revolution in military affairs (RMA) 

might or could be underway.4

 The history of the “great RMA debate” 

of the 1990s and beyond remains to be written, though preferably, 

one hopes, not until many more years have elapsed. At present the 

story is unduly incomplete, and too many commentator-historians 

would find themselves employing their versions of recent history 

in the service of contemporary argument. That granted, national 

security policy, grand strategy, military strategy, doctrine, and force 

structure cannot be put on hold pending properly scholarly assay. As 
2

war is conducted in a climate of uncertainty, so those who aspire to 

offer strategic advice must do their best with imperfect information 

and the unavoidable biases bequeathed by the time and place of their 

writing.

 The purpose of this monograph is to provide answers to the 

questions that are both explicit and implicit in its title. The analysis 

can be viewed as an assessment of the RMA debate at the 12-year mark 

by a participant-observer.5

 It is not, however, primarily an exercise 

in history. It is, rather, an attempt to corral and make intelligible for 

potential use by policymakers and military professionals, “findings” 

from the years of often heated debate on RMA. Strategic knowledge 

needs to be useful knowledge. It is in the very nature and purpose of 

strategic studies for it to be a pragmatic enterprise.

 For every fashionable concept there is a season, and inevitably so 

it has proved for RMA. However, the RMA concept has demonstrated 

an exceptional potency and longevity, facts plainly attributable both 

to the attractions of the promise in the idea and to its strong appeal in 

American culture. Revolutionary change in warfare is a notion that 

cannot be dismissed with a yawn. Unlike, say, network-centricity or 

effects-based operations, revolutionary change is not a cliché that 

conceals rediscovery of the long familiar and well-appreciated.6

Whatever one’s thoughts about the RMA hypothesis, be they 

positive or negative on balance, there can be no denying, on the one 

hand, the appeal of riding the wave of revolutionary change, or, on 

the other, the fear that one might be the victim of some other polity 

riding that wave. Now that the RMA debate of the 1990s by and 

large has matured into argument about the realization of RMA in a 

lengthy process of “transformation,” the follow-on magic concept, 

what do we think we know about recognizing and understanding 

revolutionary change in warfare? No less to the point, what are 

the practical implications of that knowledge for national security, 

strategy, and defense planning?

 The mission of this monograph is to provide some answers to 

these questions. The trajectory of the analysis proceeds through 

three sections. The first offers definitions and discusses the most 

significant theoretical matters. I do this without apology to the 

historians among my readers. As a controversial British historian, 

John Vincent, has noted, “historians themselves . . . were never ones 
3

for concepts, let alone rigour.”7 That is too sweeping a judgment, but 

it is true enough to be distinctly relevant to the course of the RMA 

debate, past and present. The next section, the core of the work, also 

is somewhat theoretical in that it strives to explain the structure of 

the subject of warfare with reference to the most vital contexts, albeit 

without downplaying the vital role of human agency and plain old 

accident and luck. In its concluding section, the monograph provides 

a set of “findings and implications” concerning the most important 

of the challenges posed by revolutionary change in warfare, with a 

view to separating the dross from the gold. Particular attention is 

paid to the authoritative roles of warfare’s several contexts.

 The use of history, or should one say the past, is controversial, but 

it is the only potential evidence available.8

 If we deny the past, the 

result has to be analysis and prognosis resting entirely upon current 

concerns and the nostrums of today. That might be good enough, 

but it would seem to this theorist to be a gratuitously reckless selfimpoverishment.

Revolutionary Change in Warfare: What Are We Talking About?

Often only a fine line separates a necessary precision in language 

from the malady of scholarly pedantry. Probably most readers of this 

monograph already are comfortable with the idea of a revolutionary 

change in warfare. After all, it is an idea blessed by the authority of 

seemingly endless repetition over the past dozen years, while also 

it carries an all but self-evident meaning. Revolutionary change is 

not exactly an obscure, arcane, idea. It is not unreasonable to believe 

that we can recognize such change when it looms or occurs. To meet 

the test of common sense, revolutionary change must be change that 

overturns an existing order. But, is our subject strictly change in 

warfare, or must it extend to change in war itself? War and warfare 

are not synonymous. Warfare is dominated by its several major 

contexts, not the least among them being the institution of war. It 

is commonplace for war and warfare to be used interchangeably, 

an error that has great potential to promote misunderstanding. 

Lest there be any uncertainty on the matter, this analysis holds 

that warfare is the actual conduct of war, principally in its strategic 

and military dimensions, which is to say with regard to the threat 
4

or use of force. In contrast, war is a political, and sometimes legal, 

relationship between belligerents. War also is a social institution. 

Just as revolutionary change in warfare can be triggered by a 

transformation of war, so the implications of such change are likely 

to be driven by the broader transformation, possibly to the point 

where they are substantially offset by extra-military developments. 

Should anyone harbor any residual uncertainty on the matter, war is 

a relationship wherein organized violence is carried on by political 

units against each other for political motives.

 Revolutionary change in warfare is a concept that typically trips 

off the tongue or out of the computer with scant felt need by its 

employer for detailed explanation. This may be a sensibly relaxed 

attitude. However, given the mission of this analysis, to help in the 

recognition and understanding of revolutionary change in warfare, 

or RMA, we cannot afford to be completely relaxed about the 

content of our subject. The scholarly pedant in this theorist would 

like to know, for preference, exactly what is meant by revolutionary 

change, or, if that is a demand too far, what is the depth and scope of 

the uncertainty.

 RMA as a professional term of art has rather gone out of fashion, 

but its meaning effectively is identical to the concept of revolutionary 

change in warfare. There is a subtle distinction between the 

two, with RMA possibly carrying some theoretical baggage that 

simple revolutionary change does not, but truly it is a distinction 

without a significant difference. Notwithstanding its longevity in

defense and academic historical discourse, RMA remains a deeply 

contested concept. Its historical reality is contested, as indeed is just 

about everything else about it: for example, its content, utility, and 

significance. Before too many readers discard this text in irritation 

at the scholastic trend in the discussion, I must insist that this thus 

far admittedly rather abstract analysis has profound practical 

implications for U.S. national security as a whole, and for the Army in 

particular. What we are discussing is nothing less than the prospects 

for, and the meaning and probable consequences of, the military 

transformation to which the American defense establishment has 

firmly committed itself. The Armed Forces have signed on for a 

revolutionary change in warfare. It is vital that they should recognize 

and understand just what it is that transformation implies.
5

 This author prefers minimal definitions that avoid arguable 

descriptive attributes; readers may find more elaborate definitions 

attractive. My definition holds that an RMA is a radical change in the 

character or conduct of war. 

 In an important book published in 2001, historians Williamson 

Murray and MacGregor Knox drew attention to a significant 

distinction between military revolutions (MRs) and RMAs. Whereas 

the latter are chosen happenings, pursued purposefully by states to 

produce “new ways of destroying their opponents,” MRs “brought 

systemic changes in politics and society. They were uncontrollable, 

unpredictable, and unforeseeable. And their impact continues.”9

Murray and Knox identified five MRs: the creation of the modern 

state and its military institutions in the 17th century; the French 

Revolution; the Industrial Revolution; World War I, which combined 

the effects of the previous three; and the Nuclear Revolution. To 

this list, we may wish to add the Information Revolution. The key 

difference between an MR and its antecedent and subsequent RMAs 

is that it forecloses on choice. Polities simply have to cope with 

the contexts it creates as best they can. This MR/RMA distinction 

has some significance for this analysis, even though my mission, 

to investigate the recognition and understanding of revolutionary 

change in warfare, risks obscuring it. The significance is that if, 

as I believe, the contemporary process of transformation is best 

understood as a response to an MR, a military revolution, it is not a 

matter of policy or strategic choice, at least not overall. Of course, in 

detail it is eminently challengeable.

 Probably the most widely used and accepted detailed definition 

was provided by Andrew F. Krepinevich in an influential article 

published in 1994. As a close associate of Andrew W. Marshall, the 

American godfather of the RMA concept, Krepinevich’s definition 

carried unusual weight. He explained RMA thus:

What is a military revolution? It is what occurs when the application of 

new technologies into a significant number of military systems combines 

with innovative operational concepts and organizational adaptation in 

a way that fundamentally alters the character and conduct of conflict. It 

does so by producing a dramatic increase—often an order of magnitude 

or greater—in the combat potential and military effectiveness of armed 

forces.10
6

By way of a final offering, a RAND study in 1999 tells us that:

An RMA involves a paradigm shift in the nature and conduct of military 

operations

 • which either renders obsolete or irrelevant one or more core 

competencies of a dominant player,

 • or creates one or more new core competencies, in some new 

dimension of warfare,

 • or both.11

The RAND author, Richard O. Hundley, defines his key term, “core 

competency,” as “[a] fundamental ability that provides the foundation 

for a set of military capabilities.”12 By way of a contemporary example, 

Hundley cites the “the ability to detect vehicular targets from the air 

and attack them with precision weapons is today a core competency 

of the U.S. Air Force.”13

 Hundley’s brave and innovative specification of the passing 

grade for an RMA provides a test that has some merit, but it is one 

which this author, perhaps ungenerously, judges unduly restrictive 

and arguable. Jeremy Black’s cautionary words in 1995 continue to 

warrant respect. Professor Black emphasized the subjective nature 

of RMA as an historical descriptor. He argued that “there are no 

agreed–upon criteria by which military change, especially qualitative 

developments, can be measured or, more significantly, revolution 

discerned.”14 Whether or not one shares Black’s skepticism about the 

historical sense in the RMA concept, he performs a useful service 

by reminding us of the contestability of many claims by historians 

and defense analysts for the presence of RMAs.15 Scholarly debate 

about RMA has a real-world resonance. After all, the Armed Forces 

currently are proceeding through the early stages of what will be 

a lengthy process designed to achieve transformation, a dynamic 

condition that we can translate fairly as a revolutionary change in 

the way warfare is waged. The conceptual RMA horse has already 

left the theory stable and, indeed, has progressed beyond starter’s 

orders into the race itself. Still it is prudent for officials and soldiers to 

check on the state of the conceptual runners in the scholarly debate. 

Strategic ideas, albeit in modified form those derived inductively as 

well as deductively, fuel policy, plans, and military behavior. So, what 
7

is the state of the contemporary debate over RMA, or revolutionary 

change in warfare?

 All strategic debates flourish, then wane and die, as the issue 

in question is intellectually exhausted, or as policy concerns move 

on, or both. RMA has been atypical in that it continues to attract 

interesting commentary, even after 12 years of high exposure. This 

fact is best explained with reference to its inherent potency; its appeal 

in American strategic and military culture; its official adoption by 

both Democratic and Republican administrations, as the master 

concept inspiring, and in a sense licensing, the transformation of the 

country’s armed forces; and, last but not least, to the extensive, if 

not very intensive, U.S. experience of armed combat from Kosovo 

in 1999, through Afghanistan in 2001-02, to Iraq in 2003-present. To 

state the matter directly, the Department of Defense is endeavoring 

to effect an RMA, a revolutionary change in the way U.S. military 

forces conduct warfare. For an approximate historical analogy, 

one has to look back to the 1950s, when the newly minted theory 

of stable nuclear deterrence gradually was accepted and then was 

all but embalmed as the intellectual architecture which dominated 

U.S. defense policy for nearly 40 years. There was, however, at least 

one vital difference between the theories of deterrence and RMA. 

The former was driven by the pressing needs of a political context 

of acute interstate hostility, while the latter is not.16 Nonetheless, 

deterrence and RMA share as a common feature the character of 

being a response to technological challenge, even though the former 

was shaped by the needs of a very definite political context of 

threats, while the latter was not. The theory of nuclear deterrence 

was developed so as to make sense of, and guide policy, strategy, 

and plans for the nuclear RMA. RMA is an imperial concept, a meta 

theory if you prefer.

 The now long-running debate over RMA has proceeded 

predictably through several stages. It moved from intellectual 

discovery (with thanks to Soviet theorists), to conceptual elaboration 

and counterattack by skeptics, through some empirical investigation, 

to second and third thoughts, which is the condition today. Some 

positions have hardened, perhaps matured, over the years, as often 

happens in debate. For example, in a recent book, Jeremy Black, who 

has probably written as much about the subject of military revolutions 
8

as anyone, sought to bring down the curtain on the RMA concept once 

and for all. He has written that “[m]ilitary realities, however, are both 

too complex and too dependent on previous experiences to make the 

search for military revolutions helpful.”17 As usual, his argument is 

cogent and plausible, though I do not endorse the full measure of his

skepticism. In the historians’ debate about RMA, the rival poles have 

been represented not only by people who are friendly or unfriendly 

to meta narrative, but also by those who attribute greater or lesser 

significance to technological change. If we recall the definition of 

RMA offered by Andrew Krepinevich, he specified “innovative 

operational concepts and organizational adaptation” to exploit new 

technologies in “a significant number of military systems.”

 What happened in the debate was that despite the sophisticated 

and originally fairly tentative, essentially speculative view of Andrew 

Marshall and OSD Net Assessment, once the RMA idea became 

general property it was captured by a profoundly technological view 

of the revolution that seemed to beckon the Armed Forces into a new 

golden age of enhanced effectiveness.18 This technophilia was to be 

expected, given America’s technological strengths, its military culture, 

and its preferred way of war, and given the particular character 

of the RMA that seemed to be inviting adoption and exploitation. 

After all, the contemporary revolutionary change in warfare 

quintessentially is about the uses of the computer. Unfortunately, 

though again predictably, the counterblasts against the technophiles 

who promised to disperse “the fog of war” and such like improbable, 

not to say impossible, achievements, were taken too far. Scholars and 

analysts made the telling points that many, perhaps most, historical 

RMAs were led by political and social, not technological change.19

Also, they argued, again persuasively, that organization, doctrine, 

and force employment, mattered rather more than did technology 

per se. Richard O. Hundley made that point with exceptional clarity 

when he wrote: “Without an operational concept, the best weapon 

systems in the world will never revolutionize anything.”20 He cites 

the early history of the machine gun in support of the point, to which 

one could add the French and Soviet experience with the tank in 

1940 and 1941, respectively.

 As was bound to happen, the assault upon the paradigm of 

technology-led RMA was overdone. Skepticism about the relative 
9

importance of technological innovation slipped inadvertently into 

what began to approach a technophobic perspective. It is time for 

the balance to be restored. Those of us who have written skeptically

about the significance of technology for military and strategic 

excellence, and I count myself guilty on this count,21 have slayed the 

technological dragon of such technophiles as Admiral Bill Owens, 

but we have proceeded intellectually way beyond “the culminating 

point of victory.”22

 We have drawn attention to the high importance of culture—

public, strategic, and military—and have scored historically 

well-attested points on the vital significance of organization and 

operational concepts, but we need to reconsider the role and relative 

potency of technological change. The technophiles have lost the 

debate, though whether they lose in the shaping of the process of 

U.S. military transformation is, of course, another matter entirely. 

There is general agreement that how weapons are used is more 

important than is the quality of the weapons themselves. Similarly, 

it is not especially controversial to maintain that morale is the most 

vital factor contributing to military effectiveness. But, and it is a 

large but, the quality of weapons does matter. Moreover, morale, no 

matter how high initially, cannot be relied on to survive close lethal 

encounters with a better armed enemy. So many and complex are the 

dimensions of warfare that there will be ways to compensate for a 

technical shortfall. However, such compensation can be insufficient, 

and for preference its desperate necessity should be avoided.23

Technology matters, even though it does not matter most.

 This largely conceptual section of the monograph concludes with 

the posing and brisk direct answering of what seem to this theorist 

to be the half dozen most salient questions one can ask of the RMA 

concept, the notion of revolutionary change in warfare.

1. Does the RMA concept make sense? On balance, it does, though it 

should not be taken too seriously, and it can only be accepted 

with some reservations. Constant repetition of the RMA 

acronym does have a way of deadening critical faculties. It 

is sensible to recognize both that the character and conduct 

of war are always changing, and that the rate of change 

periodically, if irregularly, accelerates and is made manifest 

in somewhat nonlinear outcomes in a new way in warfare. 
10

While it is no more than common sense to appreciate the 

historical reality of occasional bursts of revolutionary change 

in warfare, it is a little perilous to transcend such a mundane 

understanding and postulate RMAs. We are in danger of 

captivation by our own grandiose concept. After all, as a 

meta-narrative the RMA thesis holds that strategic history 

effectively has been organized and moved on by periodic 

revolutionary discontinuities in military affairs. There is some 

merit in that view, but only some. It is rather too monocausal

for comfort. We should not forget that there is a subtle but 

important difference between the concept of RMA, and the 

rather less definite notion of revolutionary or radical change 

in warfare. As we have noted already, there is no acid test 

for how revolutionary or radical change needs to be before 

it earns the RMA badge. Recall the Krepinevich definition 

which holds that an RMA “alters the character and conduct 

of conflict . . . by producing a dramatic increase—often an 

order of magnitude or greater—in the combat potential and 

military effectiveness of armed forces.” What appears to have 

occurred is that a large fraction of the defense community has 

succumbed to the reification fallacy. It has forgotten, if it ever 

realized, that RMA is an intellectual invention by theorists, 

including some historians, a profession usually quite hostile 

to far reaching ideas. As a consequence, there is an expectation 

that dramatic benefit will surely accrue, if only the United States 

can implement this magical procedure of an information-led 

RMA. Without the reified idea of an RMA, it is probable that 

more modest and measured expectations would attend the 

pursuit of a revolutionary change in warfare.

2. Is the RMA concept useful? The obvious answer is that surely it 

must be, since it has dominated American defense discourse 

for more than a decade. Even September 11, 2001 (9/11), 

and the consequent paying of extra attention to countering 

terrorism and to homeland security, generally failed to deflect 

the march towards execution of an information-led revolution 

in the conduct of war. However, popularity and merit are 

not always the same. It may be worthwhile to consider the 

opportunity costs of the RMA thesis. While American defense 
11

professionals were earnestly and prolifically exploring and 

debating RMA, even in its less grandiose form simply as radical 

change, what were they not investigating? For one suggestion, 

they were not debating very usefully the strategic purposes 

of the mooted revolutionary change in warfare. Historically, 

revolutionary military changes have been task-driven. What 

were, and are, the tasks that foreign policy could lay upon the 

country’s armed forces? It is difficult to resist the conclusion 

that in the minds of many the quest for revolutionary change, 

RMA, now transformation, comes perilously close to being an 

end in itself. As this author has argued in a recent publication, 

the United States has a persistent strategy deficit, rather than 

any dangerous incapacity to exploit the revolutionary military 

possibilities of information technology.24

3. Does the RMA thesis much matter? Despite the skeptical, 

even negative, comments just registered, the answer to 

this question has to be “yes.” The RMA thesis holds that 

revolutions in warfare happen, and that they render obsolete 

an existing way in combat. It would be hard to exaggerate 

the importance of that proposition. Whether or not it is 

true, or true enough to warrant respect as a general verity, 

is another matter. A problem with the RMA thesis is that it 

encourages its devotees to overreach with their expectations 

of consequent advantage. There are two principal reasons 

why this should be so. First, even a genuinely revolutionary 

change in the conduct of warfare simply may not deliver 

the “dramatic increase” in military effectiveness that the 

Krepinevich definition promises. Moreover, even if it does so 

deliver, the military and strategic output may fall far short of 

ensuring success. There is, after all, more to war than warfare. 

Second, if we recall the first of the Clausewitzian epigraphs to 

this monograph, it is a persistent fact that warfare manifests 

itself in many varieties, often even within the same war. One 

size of revolutionary military change is unlikely to fit all cases 

of American strategic need.

4. Is not change in warfare evolutionary rather than revolutionary?

An important reason why it can be difficult to recognize 
12

and understand revolutionary change in warfare is that it is 

a process that must mature over time. We cannot be certain 

that a revolution worthy of that description has been achieved 

until it has been demonstrated in battle, and possibly not 

even then. For example, the initial German gains in their great 

“Michael” Offensive in March 1918 were indeed secured by 

means of new—at least relatively so—infantry tactics, but 

those tactics were flattered by the incompetence of the British 

defense as well as by the literal fog that compounded the usual 

fog of war to confuse and panic the defenders.25 Similarly, 

the iconic RMA success of German arms in Flanders in May 

1940 may be the exemplar of the benefit to be reaped from 

revolutionary change. But, as in the previous example, the 

potency of the German offensive depended significantly on 

a quite extraordinary measure of operational incompetence, 

on the part of the French High Command, as well as on 

exemplary old fashioned performance by some infantry 

units.26 It would seem to be the case that the effectiveness of 

revolutionary change in warfare lies not, at least not only, in 

the new style of combat itself, as the RMA thesis claims (see 

the Krepinevich definition), but very much in the military 

and strategic contexts of its application. Changes in warfare 

cannot be effected overnight. They have to be the product 

of a process of evolution. There is an obvious circularity of 

argument threatening here. We can only be certain that an 

RMA has occurred when a revolutionary style of warfare is 

demonstrated successfully in battle. But, new styles of warfare 

do not always succeed. Once the enemy has assimilated the 

fact that he faces an unfamiliar style, he may be able to defeat 

it by a mixture of emulation and calculated evasion, always 

provided he has the space, which is to say the time, to do so. 

Recall that the standard RMA definition, see Krepinevich 

again, preemptively resolves the issue of desirability by 

specifying that military revolution produces a dramatic 

increase in combat potential and effectiveness. It follows from 

this discussion that two major difficulties impede recognition 

of the reality of revolutionary change. First, military capability 

of necessity evolves and the state of its evolution cannot 
13

be assessed with high confidence without the test of battle. 

Second, because war is a complex phenomenon, and warfare 

has many dimensions, it will not always be self-evident just 

why victory or defeat was the outcome. In the conventional 

Gulf Wars of 1991 and 2003, the U.S.-led coalition victories 

were hugely overdetermined.

5. Are not continuities at least as important as changes as contributors 

to military effectiveness? Naturally, a focus on revolutionary 

change must privilege discontinuity. Indeed, by definition, the 

revolutionary is expecting to secure “an order of magnitude or 

greater” improvement in military potential and effectiveness. 

Without quite challenging that view directly, it is necessary 

to point out that the conduct of war is a complex undertaking 

and even a revolutionary change in method will have only a 

limited domain of competence. To resort to a controversial 

phrase, history shows that even an apparently superior new 

method of war cannot compensate for errors in policy and 

strategy. Tactical and even operational excellence are quite 

meaningless save with respect to their political and strategic 

contextual significance. Moreover, the revolutionized 

military force needs to be available in decisive quantity, as 

well as quality, if it is to fulfil its tasks. In addition, history 

seems to suggest that even armies unable or unwilling to 

follow the RMA leader all the way to and through military 

revolution, sometimes are able to blunt the cutting edge of the 

revolutionary leader. Morale, discipline, leadership, attention 

to the much maligned “principles of war,” an imaginative 

search for the distinctive vulnerabilities in a new way of war. 

and an imaginative effort to find offsetting advantages, are all 

candidate contributors to counterrevolutionary effectiveness. 

The potency of a revolutionary change in warfare must 

depend critically upon the contexts within which it is applied. 

Because warfare has many variants, it is improbable that a 

single, albeit revolutionary, change in style will be effective in 

all cases of potential need. The generic continuities in military 

activities from period to period are many and strong. Indeed, 

it is probably sound to believe that often there is less to gain 
14

from some new way of fighting than there is from the reliable 

recovery of past skills. Counterinsurgency springs to mind as 

a skill set that has an uneven record as a much needed core 

competency of the Army.27

6. Is revolutionary change in warfare the high road to victory? The 

answer plainly is “no.” Superior conduct of what, viewed 

politically and strategically, is most sensibly judged to be the 

wrong war, will, indeed must, produce well-merited defeat. 

The two finest armies of the 20th century, those of Germany in 

the two world wars, both lost, and lost catastrophically in the 

second instance. It is easy to be misunderstood. This analysis 

is not skeptical about, let alone hostile to, revolutionary 

change in warfare. What is at issue is not revolution per 

se, but what is asked and expected of it. The target here is 

neither revolutionary change, nor transformation, but rather 

the assumption that investment in such a venture must all 

but guarantee future military and strategic success. Posed 

thus this may be an exaggeration, but as such it helps make a 

vital point. We have to beware of talismanic faith in a favored

vision of military revolution. Why? First, because war is 

multidimensional and the dimensions that we succeed in 

revolutionizing are likely to be outnumbered and substantially 

offset in their effects by behavior in the dimensions that we 

either have not, or cannot, change.28 Second, it is a persisting 

weakness of prophets for new ways in war not to pay the 

enemy due respect. Thus far in this analysis, little has been 

said on the all important subject that war is a duel. Enemies, 

current and potential, could not fail to notice the emergence of 

a revolutionary change in the U.S. way in warfare, especially 

since we have spent more than 10 years debating its character 

and promise, and have offered mini-demonstrations in war 

itself. The principal danger in the years immediately ahead 

is that U.S. Armed Forces will be so committed to their own 

network-centric transformation, that they fail to recognize the 

true character of potentially effective offsetting revolutionary 

change elsewhere. As a simple matter of historical record, 

RMA leadership has not always led to ultimate victory in war. 

Hundley tells us that “RMAs frequently bestow an enormous and 
15

immediate military advantage on the first nation to exploit them 

in combat.” That is true enough, but victory is secured by the 

nation that wins the final combat in a conflict, not the opening 

round.

The Contexts of Warfare.

Warfare is all about context. It is not self-referential, autonomous

behavior. Instead, it is about relative power, which is to say it is 

about politics. The political context is the source of, and provides 

the meaning for, war and its conduct in warfare. The analysis in this 

section does not discount the importance of military science, or of 

what Clausewitz called the “grammar” of war.29 The intention here 

rather is to help correct an imbalance in analysis. The mission of this 

monograph, to contribute to the recognition and understanding of 

revolutionary change in warfare, addresses a subject that typically 

is discussed quite literally and therefore narrowly. Of course, it is 

important to recognize and understand changing ways in warfare 

in their military dimension. But, it is scarcely less important to gain 

the insight into the prospect of occurrence of those changing ways, 

as well as into the likely character of the changes, that can come only 

from the study of warfare’s contexts.

 When defense professionals strive to recognize and understand 

revolutionary change they need to try to leap the ethnocentric barrier 

and consider the strategic context from an adversary’s point of view; 

pay full respect to the authority of the political context; recognize 

that revolutionary change does not necessarily deliver a step-level 

jump in effectiveness, just because it is new; and, finally, appreciate 

that warfare, as Clausewitz reminds us, can assume many forms.30

 Happy is the defense planner who must devise ways to contend 

with a single kind of foe, in combat of known and predictable 

character, conducted by familiar methods with a stable arsenal, 

over issues, and in geography, that are thoroughly familiar.31 Poor 

leadership, bad luck, normal friction, and so forth, may deny one 

victory, but at least there should be little danger of preparing for the 

wrong war. Alas, the U.S. situation today is maximally uncertain, in 

the sharpest of contrasts to the hypothetical condition just outlined. 
16

The American superpower is committed quite explicitly to global 

strategic preeminence.32 This is a logical, indeed a necessary, 

commitment, given the country’s role as the principal armed agent 

of world order, the global “sheriff,” as I have argued elsewhere.33

The trouble is that the role of global guardian of order attracts hostile 

attention from those who would deny the United States influence 

in their neighborhoods.

34 The role carries obligations to intervene 

selectively, at least to accept some responsibilities, for maintaining 

or restoring order in deadly quarrels among distinctly alien societies 

and polities. It follows that the U.S. defense community faces two 

tasks of extraordinary difficulty. First, because the United States may 

have to dissuade, deter, and, if need be, defeat a wide range of both 

regular and irregular enemies, the scope of needed effectiveness 

placed upon the country’s on-going RMA, or transformation, is 

exceptionally wide by any historical standard. Second, it will be 

challenging in the extreme for the Armed Forces to anticipate and 

recognize emergent alien ways in warfare that are, to a degree, 

purposefully asymmetrical to the new U.S. model of excellence.

 It is all very well to change defense planning so that the principal 

driver is capability rather than threat, but for several reasons such 

an address-free generic approach is apt to leave the planner shortchanged. Preeminently, capabilities are not always self-explanatory 

in an age of “unrestricted warfare.”35 Also, it is essential for defense 

planners to recognize that the effort to recognize and understand 

revolutionary change in warfare is best approached in its respective 

contexts. These explain why war occurs and how it is waged. It may 

be a revelation to many in the technology focussed U.S. defense 

community to realize that, historically as a general rule, military 

method and capability have by no means been revolutionized by 

technological innovations alone, or even at all in some cases.36

 The purpose of this section of the analysis is to explore the roles 

of the six principal contexts of warfare, the ones that drive and 

shape the activity. If we are to improve our ability to recognize and 

understand revolutionary change, there is an acute need to look 

beyond military science, beyond Clausewitz’s grammar of war, to 

the impact of change in and affecting these contexts. The contexts 

discussed are the political, the strategic, the social-cultural, the 

economic, the technological, and the geographical. Although these 
17

six are separately identifiable, naturally they influence each other. 

Exactly how the contexts of warfare function to trigger or enable 

revolutionary change will differ from episode to episode. What we 

discuss here is the source, or sources, of revolutionary change. In 

other words, if one is seeking to understand the provenance of such 

change, the answer lies within this framework.

 1. The political context. This is the breeding ground of war, and 

hence warfare; all war and warfare we can add. If there is no political 

context, there can be no war. Organized violence may be criminal, 

or recreational-sporting, but if it is not about the relative power of 

political entities, not only states, it is not warfare. RMA theory can 

seduce the unwary into finding favor in a grand historical master 

narrative that at least implies near autarky for military developments. 

One can compose a military history of the past 2 centuries that tells 

the military story almost wholly in military terms. In this monograph, 

we suggest that such a partial perspective, though in its limited way 

essential, is certain to promote misunderstanding. It neglects the most 

important engines of change. The state of the art in military prowess 

is not divorced from political and social influence. Revolutionary 

change in methods of war do not comprise a first-order problem. 

Wars do not occur because of military change, revolutionary or 

other. The German way of war in the victory years of 1939-41 was, 

of course, significant, but it was of secondary importance. In the 

1930s, it would have been useful for French, British, and American 

observers to have secured a better grasp than they did of the military 

meaning of Germany’s innovative Panzer divisions and obsession 

with dive bombing.37 But, even more profit would have flowed from 

an intelligent understanding of the changing political context. The 

problem was not the Panzer division, or even the so-called Blitzkrieg 

strategy, rather it was Adolf Hitler. The Third Reich was determined 

upon war, virtually regardless of the military method it would be 

obliged to pursue.38

 As the international political context alters, so do the incentives 

to pursue military innovation. The end of the Cold War is of far 

greater significance for national and international security than is 

the information-led RMA. The demise of the former Union of Soviet 

Socialist Republics (USSR) upset the global geopolitical game board. 

The United States debated and, at a modest pace, proceeded to exploit 
18

the information revolution, even though it was, and remains, more 

than a little uncertain just what tasks will dominate the future of 

the military establishment. However, to recognize and understand 

the revolutionary military change that should be of most concern to 

Americans, there is an acute need to comprehend movement in the 

threat environment. It is not sufficient, indeed it would be foolish, 

to seek to recognize and understand revolutionary military change 

if one did not first recognize and understand the character and 

location of those who one may have to deter or fight. That analysis, 

notwithstanding its unavoidable uncertainties, will provide vital 

indicators to the prudent answers to the “how,” “where,” and 

“when,” and “over what” questions. Achieving a good enough grasp 

of the dynamic political context and, one must admit, a certain luck 

in contingent prediction, has to be the first stage in approaching the 

challenge of recognizing and understanding revolutionary military 

change.

 2. The strategic context. As the ever-changing political context 

fuels demands for military preparation and occasional action, so the 

strategic expresses the relationship between political demand and 

military supply, keyed to the particular tasks specific to a conflict. 

Only infrequently is the concept of strategic context defined. It tends 

to be simply a familiar and rather grandiose term that is rhetorically 

useful mainly for its very vagueness. We shall try to do better here. 

Bearing in mind that strategy is the bridge between political purpose, 

or policy, and the military instrument, we define strategic context as 

the tasks or missions assigned to armed forces by policy, in the light 

of expected difficulties and opportunities, especially those created 

by enemies.

 Geopolitics has a lot to say about strategic context. For example, 

beneath, and derivative from, the political context of superpower 

antagonism in the Cold War was a strategic context dominated 

by a central geopolitical reality. Although the Soviet-American 

rivalry was in a sense global, ideological and ultimately territorially 

nonspecific, it so happened that the respective spheres of interest 

met around, and generally on-shore, the Rimlands of Eurasia.39 For 

40 years, the principal challenge for U.S. strategy was the need to 

extend a credible, or not-incredible, nuclear deterrence over allies 

and friends an ocean away from North America and more or less on 
19

the doorstep of the bloated Soviet imperium. This very distinctive 

strategic context literally drove the United States constantly to revise, 

at least to talk about revising, its nuclear strategy in the hope that its 

credibility of contingent employment might be enhanced.

 It may be most sensible to conflate the political and strategic 

contexts, in recognition of the merit in the great man’s judgment that 

“[t]he conduct of war, in its great outlines, is therefore policy itself.”40

Nonetheless, in this analysis, we prefer to keep strategy in clear focus, 

while appreciating its vital bridging function.41 It is not too much 

of a challenge to explain the significance of strategic context for the 

mission of this monograph. If we ask the direct questions, “Where 

might revolutionary change in warfare come from? Where should 

we look?”—the leading answers must lie, first, in the political context 

as the sine qua non, and, second, in the strategic context that derives 

from the political. What are the strategic relations, the problems and 

opportunities, implicit in a particular political context?

 3. The social-cultural context. Warfare has many dimensions, and 

the most potent are included in this admittedly somewhat brutally 

conflated super category. We must emphasize the fact of complex 

interpretation. Although we isolate six contexts here for convenience, 

history does not work along neatly separate grooves. They are all 

variably significant, and influencing each other, simultaneously. 

As this author has argued for many years, strategic study has to be 

conducted holistically. On a cognate matter, “[t]he strategic elements 

that affect the use of engagements,” Clausewitz identified just five 

types: “the moral, the physical, the mathematical, the geographical, 

and the statistical.”42 But, he issued a stern and grim warning.

It would however be disastrous to try to develop an understanding of 

strategy by analyzing these factors in isolation, since they are usually 

interconnected in each military action in manifold and intricate ways. A 

dreary analytical labyrinth would result . . .43

 Social-cultural trends are likely to prove more revealing at an 

early stage of the prospects for revolutionary change in warfare than 

will missile tests, defense contracts, military maneuvers, or even, 

possibly, some limited demonstration of a novel prowess in combat. 

Consider the information-led RMA that is the heart and soul at least 
20

of some people’s vision of transformation. It is true that the U.S. 

Army understands that transformation is about soldiers, people, 

as armies always have been.44 But that ancient truth is not accepted 

universally, except nominally.

 The current policy on transformation, which, at DOD level at 

least, is very much a high technology story, is a direct reflection of 

the trends in American society.45 There is some obvious merit in 

the Tofflers’ rather basic claim that societies fight in approximately 

the same manner that they produce wealth.46 When America was 

preponderantly an industrial society, it waged industrial-age war on 

a scale in World War II that confounded foes and astonished allies. 

Now that America is evolving into a post-industrial society, wherein 

the manipulation of information is the key to prosperity, so, naturally 

enough, the Armed Forces must reflect that emerging reality.

 Consider another example of the social-cultural roots of 

revolutionary change in warfare. The comparatively recent 

contemporary phenomenon of religiously motivated irregular 

warfare, including terrorism, was plainly detectable in the course 

and outcome of the war waged in Afghanistan against the foreign 

Soviet atheists in the 1980s. With the uplifting example of the Iranian 

Revolution of 1979, followed by the demonstrated potency of holy 

warriors in defeating a superpower, albeit with some vital arms 

provided by other unbelievers, it should not have come as a great 

surprise to find that military revolution might follow.47 In the 1990s, 

most American defense professionals were debating eagerly what 

is, and what is not, an RMA. But in the Middle East, a revolutionary 

change in warfare was brewing as an Islamic revival of an extreme 

fundamentalist kind met up with, and exploited, the tools of the 

information age.

 It is important to recognize that the social-cultural engine for 

revolutionary change in warfare works in two ways. On the one 

hand, it can, and typically will, shape the character of the revolution 

attainable. On the other, society and its dominant beliefs will provide 

the fuel for the political decisions, the policy, that actually produce 

the military revolution as well as the exercise of that revolution in 

war. It may be worth considering the possible implications of the 

point that revolutionary change in methods of war are, by definition, 

extraordinary events. They are undertaken only for the most serious 
21

of reasons. RMAs are certain to be hugely disruptive, they are 

probably very expensive, and, being revolutionary, they are bound 

to be fraught with uncertainty over effectiveness. This discussion 

leads inexorably to the argument that, as with arms race analysis, 

the political and the social-cultural always have pride of place in 

causation over the grammar of war. In the 1930s, the democracies 

would have been well-advised to study the bizarre ideology of the 

curious new German fűhrer and the steps by which he and his gang 

of opportunists eventually secured a total grip upon society and its 

common assumptions.48 Of course, the evolution of German military 

method mattered, but that was only because of a public culture, as 

made manifest in what passed for policy, that would send it into 

open-ended battle.

 Many people have noticed that, in its understandable fascination 

with the potential for revolutionary change in warfare and now its 

commitment to the long-term execution of such change in a process 

of military transformation, the defense community has paid too little 

attention to what amounts to a social and cultural transformation 

in Western public attitudes towards war and warfare. Edward 

Luttwak rang this bell loudly with his articles in the mid-1990s on 

the dawning of an age of what he descriptively called “post-heroic 

warfare.”49 Cultural assumptions about war, its legitimacy, its proper 

conduct, and its utility can play a crucial role in strategic history. 

We must repeat the points that societies, not only states and other 

polities, wage war, and that there is much more to war than warfare 

itself, which is to say war’s grammar. When we scan the strategic 

landscape for evidence of revolutionary change, it is essential not to 

neglect the social context, domestic and foreign.50 The attitude of our 

society to war and warfare, and especially to casualties, could have 

radical implications for the range of acceptable military methods 

available to our generals. It is a matter of notable significance that 

other societies, with different cultures, will not share all, or in some 

cases even many, of the cultural assumptions of America.

 4. The economic context. Wars are rarely waged for economic 

reasons, popular beliefs to the contrary notwithstanding, and granting 

some colonial exceptions. But, warfare is economic behavior, inter 

alia, just as it is, and has to be, logistical behavior also. Revolutionary 

change in warfare does not require an enabling economic revolution 
22

because the change in question may not depend critically upon a 

radical alteration in the use of material resources. However, societies 

that “take off” industrially and then are locked into a temporally 

indefinite process of scientific, industrial and agricultural progress, 

typically will develop foreign interests, responsibilities, and a sense 

of relative self-importance that is near certain to require military 

expression. There are no laws of political and strategic behavior

at all comparable to the laws of the natural sciences. But we can 

hazard as a quasi-law, a solid item of lore perhaps, the axiom that 

new-found economic strength breeds political ambition, which must 

have a strategic context, which will have implications for military 

posture. This is not to deny that revolutionary change in warfare 

can be attempted, even effected, by the economically challenged. 

Such revolutionaries must seek in desperation to find ways to fight 

smarter, certainly more cheaply than their richer enemies. All that 

we claim here is that ways in warfare, revolutionary and other, have 

an economic context. Although not as significant as the political, 

strategic, or social-cultural, still the economic context can provide 

a valuable source of warning of possible, or even probable, future 

strategic problems. For the most obvious of contemporary examples, 

the Chinese rate of economic growth has it well on the road to true 

super-statehood. There are a number of reasons, some excellent, 

some less so, why the fragility of China’s export-led prosperity 

should discourage it powerfully from staging a serious challenge 

to American military hegemony. However, the strategic history of 

the past 2 centuries attests conclusively to the total unreliability of 

economic rationality as a predictor of state behavior. All that we claim 

here is that political and military greatness requires the underpinning 

of economic greatness. A polity rising economically very rapidly 

cannot help but acquire the means to afford a significant jump in 

its military capabilities. Since it will be coming up from behind in 

the competitive stakes, it is certain to be motivated to try to identify 

ways to achieve short cuts to shared military effectiveness. In other 

words, China, for example, is an ideal customer for new ways in 

warfare. Despite its inevitable flaws in prediction, Paul Kennedy’s 

1987 historical blockbuster, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, tells 

an essentially economic story that warrants respect.51 Political and 

strategic history is economic history also.
23

 5. The technological context. Warfare always has a technological 

context, but that context is not always the principal fuel for 

revolutionary change. Scholars have highlighted this lesson 

of experience by distinguishing between a Military Technical 

Revolution (MTR) and an RMA.52 The MTR is simply a technologyled RMA. This was the idea that so exercised Soviet analysts in 

the 1970s and early 1980s, especially in the truly prescient form of 

the “reconnaissance-strike complex.” That particular Soviet hightechnology vision of future warfare is all but indistinguishable from 

the cutting edge of the technological dimensions to the American 

military transformation of the 2000s. What did the regular warfare in 

Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003 showcase, if not an excellence 

in Command, Control, Communications, Computing, Intelligence, 

Targeting and Reconnaissance (C4

ISTAR)? To which, in recognition 

of Stephen Biddle’s careful review of military events, one must add 

the perennial favorite, combined arms.53 Although Andrew Marshall 

and his Office broadened the Soviet-sourced concept of MTR to RMA, 

recognizing the importance of organization, operational concepts, 

and numbers, contemporary American awareness of, and interest 

in, the possibility of revolutionary military change has always had 

a powerful technological motor. This has been inevitable and, up to 

a point, desirable. After all, the spark which has lit the current rash 

of technological fires has been the exponential growth in computing 

capacity. Moreover, technological seers advise that there is no 

plausible scientific or engineering reason why Moore’s Law should 

be falsified in this century.54

 Obviously there are profound differences among the Services 

in their relative dependence upon, and hence attitude towards, 

technology. Whereas sailors man ships and airmen fly aircraft, 

soldiers use equipment. The quality of technology literally can be a 

matter of life and death to sailors and airmen. Soldiers, operating in 

a more complex geography, often have more choices to help them 

compensate for some, though only some, technological shortfalls.

 Appreciation of war’s changing technological context is an 

essential intelligence function, as well as a vital source of inspiration 

for domestic change. But a common material context across societies 

does not equate necessarily to a common understanding of the scale, 

or character, of the change that may be on offer. Recent studies 
24

have supported strongly what some of us have long believed or 

suspected. Different public, strategic, and military cultures, given 

their unique strategic contexts, exploit, and pick and choose among 

new technologies according to their own criteria of utility, not in 

obedience to some presumed universal military logic. If we consider 

the mechanization RMA(s) of the period 1930-45, for example, it is 

clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that notwithstanding a tolerably 

common technological base, each of the principal combatants in 

World War II developed air and mechanized ground forces along 

nationally distinctive lines, for reasons that appeared to make sense 

for each polity’s strategic and military situation.55 There should 

be little need to highlight the significance of this argument for the 

mission of our monograph. Many, and probably most, military 

technologies lend themselves to varied employment, depending on 

the local military tasks and strategic context and the preferences in 

operational concepts and organization. Identifying technological 

trends, no matter how accurately, is no guarantee of a grasp of their 

meaning. One could make much the same point by observing that 

superb overhead reconnaissance will provide formidable detail on 

people and their movement. Unfortunately, that intelligence can tell 

one nothing at all about what is in their hearts and minds.

 Paradoxically, the more firmly an RMA leader, such as the United 

States with information technology, becomes wedded to a distinctive 

and arguably revolutionary paradigm of future warfare, the more 

likely is it to misread the character of military change abroad. It is 

difficult for a proud and self-confidently dominant military power 

to accept the notion that there can be more than one contemporary 

military enlightenment.56 The strategic sin of ethnocentricity is 

readily revealed. First, other military cultures may not agree with 

the dominant power’s military logic. Second, those other cultures, 

even if they appreciate the sense in the RMA leader’s choices, will 

be bound to make their own decisions on investment in innovation, 

based upon such local circumstances as distinctive military tasking, 

affordability, and the need to offset the RMA leader’s putative 

advantages.57

 As the Parthian shot in this discussion, it is worth noting that, 

despite the contrary claims and implications of dozens of television 

series, the technological dimension to warfare is very rarely 
25

decisive. War is complex and so is its conduct in warfare. Just as 

its outbreak typically is the product of redundant causation, so its 

course and outcome, no less typically, is hardly ever plausibly, let 

alone unarguably, attributable to a technological advantage. It is 

easy to see why this should be so. Given war’s complexity and the 

large number of dimensions that are always in play, of which the 

technological is only one, there are simply too many factors other 

than the technological which must influence events. This is a long 

familiar truth. For example, a recent study of Alexander the Great 

and his way of war concludes that although his army was “a wellarmed force . . . not too much should be made of the technological 

edge it enjoyed over most of its enemies.”58 The author explains as 

follows:

In the close-order combat of this period [4th century BC], the tactical 

prowess and morale of the forces was more important to the outcome 

of battles. Technology does not win wars. Even on those occasions when 

technology was clearly very significant, for example in the use of siege 

engines, breaches in the enemy’s defences still had to be exploited by 

Alexander’s men in face-to-face combat with the enemy. However good 

Alexander’s instrument was, this outstanding army still had to be led 

and handled effectively.59

The subject of David Lonsdale’s book may be Alexander, but his 

analysis has more than minor contemporary relevance.

 6. The geographical context. No study of warfare can afford to neglect 

the geographical context. Time after time over the past century, 

military revolution keyed to the emerging exploitation of a new 

geographical environment has beckoned both the visionary theorist 

and the bold military professional. Since 1900, RMA anticipators and 

spotters, had there been such in those times, would have been obliged 

to recognize and try to understand the meaning of submarines, for a 

potential revolution in sea warfare; aircraft, for a potential revolution 

(a) in warfare as a whole, (b) in warfare on land, and (c) in warfare 

to, at, and from the sea; spacecraft, for a potential revolution, with 

aircraft, in warfare as a whole as well as in each of the terrestrial 

geographies; and, finally, the computer as cyberpower. History lends 

itself to inconveniently alternative explanations. But there can be no 

argument that there has been no historical precedent for the scale 
26

and diversity of the challenges posed by the geographical expansion 

of warfare since 1900. Over the past 100 years, defense analysts, 

strategic theorists, and the soldiers and sailors who would be at most 

immediate risk at the sharp end of it all, have had to contend with the 

promise and peril of no fewer than four new environments (including 

the undersea). So familiar are we with the concept of airpower, even 

spacepower, and now—just about—cyberpower, that we are apt 

to forget how novel are, and have been, the modern geographical 

challenges to the comprehension of military and strategic affairs. 

From a time before recorded history, humans had waged war in only 

two dimensions, on land and on the surface of the sea. For us to 

have added no fewer than four geographical environments to those 

traditional two in less than a century, one may register as progress, 

or, less optimistically, at least as monumental cumulative change. 

But how revolutionary would the submarine, the aircraft, the earth 

satellite, and the computer prove to be? It is sobering to realize that 

even today, 102 years from the first flight of a heavier-than-air vehicle, 

and 94 years since Italian Lieutenant Gavotti engaged in the first act 

of aerial bombing in war on November 1, 1911, against the Turks in 

Libya, the quality of the airpower RMA remains controversial.

 Thus far, this discussion has stressed the challenge in the novelty 

of the expansion of warfare’s geography. It is necessary, however, to 

balance that analysis with recognition of some of the more permanent 

features of the geographical context. Such recognition is vital for 

our mission because the subject of this enquiry privileges radical 

change and always threatens to drive into the shadows the more 

significant contextual elements that change either not at all or only 

slowly. While certainly it is necessary to attempt to recognize and 

try to understand revolutionary change in warfare, it is scarcely less 

important to recognize and understand the constants, or very-slowto-change variables. The latter concern can be controversial. There is 

a history of the advocates of military revolution claiming that their

favored new method of war, exploiting a new geography, would 

certainly render obsolescent, then obsolete, older concerns tied to 

the other geographies. This has been the pattern of claims from the 

submarine, to the aircraft, to the satellite, and now to the computer. 

Cyberspace, we have been told, not only shrinks space and therefore 

time, it is effectively beyond geography, it exists everywhere and in 
27

a sense, therefore, nowhere.60 If strategic information warfare is the 

revolution that is coming, who cares about terrestrial geographies! 

If “command of the nets” is the decisive enabler of victory in future 

warfare, as Bruce Berkowitz maintains, physical geography cannot 

fail to suffer a marked demotion in strategic significance.61

 Through the several RMAs of the past century, up to and including 

the current exploitation of the computer, the geographical context 

has retained features whose importance has scarcely been scratched 

by revolution. Notwithstanding the marvels of submarines, aircraft, 

spacecraft, and computers, humans are land animals and, functionally 

viewed, war is about the control of their will. In the timeless and 

priceless words of Rear Admiral J. C. Wylie, USN: “The ultimate 

determinant in war is the man on the scene with the gun.62 This man is the 

final power in war. He is control.” Military revolutionaries, whether 

they dream of decisive mechanized maneuver, bombardment from 

altitude, or electronically triggered mass disruption, should never 

be permitted to forget Wylie’s maxim. It is perhaps strange to record 

that in our enthusiasm for novelty, especially for that of a technical 

kind, we can forget both what war is about as well as who wages it. 

War is about politics and warfare always is about people, and people 

inhabit and relate to a geographical context.

 Another more controversial aspect to the salience of physical 

geography is what we call the geopolitical. It so happens that the 

arrangements of continents, oceans, and islands is what it is. It is 

undeniable that changes in warfare, and especially in the technologies 

of communication, have altered the meaning of geographical 

distance, and hence time. But there is much, indeed there is very 

much, of a geopolitical character in warfare’s geographical context 

that alters hardly at all.63 National geographical location continues to 

matter greatly. That location literally dictates the necessary balance 

among a polity’s military instruments, it determines the identity of

neighbors, it translates into a distinctive history and culture, and it 

provides strategic opportunity and carries implicit strategic perils. 

Despite the wonders of network-centric warfare (NCW) and effects 

based operations (EBO), there are, and will long remain, significant 

differences between combat in the jungle, the desert, the mountains, 

and the city. This is not to suggest that an information-leveraging 
28

military transformation will not be able to improve performance in 

all environments. It is to suggest, though, that a prudent process of 

transformation must be flexible, adaptable, and ever mindful of the 

eternal fact that war is not about the enemy’s military defeat, necessary 

though that usually will be. Instead, war is about persuading the 

enemy that he is defeated; to repeat, it is about influencing his will. 

Warfare is all about human behavior, ours and theirs. Every RMA, 

actual or mooted, is no more than a means to affect the minds of the 

people in our gunsights. Those people live in physical geography, 

and whether we traverse that geography hypersonically or at 

marching pace is really only a detail. As I have argued elsewhere, 

all politics is geopolitics and all strategy has to be geostrategy.64 Not 

everyone is convinced, but I am hopeful that a better appreciation of 

the enduring significance of geography is achievable.

Revolutionary Change in Warfare: Findings and Implications.

As promised at the outset, this monograph concludes with 

what amounts to an audit, a critical review, of our understanding 

of the RMA concept and phenomenon. This should have important 

implications for national security policy in general, as well as for the 

U.S. Army in particular. The information-led revolution in question 

here has been advancing, initially slowly, for more than 30 years. 

We can argue over whether the Gulf War of 1991 was the last war 

of the industrial age or the first one of the information era. But it is 

a matter of public record that that conflict alerted the world to the 

fact that regular conventional warfare was changing in potentially 

radical ways.65 The RMA concept emerged from the brew consisting 

of monitored Soviet analyses, mentioned already; a decade-plus 

of research and development effort to find technological offsets 

to Soviet mechanized strength, tactics, and inferred operational 

designs in Europe, hence the quest for long-range precision strike 

and stealthy delivery; the dramatic evidence of a new way in war 

that was much advertised in briefings on the victory in 1991; and the 

historians’ debate, with their somewhat arcane, not to say parochial, 

controversies over what were, and what were not, historical RMAs. 

Today, both policy towards, and intellectual understanding of, 
29

revolutionary change in warfare are sufficiently mature for it to 

be feasible to attempt a critical summary of the “findings” of the 

years of controversy. More to the point, it is possible to suggest the 

implications of those findings for U.S. policy, strategy, and, generally, 

for the American “way of war” in the future.

 It is my strong belief that each of the seven findings of this enquiry 

is plausible historically. By and large, this analysis has avoided 

argument about the use of history. However, some recent statements 

of a skeptical kind require an answer, primarily because I wish to 

insist that this monograph rests upon empirical research by some 

excellent historians. It is not simply an exercise in deductive strategic 

theory, let alone in commonsense reasoning untroubled by issues of 

evidence. Historian John Vincent, with typical directness, claims that 

“History is about evidence. It is also about other things: hunches, 

imagination, interpretation, guesswork. First and foremost, though, 

comes evidence: no evidence, no history.”66

 Vincent proceeds to explain just how partial is the evidence 

available. In particular, he draws attention to the facts that the 

winners tend to write the histories and that the “facts” are, of course, 

selected to tell the stories that the historians intend. And then there is 

the problem that most of the potential documentary evidence has not 

survived the rigors of deliberate omission, purposeful destruction, 

war, fire, flood, age, and other maladies. This author is distressed to 

notice that a judicious skepticism about the use of history is slipping 

into outright disdain. No less authoritative a publication than the 

Strategic Survey 2004/05 of the International Institute for Strategic 

Studies (IISS) offered some thoughts frankly dismissive of historical 

study and history-based theory.

The foundation of sound defence planning is identifying the operational 

problems of greatest potential consequence. As the preceding discussion 

suggests, this cannot be done by studying past RMAs or ruminating on 

the nature of transformation. It can be done by assessing the international 

environment and how trends therein might impinge on national 

objectives.67

 That critic is right to excoriate scholastic theorizing, but the 

suggestion that our past experience with revolutionary change in 

warfare is irrelevant to the challenges of today could not be more 
30

wrong.68 The major difficulty with the history constructed by 

historians as they seek to explain the past, has been well-expressed 

by Antulio J. Echevarria.

The fundamental problem for historians is that, aside from being able 

to refer to such demonstrable facts as do exist, they have no objective

references for determining (beyond a reasonable doubt) to what extent 

the histories they write either capture or deviate from the past. Put 

differently, they have nothing resembling the scientific method to aid 

them in determining whether what they have written is somewhat right, 

mostly right, or altogether wrong about the past.69

 Which is true enough. It is also just the way that history has to 

be. Unfortunately, what the IISS’s author would dismiss and Dr. 

Echevarria identifies as inescapably subjective, happens to be the 

whole, the sum, of human experience. Echevarria’s point is not really 

an argument, it is simply a description of reality. Historical debate 

cannot be settled by reproducible experiments, period! His caveat is 

especially relevant to the subject of this monograph because our topic 

is not only change in warfare, but the challenge in recognizing and 

understanding such change. And how do we test for a revolution? By 

the degree of its change from past practice?—what degree is that?—

or by its outcome? But, there is no necessary connection between 

RMA and victory.

Undaunted by the admitted problems with historical evidence, 

this monograph urges readers to accept the world of learning as it 

is, deficiencies and all. There is no good alternative to our seeking 

education from the past. Of course, we cannot find detailed guidance 

from past practice, but the structural continuities in human strategic 

experience are massive and pervasive. There have been a succession 

of revolutionary, indeed transformative, changes in warfare since 

the early 19th century. Is it plausible to argue that we have nothing 

to learn from that experience? The question all but answers itself. In 

short, although fully aware of the inherent subjectivity of historians’

endeavors, this author makes no apology for offering “findings” 

which, if not quite demonstrably true, certainly are both well enough 

attested and highly plausible.

 As the Army moves forward with its Transformation Roadmap

and its subsequent editions and variants, it should derive advantage 
31

from taking heed of the seven “findings” presented below.70 These 

have been chosen for their high plausibility, for their significance, 

and because they each have practical implications for desirable 

American attitudes and behavior.

 1. Contexts rule! The central message of this monograph is that 

war’s contexts tell most of the story. The political context is what war, 

warfare, and revolutionary change in either or both is all about. The 

strategic context derives strictly from the political, while the socialcultural, economic, technological and geographical all have more or 

less to say about the bounds of feasibility. After all, strategy for the 

conduct of war is “the art of the possible,” inter alia.

71 The discussion 

of just six contexts of war and warfare is a deliberately drastic exercise 

in parsimony. I have accorded context the prominence it enjoys in 

this enquiry for two principal reasons. First, simply for its dominant 

role: its overriding significance mandates a position on the right of 

the line that it is granted here. Second, it is necessary to highlight 

the authority of the contexts of war, especially the political, to the 

American defense community, because typically the U.S. Armed 

Forces are much stronger in advancing warfare’s “grammar” than 

they are in appreciating war in the round. The relevant motto quoted 

already is that there is more to war than warfare. As the Army moves 

down the path of revolutionary change for transformative effect, 

hopefully adaptively, the nonmilitary contexts that give meaning 

to and indeed, enable, the whole endeavor, assume ever greater 

significance. The full complexity of the contexts and dimensions of 

warfare are felt by armies to a far greater extent than by navies or 

air forces, which must operate in uninhabited, indeed uninhabitable, 

geographies.

 The future of the U.S. Army will be driven not so much by the 

transformative drive, but rather by the political and strategic contexts 

that will shape its missions and tasks. That future is not in the hands 

of some reified Science of War, no matter how expertly determined 

by our more scientifically inclined theorists and analysts. Rather is 

the Army’s future at the mercy of the answers to such questions as 

“will China assemble an anti-American coalition to contest global 

leadership?”—and “will America’s enemies principally be irregular 

in character for decades to come, with the implication that the 
32

Army should transform itself in such a way as to privilege COIN 

[counterinsurgency] as the most core of its competencies?”

 The implication of this first and admittedly less than startling 

finding is that the Army needs to improve its understanding of war 

and its contexts, at the same time that it pursues its military-technical 

modernization.

 2. Revolutionary change in warfare may be less important than is 

revolutionary change in attitudes to war and the military. While the U.S. 

military establishment has been planning and beginning to implement 

a revolutionary change in its capabilities for warfare, it probably has 

been behind the curve in understanding revolutionary change in 

the social-cultural context of the institution of war. Too much can 

be made of this argument, as some theorists have demonstrated. 

However, it is plausible to argue that two revolutions are underway; 

one in warfare, the subject of the protracted debate over RMA and 

then transformation; and one in the social-cultural context of war.72

Although war has a constant nature through all periods, attitudes 

to its legitimacy and to its right conduct have been highly variable. 

U.S. fighter-bombers happily massacred the German forces who 

were striving desperately to escape from Normandy through the 

“Falaise Gap” in August 1944. By contrast, the United States wielded 

an air arm in 1991 that it felt obliged to rein-in, not that the airmen 

themselves were enthusiastic, from the historical replay of “Falaise” 

that was unfolding on the so-called “highway of death” leading 

north from Kuwait City. Standards of acceptable military behavior

vary over time, from conflict to conflict, and sometimes within the 

same war against different enemies. The reasons are in part politicalpragmatic, as the conduct of war is scrutinized by the media with 

an immediacy and in a detail that is historically unprecedented.73

This process began as long ago as the 1850s in the Crimea. It was 

the result of greater public literacy, and hence the demand for more 

news, the creation of the new profession of war correspondent, the 

invention of the electric telegraph, and, of course, the slow growth of 

democratic politics which engendered a sense of public involvement 

in the country’s strategic ventures and adventures.74

 Some theorists today believe that the RMA which is the 

responsibility of the U.S. defense establishment to effect is really 
33

of less significance than is a Revolution in Attitudes towards the 

Military, or RAM. The future American way(s) of war, singular 

or plural, will be shaped by the social and cultural context which 

defines the bounds of acceptable military behavior, as well as by the 

military-technical opportunities that beckon as a consequence of the 

exploitation of information technology.

 By way of an extreme, but telling example of the potency of this 

second finding, consider the character of the Soviet-German War 

(within a war) of 1941-45. While one must explain the scale of the 

struggle in terms of the extraordinary strength of the combatants, 

the breathtaking brutality of what was, truly, a total war, owed 

much less to the military methods of the belligerents than it did 

to the rival ideologies and the finality of the stakes: it was literally 

victory or death. It is plausible to argue that Germany might well 

have won its war in the East had the social and cultural context of 

that conflict not been defined by the Nazi leadership as a struggle for 

racial survival.

 The plain implication of this finding is that revolutionary change 

in warfare is always much more than a narrowly military matter. 

What is more, social and cultural contexts differ among societies. 

It is not safe to assume that strategic behavior deemed morally 

unacceptable by our society would meet with identical prohibition 

abroad.

 Although this analysis registers strong approval of the newfound official significance attached to war’s social and cultural 

dimension, two caveats need to be noted. It is all too easy to seize 

on a fashionable, and basically prudent, idea and respond with a 

“me, too,” without really considering the implications. First, it is 

noticeable that in the current discourse on defense policy, recognition 

of the relevance of “culture” has become a part of the necessary 

canon of right beliefs. As such, it is in danger of evolving rapidly, 

if it has not already done so, from an excellent idea into little more 

than a panacea.75 In the latter case, it is being touted as the answer

to America’s military and strategic difficulties when intervening in 

alien societies. But, it is not the answer, it is only a part of the answer. 

The second caveat is to remind the Army that it commands warriors, 

not cultural anthropologists. Of course, it is important to understand 

the enemy, and one’s friends as well, but armies are, at root, about 
34

fighting. Given the global domain of America’s ordering interests, 

it is thoroughly impractical to expect more than a small number of 

military specialists to acquire a deep knowledge of the relevant local 

societies with their values, beliefs, languages, and histories. Since tens 

of thousands of distinctly nonacademic young American warriors 

may be transported on short notice to surprising foreign locations, 

the idea that “culture-centric warfare” is the, or even a, way to go, 

does not appear to this theorist to be a very practical suggestion. It is 

not so much a question of inherent desirability, simply of feasibility. 

Our soldiers have to be expert at fighting; cultural skills, though 

important, are secondary.

 3. Historical research shows that there are vital conditions for success 

in carrying through revolutionary changes in warfare. At some risk of 

placing an undue burden of explanation on a single body of research, 

this analysis is impressed by a particular set of case studies of RMA 

and by its editors’ conclusions—The Dynamics of Military Revolution, 

1300-2050, edited by MacGregor Knox and Williamson Murray. 

These editors suggest that “[p]ast revolutions in military affairs 

have given evidence of at least four distinguishing characteristics.”76

It need hardly be said that since the mission of this monograph is 

to help the Army recognize and understand revolutionary change 

in warfare, it is deeply interested in what historians can teach. It is 

interesting to note that the distinguished subject experts assembled 

by the editors did come up with a set of explanations that made for 

a coherent story, overall, notwithstanding the on-going, quite bitter 

“historians” debate” about RMA cited earlier.77

 On the authority of eight case studies ranging from the 14th century 

to 1940 (the “2050” in the book’s title is seriously inappropriate), one 

should add as well other studies they have conducted;78 Knox and 

Murray make four historically founded claims about RMAs. They 

argue, first, that “technology alone has rarely driven them; it has 

functioned above all as a catalyst.” Second, they argue that,

revolutions in military affairs have emerged from evolutionary problemsolving directed at specific operational and tactical issues in a specific 

theatre of war against a specific enemy. Successful innovators have always 

thought in terms of fighting wars against actual rather than hypothetical

opponents, with actual capabilities, in pursuit of actual strategic and 

political objectives.
35

 Third, the editors claim that “such revolutions require coherent 

frameworks of doctrine and concepts built on service cultures that 

are deeply realistic. Innovation, to be successful, must rest upon 

thorough understanding of the fundamentally chaotic nature of war.” 

Fourth and finally, they assert that “revolutions in military affairs 

remain rooted in and limited by strategic givens and by the nature 

of war. They are not a substitute for strategy—as so often assumed by 

utopians—but merely an operational or tactical means.”79

 I have quoted Knox and Murray so extensively because theirs is 

by far the most mature, authoritatively researched, and persuasive 

collective statement from the historians’ realm to have appeared thus 

far. Also, need I confess, this author agrees with their conclusions. 

Their edited book is especially impressive because it is authored by 

scholars who are, at the least, not unfriendly to the RMA thesis, while 

being prudently skeptical of extravagant claims for the revolutionary 

impact of innovative technologies. In addition, the book appeared 

10 years into the long-running debate. By that time, the authors, 

the editors in particular, had had ample time to outgrow any early 

opinions that may have leaned unduly in praise or criticism of the 

RMA postulate when it was still relatively fresh and untried.

 At this juncture, it is necessary to refer to a conceptual and 

contextual point that was first registered much earlier. Specifically, 

the conclusions to Knox and Murray just quoted need to be seen in 

the context of the key distinction that they themselves highlighted 

between RMAs and the much rarer, but vastly more traumatic, indeed 

unavoidable, MRs. The course and dynamic objectives of the current 

process of transformation are arguable. But to the extent to which 

this process is a broad response to the global information revolution 

effected by the leading information-using society, the American, it is 

inevitable, unstoppable, and, in a sense, beyond criticism. It simply 

reflects the way of the world in the 2000s.

 The meaning of the Knox and Murray volume for the U.S. Armed 

Forces could not be clearer, at least to this convinced theorist. Despite 

Antulio Echevarria’s potent caveat concerning the lack of objectivity 

in history, a judgment possibly supported by no less an authority 

than Sir Michael Howard, with his dismissive, and in my view 

misleading, truism that “history is what historians write,”80 Knox 
36

and Murray have shown us that history can be accessible to, and 

useful for, policymakers and soldiers today. This is an important 

claim, if true. If untrue, it is still important, though in that case it is 

a danger. There is no law which requires one only to learn correct 

and appropriate things from historical experience. However, it is the 

view of this analysis that historical study, notwithstanding the biases 

and other fallibilities of historians, can make an essential, valuable 

contribution to the recognition and understanding of revolutionary 

change in warfare.

 4. Recognition of change in warfare is one thing, but understanding the 

character, relevance, and implications of change is something else entirely, 

given the sovereignty of the political and strategic contexts. Historically, 

recognizing and understanding revolutionary change in warfare has 

been far more a matter of grasping consequences, than of existential 

recognition. As a general rule and for obvious reasons, would-be 

belligerents tend to be tolerably well-informed about the capabilities 

of their intended foes, though there have been many notable, and 

notably catastrophic, exceptions.81

 It is unusual, to say the least, for a belligerent to be as ignorant 

of the enemy’s military strengths as was Germany in 1941, when 

it invaded the USSR. German Military Intelligence, Foreign Armies 

East of the Army General Staff, confidently undercounted Soviet 

divisions initially by a wide margin and, for the future by a margin 

so great as almost to beggar the imagination. Naturally, there is some 

difficulty in comparing divisions, let alone division-equivalents. It 

is true that German divisions typically were more substantial than 

Soviet, but wartime attrition, Germany’s disastrous and progressively 

more desperate combat manpower shortage after the 1941 Moscow 

campaign, as well as the lower fighting quality of Axis allied 

divisions, much increased the German numerical shortfalls. When 

Barbarossa was unleashed on June 22, 1941, Foreign Armies East 

estimated a total Red Army strength, in all theaters (i.e., including 

Asia) of approximately 240 divisions and their equivalents. They 

made no allowance for the quasi-army of the People’s Commissariat 

of Internal Affairs (NKVD), which was relatively small, lightly 

armed, and rapidly overrun in June and July. However, the NKVD, 

the regime’s private army, actually fielded no fewer than 53 

divisions, 20 brigades, several hundred regiments of various types, 
37

as well as hundreds of smaller units with special assignments. The 

main fact on which Foreign Armies East was in error was that the 

Red Army on July 1, 1941, nominally had 281 division equivalents, 

not 240 or so, a figure which grew to the incredible figure of 581 

by February 1, 1943, when Stalingrad fell, and which expanded to 

603 by December 1 of that year. And those figures do not include 

NKVD forces. As to the fact cited in the text, not only was Foreign 

Armies East highly unreliable on the strength of the Red Army, also 

it had no notion of the scale of the Soviet Union’s relocation of most 

of its armaments factories to the Urals and beyond, while it knew 

nothing at all about the production capacities of those factories. That 

is what happens when there is no aerial reconnaissance deep over 

the intended victim’s territory (it was forbidden by high policy, and 

the Luffwaffe lacked planes with the necessary range), and when 

the Abwehr literally had no agents on the ground in that country 

(again, this was forbidden by policy when Hitler was wooing Stalin 

and, later, was not wishing to fuel his suspicions).82 It is far more 

common for belligerents to be as well-informed on most of the salient 

facts as they are apt to be ignorant of the meaning of those facts in 

their particular local political and social-cultural contexts. Whether 

the current process of transformation is best regarded as an MR or 

an RMA is quite beside the vital point that no measure of military 

revolutionary change can alter the sovereignty of warfare’s political 

and strategic context. Of course, military effectiveness matters. But 

that effectiveness has no value in and of itself. It can only be a means 

to political ends, via the transmission belt, the bridge, of strategy.

 Logically, perhaps, it should be the case that revolutionary 

change in warfare can turn the political context into a dependent 

variable. But, do policymakers shape decisions favoring war because 

they believe that they have on hand a reliable military tool? Perhaps 

very occasionally this occurs. But, far more often than not the will to 

fight, and the decision, precedes confidence in the promise of a new 

military instrument. If historians are prone to believe the evidence 

that suits them, so, too, are policymakers. Some excellent recent 

studies by historians cast more than a little doubt on the popular 

long-standing image of the military professionals of the mid-to-late 

19th century and the first half of the 20th as ignorant buffoons, men 

as baffled by new technology as they were careless of the lives of 
38

their men. The truth, to resort to that invaluable anti-post-modern 

concept, is that the past, present, and presumably the future, of war 

and warfare is hugely diverse, and most telling examples can be 

challenged by counterexamples. In fact, examples of professional 

military prescience and its obverse will both be sound. For the 

limited purpose of this enquiry, however, it is sufficient simply to 

note the rich variety of accuracy and error by historical figures.

 It should be instructive for us to note that the myth of the “short 

war illusion” was not shared by the most senior military leaders of 

the principal belligerents of 1914. They were convinced that a greatpower war could not fail to expand to be a general conflict, one that 

would engage the efforts of the whole of society, a people’s war, as 

the Franco-Prussian War became after the defeat of the regular French 

Army. As for the style in warfare appropriate for the conditions of 

the 1910s, as Dr. Antulio Echevarria has shown beyond reasonable 

challenge, the German Army had attained a good understanding 

of the meaning of modern civilian and military technologies, in 

their social context, and had proceeded to write excellent tactical 

doctrine which expressed that understanding. The trouble was 

that, notwithstanding the legendary superiority of German training 

methods, many commanders in 1914 ignored the new drills, with 

lethal consequences for their poorly prepared landsers.

83

 To move forward rapidly in time, the U.S. Armed Forces today 

know that they do, and will long continue to, face strategically 

highly asymmetric, culturally alien enemies. At long last culture 

“has made it,” as a recognized dimension known to be important to 

the success of transformed forces in action, or even in deterrence. But 

to recognize that culture matters is not quite the same as knowing 

how it matters or what we should do with the cultural knowledge 

acquired—and acquired by whom? The theater military planners 

and the soldiers on the ground will need cultural enlightenment, not 

only the policymakers in Washington. This point intersects the main 

thrust of the enquiry, because it means that even if we grasp well 

the notional military potency of our transforming forces, we could 

still be horribly in error. To recite the theme tune of this analysis, 

“contexts rule!” The effectiveness of a revolutionary American way 

of war will not be wholly within America’s competence to ensure. 

Americans may wage the wrong war the wrong way, or the right war 
39

the wrong way, because they failed to recognize and understand the 

political and cultural context of the conflict at issue. This is not by 

any means intended as a counsel of despair. It is simply a warning, 

indeed it is a lesson from history, to deploy the old fashioned idea.

 Our public, strategic, and military cultures contribute mightily to 

the strategic and military choices we make, and they also, inevitably, 

constitute an ideational prism through which we regard the behavior

of other cultures.84 To see foreign strategic behavior as its foreign 

authors see it, readily can overstretch our particularly encultured 

strategic imagination. An important recent study of the performance 

of U.S. intelligence in spotting foreign military innovation in the 

interwar years, written by Thomas C. Mahnken, offers conclusions 

highly relevant to this enquiry. He finds that U.S. intelligence was 

substantially the victim of its preconceptions.85 A cognate idea 

is Jeremy Black’s deployment and use of the notion of cultural 

assumptions.86 Mahnken discovered, perhaps unsurprisingly, that 

foreign military innovation was most likely to be identified when it 

fitted what Americans were predisposed to expect, it had already been 

demonstrated in battle, or when it was development that was also 

of interest to the U.S. Armed Services. Overall, Mahnken’s excellent 

study warns us that it is difficult to spot military innovations, or to 

assess them realistically, if they are unfamiliar, if they are familiar but 

not favored by us, or if they are generally despised as unpromising 

or worse.87 Given the mission of this monograph, to consider the 

challenge of recognizing and understanding revolutionary change 

in warfare, it is all but self-evident that predispositions and cultural 

assumptions can comprise a formidable barrier to understanding. 

Unlike 18th and 19th century European warfare, American warfare 

in the 21st century will engage distinctly asymmetrical foes who 

fight in unfamiliar ways.

 5. When we effect a revolutionary change in the way we fight, we must 

do so adaptably and flexibly. If we fail the adaptability test, we are begging 

to be caught out by the diversity and complexity of future warfare. If we lock 

ourselves into a way of warfare that is highly potent only across a narrow 

range of operational taskings, we will wound our ability to recognize and 

understand other varieties of radical change in warfare. Moreover, we will 

be slow, if able at all in a relevant time span, to respond to them. As we 

have had occasion to mention before, both in an epigraph and in the 
40

text, Clausewitz tells us that “war is more than a true chameleon that 

slightly adapts its characteristics to the given case.”88 He proceeds 

to comment that we need a theory able to accommodate the all too 

rich diversity of war’s variable character. Before advancing the 

argument with the theory of the Great Prussian, it is only fair to alert 

readers to a recent full-frontal challenge mounted by Britain’s most 

popular military historian, Sir John Keegan. In his near instant book 

on the Iraq War of 2003, a work in which he was highly approving 

of American policy, he thoroughly misreads Clausewitz, but he 

does so in an interesting and timely manner. He is timely because 

now he is writing to an American defense community that has been 

rudely alerted to the realities of cultural diversity. Sir John offers the 

following dicta, which are worth quoting. To repeat, they are wrong 

about the master, but still there is a diamond lurking in the rough.

The circumstances in Iraq in 2003 demonstrate that classical military 

theory applies only to the countries in which it was made, those of the 

advanced Western world. Elsewhere, and particularly in the artificial 

ex-colonial territories of the developing world usually governed as 

tyrannies, it does not.89

 Keegan’s opinion on the Prussian would have come as a surprise 

to Mao-Tse Tung, who was a strong admirer and user of his theory 

of war. Keegan believes that the Clausewitzian trinity is really a joke 

in a “country” like Iraq, and he attributes the lack of effective regular 

resistance to invasion in 2001 and 2003 to the absence of morale, a 

will to fight, among the people in the “trinity.” What Keegan does 

not understand is that Clausewitz’s trinity allows for near infinite 

combinations of relative influence among the three fundamental 

elements from historical case to case.90

 Clausewitz reposes the heart of his theory of war in his primary 

trinity—a theory that has to maintain a balance between violence, 

hatred, and enmity; chance and probability; and the reason that 

should be behind policy. Clausewitz offers a potent simile when 

he likens the relations among his three tendencies (passion, chance 

and creativity, and reason) to “an object suspended between three 

magnets.” In other words, although “all wars are things of the 

same nature,” that nature is exceedingly permissive of variety 
41

and innovation. The implications for this analysis could hardly be 

plainer. Four, in particular, demand recognition.

 First, while “contexts rule” is the most important of our more 

general findings, its military complement has to be the necessity for a 

United States with global strategic responsibilities to ensure that the 

radical change it intends in its way of war is sufficiently adaptable 

and flexible. Historically, successful executors of RMAs have effected 

change that could be exploited in different ways, against different 

enemies, and in different geographical conditions. No matter how 

wonderful the promise of a particular RMA, airpower for a classic 

example, if it is developed to deliver major advantage only in 

warfare across a narrow, albeit vitally important, range, it is going 

to fail the critical strategy test.91 It will provide means inadequate to 

support policy. In my book, Strategy for Chaos, I made the argument, 

thus far uncontested even by the less friendly reviewers, that the 

implementing of an RMA, of revolutionary change in warfare, is 

strategic behavior.

92

 The necessity for the U.S. Army to plan, organize, train, equip, 

and write doctrine for an adaptable transformation can cite no clearer 

precedent than the experience of “the greatest military strategist of all 

time.”93 Alexander of Macedonia was never, repeat never, defeated 

in battle. He effected an RMA, building on the changes already 

implemented by his gifted, if notably rough-hewn, father, Philip II. 

Alexander enjoyed 12 years in supreme command, including most 

especially the 10-year-long series of campaigns to bring down and 

supplant the super-state of the era, Persia. Alexander’s army waged 

war invariably ultimately victoriously against both regular and 

irregular enemies, against Greeks and a substantial fraction of the 

warrior races of Asia, over all manner of terrain, including some of 

the worst in the world, and in all weathers. He fought limited wars to 

coerce, just to influence, as well as wars of conquest. When feasible, 

he was pleased to allow diplomacy to secure for him by grand 

strategy what otherwise would have to be bought by the blood of 

his soldiers. It is true that the key to Alexander’s success was not his 

RMA, rather was it the personal and national loyalties that sustained 

morale and his own irreplaceable genius. Nonetheless, this tale of 

distant strategic and military excellence, despite its highly individual 

human centerpiece, has major implications for this monograph.
42

 Alexander inherited and improved a flexible combined-arms 

force that proved itself adaptable to the challenges posed by enemies 

of all kinds, some with styles of war utterly strange to the Greeks—

in India for example—as well as some cunningly planned to offset 

Greek strengths. His army functioned well enough in all climes, and 

in combats great and small. What I am describing is an exemplar, 

perhaps the exemplar, of what the U.S. Armed Forces need to aim to 

be, if they are to transform so as to meet the demands of the country’s 

ambitious “National Security Strategy.” U.S. strategic needs over 

the next several decades will be at least as stressful as those which 

Alexander’s army was obliged to overcome from 334 to 323 BC.

 Finally, it is interesting to note that, as with Iraq in 2003, Alexander 

achieved regime change in Persia very swiftly, albeit bloodily. The 

political, strategic, and cultural challenges that that success delivered 

were not dissimilar to America’s problem today. Having beaten the 

enemy, you own him! In an obvious sense, this was not a difficulty 

for Alexander because he had intended to own Persia, not merely 

to raid and loot it for its past wrongs against Greeks. Nonetheless, 

the basic question he faced was one familiar to us today. The regime 

was changed, the enemy tyrant, like Saddam Hussein, was a pitiful 

refugee, doomed to an ignominious demise, but what is the war, 

actually the wars, after the war like? When you collapse an empire, 

it is opportunity time for local warlords to assert their independence. 

Sound familiar?

 Second, to implement a revolutionary change in warfare is not 

necessarily to command warfare’s future character. To venture 

a contestable phrase, history appears to show that the combat 

effectiveness of revolutionary change depends critically upon the 

inadvertent cooperation of a poorly prepared enemy. The initial 

German assaults in March 1918, the Blitzkrieg victories of 1939-41, 

and even the follies of hapless Iraqis in 1991 and 2003, and Talibans 

in 2001, all illustrate this fact. More distantly, the armies of the French 

Revolution and Empire depended more on superiority of numbers, 

on the Emperor’s operational, not so much tactical, skill, on their high 

reputation and morale, and on the prior demoralization of the enemy, 

than they did on a new way in warfare. Rather like the Union armies 

in the East in 1862-63, for a while, at least,94 the enemies of France 

were half-defeated before ever a shot was fired. However, what if 
43

the enemy declines to cooperate physically, morally, operationally, 

or strategically in his own defeat? What if he seeks, and sometimes 

finds, a style or form of warfare that does not privilege the “way” 

of the revolutionary innovator? This is not to suggest that an RMA 

leader always can be thwarted by a materially disadvantaged foe 

who, of necessity, needs to try to fight smarter. But it is to maintain 

that, in many cases, warfare, especially when approached in the 

broad contexts of the pertinent war, can be prosecuted in a number of 

alternative ways. U.S. soldiers may believe, with some good reason, 

that an information-led way of war, one that enables networkcentricity 

and EBO, is all but omni-competent. The U.S. military competencies 

magnified by the intended revolutionary change should yield vital 

advantage in warfare of all kinds. I suggest that this is a truth with 

limitations. Intelligent enemies should be able to blunt the U.S. 

sword by attacking, not necessarily American soldiers, but rather 

the American style in warfare. For example, casualty creation will 

have obvious grand strategic, and hence political attraction. When 

we mention the importance of the contexts of war for the promise in 

innovative methods of warfare, we intend to suggest that cunning 

and capable enemies fight grand strategically, not only militarystrategically. Wars are waged at every level. Our transforming army 

must never forget this.

 The second implication derives not so much from the diversity 

of warfare, but rather from its complexity. If one asks, “What is war 

made of?” and “How does it all work?” the answer is depressingly 

complex.95 I shall content myself here simply by citing as a fact the 

many dimensions of warfare and strategy. In order to maintain 

focus specifically on the subject of this enquiry, I challenge readers 

to ask themselves in what ways should the on-going U.S. military 

transformation enable the entire effort to achieve that “dramatic 

increase—often an order of magnitude or greater—in the combat 

potential and military effectiveness of armed forces,” of which 

Krepinevich wrote back in 1994? Warfare may seem to be a 

straightforward enterprise. It is about the threat, or actuality, of 

killing people and breaking things for the purposes of high policy. 

But to achieve tolerable competence in those violent arts a vastly 

complex institution has to function well enough, though mercifully 

not perfectly. As noted already, Clausewitz identified five elements 
44

of war: moral, physical, mathematical, geographical, and statistical. 

In 1979, Michael Howard was even more economical; he preferred 

just four: the logistical, operational, social, and technological. 

While this author, seeking strength in numbers and ignoring the 

sound principle that more is usually less, has located no fewer 

than 17.96 To spare this text needless detail, I will omit a few of my 

dimensions: people, society, culture, politics, ethics, information and 

intelligence, theory and doctrine, technology, military operations 

(fighting performance), command, geography, friction and chance, 

the adversary, and time. The point of importance is not to spot the 

correct number of dimensions, an absurdly misconceived task, or 

to argue about their precise identity. Instead, what matters is to 

recognize just how complex is the institution of war and its conduct 

as warfare, and therefore just how vulnerable its course can be to 

ambush from a wide variety of sources. Folly, incompetence, bad 

luck, or plain ineffectiveness on almost any of war’s dimensions has 

the potential to make a mockery of that aspiration for a “dramatic 

increase” in military effectiveness to which Krepinevich pointed.

 The third implication of the diversity and complexity of warfare, 

though primarily of the former, has been signalled lightly above. 

Specifically, even if one’s revolutionized military machine functions 

as it should, the politicians say “go,” the generals turn the key, and 

the engine starts, the new way of war may not deliver decisive victory 

if the political and social-cultural contexts are not permissive. This 

is not an argument against innovation, revolutionary or other. But 

it is a reminder that few, if any, military establishments are equally 

competent in the conduct of war of every kind. Similarly, RMAs, 

no matter how well-conceived and executed as prudent strategic

behavior, always have their distinctive limitations. It is perhaps 

true to claim that the contemporary American revolution in warfare 

is more of a grand MR than a humble RMA or MTR. If that is the 

case, generic limitations should be less damaging. Nonetheless, this 

author suggests that the traditional American way of war, one which

favors firepower and mechanical over human methods, is likely to 

exploit the information revolution militarily in a way that does not 

yield equivalent benefit in all forms of conflict.97

 The fourth implication of the diversity and complexity of warfare 

is that there will often be opportunity for traditional military virtues 
45

to triumph over, or at the least embarrass, innovative virtuosity. We 

claimed above that military revolution could fail to deliver victory 

if it was executed in action in a nonpermissive political, social, or 

indeed strategic, context. Even if revolutionary change is effected 

and applied as force in permissive looking contexts, still it may not 

succeed. The reason lurks in those many dimensions cited above. 

Such old fashioned virtues as command efficiencies, discipline, 

training, morale, and leadership, for key examples, may suffice to 

blunt the cutting edge of a new way of war. Historically speaking, 

it is not the case that investment in revolutionary military change 

yields a ticket to guaranteed victory. An important reason why this 

should be so is the subject of the next, the penultimate, “finding” of 

this study.

 6. Revolutionary change in warfare always triggers a search for 

antidotes. Eventually, the antidotes triumph. They can take any or all of 

tactical, operational, strategic, or political forms. The solution is to carry 

through an RMA that is adaptable, flexible, and dynamic, as recommended 

in Finding No. 5. Finding No. 6 rests on the claim that one cannot 

understand revolutionary change in warfare without taking full 

account of warfare’s adversarial dimension. As the Prussian master 

insists on the first page of On War: 

War is nothing but a duel on a larger scale. Countless duels go to make 

up war, but a picture of it as a whole can be formed by imagining a pair 

of wrestlers. Each tries through physical force to compel the other to do 

his will; his immediate aim is to throw his opponent in order to make him 

incapable of further resistance. War is thus an act of force to compel our 

enemy to do our will.98

 War is a struggle against an adversary with an independent will. 

Enemy-independent, or absent save as hapless victim, analysis cannot 

be an analysis of war. Because of war’s adversarial nature, enemies, 

actual or potential, must always be motivated to seek antidotes 

somewhere amidst war’s rich complexity to the threat posed by a 

rival’s revolutionary enhancement in military effectiveness. The 

historical life-cycle of RMAs includes adversary response and then 

the counter-response, and so on in a process of interaction. What is 

important is to recognize that there can be no final move.99 Every 
46

revolutionary change in warfare has met, if not its Waterloo, at least 

an effective enough answer. Even the MR of the nuclear revolution 

has been all but neutralized politically and strategically, though 

assuredly not militarily, by the potency of emulation that creates 

a condition of variably stable mutual deterrence. At least this was 

true enough during the First Nuclear Age of the Cold War. It is no 

longer so in the Second Nuclear Age, with its trickle of new regional 

nuclear weapon states.100

 No polity, including the United States today, ever is permitted 

to enjoy for long, unchallenged, the benefits of a successful 

revolutionary way in warfare. This claim rests on the rock-solid 

basis of the anarchic structure of international politics, past, present, 

and, we can say with confidence, future. America’s rivals cannot 

afford to concede military and strategic superiority, if that is what 

the revolution appears to yield. The idea that they can be dissuaded 

indefinitely from competing by the scale of the task America poses, 

is, alas, a fantasy. This author is reminded of the old saying that “the 

difficult we do immediately; the impossible takes a little longer.” 

By common discovery, imitation, theft, purchase, and espionage, 

especially if revolutionary change is demonstrated in war, the 

RMA of the day will be recognized and eventually comprehended. 

When feasible and judged desirable, it will be copied in parts. When 

borrowed, it will be domesticated to fit local cultural preferences 

and strategic circumstances.101 If it cannot or should not be imitated, 

then the challenge will be to find ways of warfare that negate much 

of its potential. Common sense should tell us that this must be 

so, but happily we need not rely solely on that unreliable source 

of authority. In the conclusions to their edited work on military 

revolutions, Murray and Knox deliver the unqualified verdict that 

“[e]very RMA summons up, whether soon or late, a panoply of 

direct countermeasures and ‘asymmetrical responses’.”102 We have 

been warned.

 7. Revolutionary change in warfare is only revealed by the “audit of 

war,” and not necessarily reliably even then. And if it is to be conducted 

competently, review of that audit must take full account of war’s complex 

nature. The core competency of a military force is the ability to apply 

sufficient violence that the polity’s enemies lose the will and, if need 
47

be, the ability, to resist further. In a long period of peace when they 

cannot test their prowess, military establishments tend to forget that 

war is their business and that fighting is their distinctive contribution 

to that institution. There is something to be said in favor of Murray 

and Knox’s claim that “[o]nly the audit of war, a war conducted 

against a significantly backward opponent, will demonstrate that 

an RMA has occurred.”103 But the experience of trouncing hopeless 

adversaries is as likely to mislead as it is to enlighten. After all, 

we are not interested in revolutionary change as an end in itself, 

in the mere fact of its achievement. Rather are we always, and 

solely, concerned with understanding its consequences, which is 

the distinctive domain of strategy? Almost by definition, enemies 

who are significantly backward most probably can be defeated by 

virtually any moderately competent way of war. In that event, who 

needs an RMA?

 At this concluding point in the study, I must indicate, belatedly 

perhaps, that, there may be some inadvertent confusion between a 

revolutionary change in methods of war and an order of magnitude 

increase in military effectiveness. Andrew Krepinevich links the two 

in the definition I have quoted several times. There is no doubt that 

the intent of revolutionaries is a “dramatic increase” in effectiveness. 

However, to change one’s method of warfare is not necessarily to 

change one’s military performance very much for the better. One 

might, indeed one should. But not all revolutions have revolutionary 

consequences, and particularly is this likely to be so in the contexts 

of war wherein there must be an active opponent and the nature 

of the activity is vastly complex. That complexity, to repeat, allows 

opportunities for offsetting tactics, operations, strategies, and 

policies.

 The final thought in this lengthy enquiry is that the RMA concept, 

the notion of revolutionary change in means and methods, is 

perilously short of firepower for coping with the all too rich diversity 

and complexity of war. It is probable that revolutionary change, of 

any character, will yield dramatic advantages only along a fairly 

narrow stretch of the warfare spectrum. My Alexandrian example 

showed what has been achieved when true genius is in charge. 

Furthermore, it is a certainty that such change must trigger a quest 
48

for offsetting means, methods, and policies, on the part of enemies. 

These negative observations do not amount to a condemnation of the 

very concept of revolutionary change, appearances to the contrary 

possibly notwithstanding. Instead, they suggest that a U.S. military 

establishment committed to a particular vision of its modernization, 

would be well-advised to assess its process of change in the light 

cast by appreciation of the contexts of war and warfare discussed in 

this enquiry.

Summary of Findings.

1. Contexts rule!

2. Revolutionary change in warfare may be less important 

than revolutionary change in social attitudes to war and the 

military.

3. Historical research shows that there are vital conditions 

for success in carrying through revolutionary changes in 

warfare.

4. Recognition of change in warfare is one thing, but 

understanding the character, relevance, and implications of 

change is something else entirely, given the sovereignty of 

the political and strategic contexts.

5. When we effect a revolutionary change in the way we fight, we 

must do so adaptably and flexibly. If we fail the adaptability 

test, we are begging to be caught out by the diversity and 

complexity of future warfare. If we lock ourselves into a way 

of war that is highly potent only across a narrow range of 

strategic and military contexts, and hence operational taskings, 

we will wound our ability to recognize and understand other 

varieties of radical change in warfare. Moreover, we will be 

slow, if able at all in a relevant time span, to respond effectively 

to them.

6. Revolutionary change in warfare always triggers a search for 

antidotes. Eventually the antidotes triumph. They can take 

any or all of tactical, operational, strategic, or political forms. 

The solution, in principle if not always in practice, is to carry 
49

through an RMA that is adaptable, flexible, and dynamic, as 

recommended in Finding No. 5.

7. Revolutionary change in warfare is only revealed by the 

“audit of war,” and not necessarily reliably even then. And if 

it is to be conducted competently, review of that audit must 

take full account of war’s complex nature.

ENDNOTES

 1. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Michael Howard and Peter Paret, trans., 

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976, p. 89 (hereafter cited as 

Clausewitz).

 2. Ibid., p. 606.

 3. Ibid., p. 54.

 4. Andrew W. Marshall, Statement on “Revolutions in ‘Military Affairs’,”

before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Subcommittee on Acquisition 

and Technology, May 5, 1995. In a letter to the author dated August 24, 1995, Dr. 

Marshall wrote to say that “I think the period we are in has a lot of similarities 

to the 20s and 30s and that we are in the early 20s. We have only the beginnings 

of the ideas about the appropriate concepts of operations and organizations. The 

innovations will be harder this time because there appear to be few new distinctive 

platforms.” A key early document was Andrew W. Marshall, Some Thoughts 

on Military Revolutions, Memorandum for the Record, Office of the Secretary of 

Defense (OSD), Office of Net Assessment, July 27, 1993. Marshall sponsored the 

research which led to an outstanding collection of case studies on the 1920s and 

1930s. See Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett, eds., Military Innovation in the 

Interwar Period, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

 5. For some of my earlier assessments, see Colin S. Gray, The American Revolution 

in Military Affairs: An Interim Assessment, Occasional Paper 28, Camberley, UK: The 

Strategic and Combat Studies Institute, 1997; and Strategy for Chaos: Revolutions in 

Military Affairs and the Evidence of History, London: Frank Cass, 2002.

 6. For the record, let it be understood that this author is not hostile to the 

concepts of NCW and EBO. He thinks that they are excellent ideas, and, indeed, 

that they always have been. The problem with them is that there is a danger that 

these commonsensical notions have become canonized by high official blessing, 

and now have the status more of articles of faith than as vital and useful principles 

for guidance.

 7. John Vincent, History, London: Continuum, 2005, p. 168.

 8. History is ambiguous as a concept. It can refer to what happened, whether 

or not we are well-informed about it. But also it can refer to what historians have 

written. Modern intellectual fashion has tended to dismiss history as an accessible 
50

past. Instead, we are invited to have only low expectations of the veracity in 

historical writing. In a recent essay, Dr. Antulio J. Echevarria characteristically 

corners the “the trouble with history.” He tells us that, “[t]he problem is not so 

much that history is a ‘fable agreed upon,’ as Napoleon reportedly said, but that 

except for those accounts that blatantly contradict or disregard the available 

facts, the reader cannot determine objectively which history is more accurate 

than another. Ultimately, historical truth, like beauty, remains in the eye of the 

beholder.” “The Trouble with History,” Parameters, Vol. XXXV, No. 2, Summer 

2005, p. 81 (emphasis in the original). Echevarria is right with his post-modern 

view. Nonetheless, I decline to be intimidated by his formidable logic, and I persist 

in regarding historical study as a practicable search for truth. Perhaps I should say 

for a plausible approach to truth. The trouble with “The Trouble with History,” 

is that it will be read and cited to confirm anti-historical bias in a U.S. defense 

community not overly inclined to respect the past.

 9. Williamson Murray and MacGregor Knox, “Thinking About Revolutions 

in Warfare,” in Knox and Murray, eds., The Dynamics of Military Revolution, 1300-

2050, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 12, 7.

 10. Andrew F. Krepinevich, “Cavalry to Computer: The Pattern of Military 

Revolutions,” The National Interest, No. 37, Fall 1994, p. 30.

 11. Richard O. Hundley, Past Revolutions, Future Transformation: What can the 

history of revolutions in military affairs tell us about transforming the U.S. Military?

MR-1029-DARPA, Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1999, p. 9. Mercifully, this study is 

untroubled by post-modern qualifications of judgment.

 12. Ibid.

 13. Ibid.

 14. Jeremy Black, “A Military Revolution? A 1660-1792 Perspective,” in Clifford 

J. Rogers, ed., The Military Revolution Debate: Readings on the Military Transformation 

of Early Modern Europe, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995, p. 98.

 15. It is worth noting that Black’s objection to the RMA concept is not of the 

post-modernist kind. He writes with some confidence in the belief that the past is 

accessible to our understanding. Moreover, in common with this theorist, Black 

does not subscribe to the view that “history” is a beauty contest between competing 

fables.

 16. The United States declares that it is a country at war, a commitment that 

flatters the contemporary foe more than a little. No matter how impressed one 

may be by the prowess of whatever al Qaeda is today, its menace does not, and 

will never, bear even a remote resemblance to that posed by the Soviet Union.

 17. Jeremy Black, Rethinking Military History, London: Routledge, p. 225.

 18. The title tells all in the notable, perhaps notorious, revolutionary tract, Bill 

Owens, Lifting the Fog of War, New York: Farrow, Straus, Giroux, 2000.

 19. The best discussion by far is provided by the studies in Knox and Murray, 

eds., The Dynamics of Military Revolution, 1300-2050.
51

 20. Hundley, Past Revolutions, Future Transformations, p. 27.

 21. Colin S. Gray: Weapons for Strategic Effect: How Important is Technology?

Occasional Paper 22, Maxwell AFB, AL: Air War College, Center for Strategy and 

Technology, January 2001; Strategy for Chaos.

 22. Clausewitz, p. 566.

 23. Not infrequently, a technological shortfall creates a demand for a supply of 

heroes. Such a supply can be easily exhausted.

 24. Colin S. Gray, Transformation and Strategic Surprise, Carlisle, PA: Strategic 

Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, April 2005.

 25. See Bruce I. Gudmundsson, Stormtroop Tactics: Innovation in the German 

Army, 1914-1918, New York: Praeger, 1989. This excellent book suffers a little from 

a case of teutophilia. The author is slightly baffled by the indisputable fact that the 

German Army lost the war. American admirers of German military prowess quite 

often can seem almost embarrassed to have to concede, en passant, that, by the 

way, the superior military team lost!

 26. The story is well told in Williamson Murray, “May 1940: Contingency and 

Fragility of the German RMA,” in Knox and Murray, eds., The Dynamics of Military 

Revolution, 1300-2050, pp. 154-74. Robert Allan Doughty, The Breaking Point: Sedan 

and the Fall of France, 1940, Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1990, is classic.

 27. Robert R. Jones, “Relearning Counterinsurgency Warfare,” Parameters, Vol. 

XXXIV, No. 1. Spring 2004, pp. 16-28, offers a plausible message for today. Some 

highly relevant background is to be found in Andrew F. Krepinevich, The Army 

and Vietnam, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.

 28. I developed this point in my article, “RMAs and the Dimensions of 

Strategy,” Joint Force Quarterly, No. 17, Autumn/Winter 1997-98, pp. 50-54.

 29. Clausewitz, p. 605.

 30. Ibid., p. 89.

 31. A near perfect example were the Anglo-French wars of the very late 

17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries, especially in their maritime dimension. It 

may be needless to add that the political, and hence strategic, contexts did vary 

significantly from war to war. Nonetheless, the challenge to English, then British, 

security posed by France was essentially stable for more than a century.

 32. George W. Bush, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, 

Washington, DC: The White House, September 2002, is amazingly forthright in its 

declaration of a U.S. intention to remain strategically preeminent.

 33. Colin S. Gray, The Sheriff: America’s Defense of the New World Order, Lexington, 

KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2004.

 34. In a now quite famous purple passage in his book, Paradise and Power: 

America and Europe in the New World Order, London: Atlantic Books, 2003, pp. 36-

37, Robert Kagan explained colorfully the strategic context for the global sheriff. 
52

Americans are “cowboys,” Europeans love to say. And there is truth in 

this. The United States does act as an international sheriff, self-appointed 

perhaps but widely welcomed nonetheless, trying to enforce some peace 

and justice in what Americans see as a lawless world where outlaws need 

to be deterred or destroyed, often through the muzzle of a gun. Europe, 

by this Wild West analogy, is more like the saloonkeeper. Outlaws shoot 

sheriffs, not saloonkeepers. In fact, from the saloonkeeper’s point of 

view, the sheriff trying to impose order by force can sometimes be more 

threatening than the outlaws, who may just want a drink. 

 35. See Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, Unrestricted Warfare: Assumptions on 

War and Tactics in the Age of Globalization, Foreign Broadcast Information Service 

(FBIS) trans., Beijing: PLA Literature Arts Publishing House, February 1999.

 36. A well-regarded short paper on “The Current Revolution in the Nature of 

Conflict” (July 2005), prepared by Chris Donnelly at Britain’s Defence Academy 

for the attention of the Secretary of Defence, has this to say: “[W]e think of them 

[revolutions in the nature of conflict] as ‘military events’. But in fact the principal 

drivers tend to be economic, social or political rather than military-technical. They 

are not just revolutions in the nature of battle.” P. 1.

 37. First-rate studies of military innovation in the interwar years, both its 

execution and its detection, monitoring, and comprehension, include Ernest May, 

ed., Knowing One’s Enemies: Intelligence Assessment before the Two World Wars, 

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984; Wesley K. Wark, The Ultimate 

Enemy: British Intelligence and Nazi Germany, 1933-1939, Ithaca, NY: Cornell 

University Press, 1985; Murray and. Millett, eds., Military Innovation in the Interwar 

Period; Harold R. Winton and David R. Mets, eds., The Challenge of Change: Military 

Institutions and New Realities, 1918-1941, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 

2000; Thomas G. Mahnken, Uncovering Ways of War: US Intelligence and Foreign 

Military Innovation, 1918-1941, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002; and 

John Ferris, Intelligence and Strategy: Selected Essays, London: Routledge, 2005, ch. 

3, “Image and Accident: Intelligence and the Origins of the Second World War.”

 38. The authoritative, even quasi-official, German history of World War II is 

unambiguous in its judgment on the implications of Hitler’s frank outlining of his 

plans for expansion to the country’s military and diplomatic leaders on November 

5, 1937. “From this point onwards, Hitler was not pursuing a policy at the risk 

of war, but a war policy, which he had thought out in advance and had been 

preparing since 1933.” Wilhelm Deist, et al., Germany and the Second World War: 

Volume I, the Build-up of German Aggression, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000, p. 638.

 39. The Rimland concept was developed in the early 1940s by the Yale-based 

Dutch-American political scientist, Nicholas J. Spykman. See his books: America’s 

Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power, New York: 

Harcourt, Brace, 1942; and The Geography of the Peace, 1944, Hamden, CT: Archon 

Books, 1969.

 40. Clausewitz, p. 610.
53

 41. This concern of mine is shared by Hew Strachan in his important article, 

“The Lost Meaning of Strategy,” Survival, Vol. 47, No. 3, Autumn 2005, pp. 33-54.

 42. Clausewitz, p. 183.

 43. Ibid.

 44. See Peter J. Schoomaker, 2004 Army Transformation Roadmap, Washington, 

DC: Department of the Army, July 2004.

 45. See Donald H. Rumsfeld, Transformation Planning Guidance, Washington, 

DC: Department of Defense, April 2003.

 46. “The thesis of this book is clear—but as yet little understood: the way we 

make war reflects the way we make wealth . . .” Alvin and Heidi Toffler, War and 

Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century, Boston: Little, Brown, 1993, p. 3.

 47. See Rohan Gunaratna, Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror, New York: 

Columbia University Press, 2002; and Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: the Secret History of 

the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, 

London: Penguin Books, 2004. The historical context is brilliantly explained from 

a viewpoint rarely considered seriously by Westerners, in M. J. Akbar, The Shade 

of Swords: Jihad and the Conflict between Islam and Christianity, London: Routledge, 

2002.

 48. Of recent years, there has been a revival of interest in the power of ideas 

to shape minds, societies, policy, and the course of history. An exemplar of this 

trend is Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History, London: Macmillan, 

2000, which presents nazism as a political religion.

 49. Edward N. Luttwak, “Toward Post-Heroic Warfare,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 

74, No. 3, May/June 1995, pp. 109-122.

 50. Although I advise careful study of warfare’s social-cultural context, I must 

admit to a certain unease. It is some small comfort to note that other scholars, 

Richard K. Betts and Hew Strachan, have flagged the same disquiet. Specifically, 

it is possible to become so enamored of the possible significance of social and 

cultural factors, among many others, that one’s strategic analysis ceases to be very 

strategic. In short, one may drown in context. A good idea, that context is vitally 

significant, becomes a bad idea if it promotes so much extra-strategic study that 

strategic analysis all but disappears. Given the long-standing strategy deficit which 

has plagued American performance in war, the last thing one wishes to encourage 

is any further dilution of that essential focus. Strategic studies become security 

studies, and security studies potentially include just about everything, a condition 

which Strachan rightly condemns thus: “by being inclusive [security studies] they 

end up by being nothing.” “The Lost Meaning of Strategy,” p. 47. Also, see Betts, 

“Should Strategic Studies Survive?” World Politics, Vol. 50, No. 1, October 1997, p. 

27.

 51. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and 

Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, New York: Random House, 1987. Kennedy’s 

main argument is to the effect that military greatness imposes such an enervating 
54

economic burden that it proves unsustainable. It carries the economic seeds of 

its own future destruction, always provided rival states do not write finis to the 

imperial story in the nearer term.

 52. The clearest and most persuasive analysis is Murray and Knox, “Thinking 

About Revolutions in Military Affairs.”

 53. Stephen Biddle, Afghanistan and the Future of Warfare: Implications for Army 

and Defense Policy, Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 

November 2002. Also see Stepehn Biddle, Military Power: Explaining Victory and 

Defeat in Modern Battle, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004, especially 

pp. 37-38.

 54. British scientist, Martin Rees, advises that although “[t]here are physical 

limits to how finely silicon microchips can be etched by present techniques . . . 

new methods are already being developed that can print circuits on a much finer 

scale, so ‘Moore’s Law’ need not level off.” Rees proceeds to speculate that “quite 

different techniques—tiny crisscrossing optical beams, not involving chip circuits 

at all—may increase computing power still further.” Our Final Century: Will 

Civilization Survive the Twenty-First Century? London: Arrow Books, 2003, p. 16.

 55. See Murray and Millett, eds., Military Innovation in the Interwar Period; and 

Thomas G. Mahnken, “Beyond Blitzkrieg: Allied Responses to Combined Arms 

Armored Warfare during World War II,” in Emily O. Goldman and Leslie C. 

Eliason, eds., The Diffusion of Military Technology and Ideas, Stanford, CA: Stanford 

University Press, pp. 243-266.

 56. In support of this claim I cite the now well-known fact that for 40 years there 

were major difference between U.S. and Soviet approaches to nuclear strategy. 

Those differences were not, as many Americans believed in the 1960s and 1970s, the 

result of Soviet strategic intellectual backwardness, neither did they simply reflect 

distinctive paths in weapons choices driven by respective technological prowess. 

Instead, U.S. and Soviet strategies for nuclear weapons, and their motives and 

proposals for strategic arms limitation, were the product mainly of distinguishably 

different strategic and military cultures. This author was a participant observer of 

this long running controversy for 15 years or more. See Colin S. Gray, Nuclear 

Strategy and National Style, Lanham, MD: Hamilton Press, 1986.

 57. A fine set of studies on the diffusion of technology and ideas concludes 

with the important judgment that, 

An innovation developed and honed in one setting is rarely transplanted 

wholly to another without modification. Historically, states have either 

adapted innovations to make them functionally effective in their new 

setting, or selected certain aspects of the model to adopt. Few chapters 

identify instances of faithful emulation. Departure from original patterns 

occur because the environment and values in the importing society 

usually diverge from those of the source. 

Emily O. Goldman and Andrew L. Ross, “Conclusion: the Diffusion of Military 
55

Technology and Ideas—Theory and Practice, Goldman and Eliason, eds., The 

Diffusion of Military Technology and Ideas, p. 386.

 58. David J. Lonsdale, Alexander: Killer of Men. Alexander the Great and the 

Macedonian Art of War, London: Constable, 2005, p. 198.

 59. Ibid.

 60. Martin C. Libicki, “The Emerging Primacy of Information,” Orbis, Vol. 40, 

No. 2, Spring 1996, pp. 261-274.

 61. Bruce Berkowitz, The New Face of War: How War Will Be Fought in the 21st 

Century, New York: Free Press, 2003, p. 179.

 62. J. C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control, Annapolis, 

MD: Naval Institute Press, 1989, p. 72 (emphasis in the original).

 63. Brian W. Blouet, ed., Global Geostrategy: Mackinder and the Defence of the 

West, London: Frank Cass, 2005, is a helpful collection of essays that treats many 

of the key themes in geopolitics.

 64. Colin S. Gray, “Inescapable Geography,” in Gray and Geoffrey Sloan, eds., 

Geopolitics, Geography and Strategy, London: Frank Cass, 1999, pp. 161-177.

 65. See Thomas A. Keaney and Eliot A. Cohen, Revolution in Warfare? Air 

Power in the Persian Gulf, Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1995. This book 

is a revised version of the Summary volume of the Gulf War Air Power Survey, 

published in 1993.

 66. Vincent, History, p. 9.

 67. International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), Strategic Survey 2004/5, 

London: Routledge, May 2005, p. 25.

 68. The anti-historical blast in Strategic Survey is more than a little reminiscent 

of the trouble that Bernard Brodie had, and complained about repeatedly, with his 

long-time colleagues at RAND in general, and in the U.S. defense community as a 

whole. See his somewhat personal, even ad hominem, critique of the prophets and 

practitioners of systems analysis in War and Politics, New York: Macmillan, 1973, 

ch. 10. Brodie is right, but the personal dimension to his argument obliges us to 

treat it with some caution.

 69. Echevarria, “The Trouble with History,” p. 80 (emphasis added).

 70. Schoomaker, 2004 Army Transformation Roadmap.

 71. This maxim of eternal worth is well-presented in Williamson Murray and 

Mark Grimsley, “Introduction: On Strategy,” in Murray, MacGregor Knox, and 

Alvin Bernstein, eds., The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States and War, Cambridge: 

Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 22. The authors qualify the maxim brilliantly 

with an all too pertinent observation, “but few can discern what is possible.”

 72. The scholarly literature on this subject is of high quality and has much merit, 

even though, in my opinion, it tends to come to unsound conclusions and offers 

unreliable advice for policy and strategy. See Martin van Creveld, The Transformation 
56

of War, New York: Free Press, 1991; John Keegan, A History of Warfare, London: 

Hutchinson, 1993; Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global 

Era, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999; Colin McInnes, Spectator-Sport War: The West 

and Contemporary Conflict, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002; James C. 

Kurth, “Clausewitz and the Two Contemporary Military Revolutions: RMA and 

RAM,” in Bradford A. Lee and Karl F. Walling, eds., Strategic Logic and Political 

Rationality: Essays in Honor of Michael I. Handel, London: Frank Cass, 2003, pp. 274-

297; Christopher Coker, Waging War Without Warriors? The Changing Culture of 

Military Conflict, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002; Christopher Coker, 

The Future of War: The Re-Enchantment of War in the Twenty-First Century, Oxford: 

Blackwell Publishing, 2004; Herfried Műnkler, The New Wars, Cambridge: Polity 

Press, 2005; and Isabelle Duyvesteyn and Jan Angstrom, eds., Rethinking the Nature 

of War, London: Frank Cass, 2005.

 73. Chris Donnelly observes that “there is today an almost total lack of media 

correspondents and editors who really understand defence and security issues.” 

“The Current Revolution in the Nature of Conflict,” p. 4.

 74. “But in terms of the history of warfare, the most significant point about 

the war with Iraq is perhaps that soldiers are accountable as in no other age for 

the war that they fight. Not just for winning the war, which is all that mattered 

in centuries past, but for every action that takes place on the battlefield.” Eleanor 

Goldsworthy, “Warfare in Context,” The RUSI Journal, Vol. 148, No. 3, June 2003, 

p. 19.

 75. See the timely, well-argued, but dangerously enticing article, Robert H. 

Scales, Jr., “Culture-Centric Warfare,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, Vol. 130, 

No. 10, October 2004, pp. 32-36.

 76. Murray and Knox, “Conclusion: The Future Behind Us,” in Knox and 

Murray, eds., The Dynamics of Military Revolution, 1300-2050, p. 192 ff.

 77. For a superior recent manifestation of fairly deadly combat between 

historians, see: “Military Revolutions: A Forum,” Historically Speaking, Vol. IV, 

No. 4, April 2003, pp. 2-14. The contributors to this internecine bloodletting were 

Geoffrey Parker and Jeremy Black, the primary champions, with commentaries 

also by Dennis Showalter, sensible as always, Jeffrey Clarke from the Army, who 

was noncombative, concluding with an unrepentant blast by Parker. On balance, it 

must be said that Black won the debate. Parker overplayed and oversimplified his 

argument in favor of there having been a technology driven Military Revolution 

from 1530 to 1660. However, the process of debate did cause an escalation of 

extremism in the exchanges.

 78. Especially Murray and Millett, eds., Military Innovation in the Interwar Period. 

And one should not forget the monumental three-volume study of comparative 

military effectiveness led by these authors in the mid to late 1980s, also with the 

sponsorship of Marshall’s Office of Net Assessment. See Allan R. Millett and 

Williamson Murray, eds., Military Effectiveness: Vol. I, The First World War; Vol. II, 

The Interwar Period; Vol. III, The Second World War, Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1988. 
57

These outstanding books have much to say that is relevant to the understanding 

of revolutionary change in warfare. There is no denying, though, that they do 

suffer noticeably from some important conceptual shortfalls. There is a pervasive 

theory shortfall which most plausibly is attributable to the fact that the project 

was conducted almost entirely by professional historians, without the conceptual 

discipline from social science that it needed. 

 79. Murray and Knox, “Conclusion: The Future Behind Us,” pp. 192-193 

(emphasis in the original).

 80. Michael Howard is quoted informally in Echevarria, “The Trouble with 

History,” p. 89, n. 14.

 81. Unfortunately for the theorist who relies heavily on the “evidence” of the 

past, history is almost maliciously well-endowed with inconvenient exceptions to 

favored postulates, theories, and meta-narratives. As Napoleon said, “[t]here is no 

authority without exception . . .” Napoleon, The Military Maxims of Napoleon, David 

G. Chandler trans., New York: Macmillan, 1988, p. 70, “Maxim XLII.”

 82. For the industrial points, see Guido Knapp’s study of Admiral Wilhelm 

Canaris, Head of the Abwehr, in his book, Hitler’s Warriors, Stroud, UK: Sutton 

Publishing, 2005, esp. p. 324. General Lieutenant Friedrich Paulus, the chief 

planner for Barbarossa with his appointment to be senior Quartermaster on the 

Army General Staff, was not seriously troubled by doubts about the quality of 

the intelligence on which he based his planning, any more than he was by doubts 

about the logistical feasibility of the campaign. Ibid., pp. 200-202. Political and 

strategic assumptions dominated the analysis. Since the campaign, which is to say 

the war, was confidently expected to destroy the fielded Red Army close to the 

recently advanced frontiers of the Soviet Union, and because the entire venture was 

calculated to last little more than 6 weeks, perhaps 2 to 3 months, what did it matter 

how many additional divisions the enemy might raise, or how many tanks his 

factories could produce? For the statistics cited in the text on the Soviet and NKVD 

divisional order of battle, for the Red Army see Horst Boog, et al., Germany and the 

Second World War: Volume IV, The Attack on the Soviet Union, Oxford: Clarendon 

Press, 1998, pp. 320-325; while for the NKVD see Glantz, Colossus Reborn, ch. 5.

 83. Antulio J. Echevarria II, After Clausewitz: German Military Thinkers Before the 

Great War, Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2000. Also see Niall Ferguson, 

The Pity of War, London: Allen Lane, 1998, p. 101; and especially Hew Strachan, 

The First World War: Volume I, To Arms, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 

98-99. Although military leaders almost everywhere expected a lengthy conflict in 

military terms, they were assured by civilian economic experts that this could not 

happen because a general war must precipitate a no less general financial collapse 

which would render further hostilities impossible. This was a significant illusion 

prior to 1914.

 84. These are not uncontested judgments. See: Stephen Peter Rosen, “Military 

Effectiveness: Why Society Matters,” International Security, Vol. 19, No. 4, Spring 

1995, pp. 5-31; and for a more skeptical view, Michael C. Desch, “Culture Clash: 

Assessing the Importance of Ideas in Security Studies,” International Security, Vol. 
58

23, No. 1, Summer 1998, pp. 141-170; a recent scholarly work offers an interesting 

collection of focused comparative case studies of six countries: India, Nigeria, 

Japan, Australia, Russia, and Germany. John Glenn, Darryl Howlett, and Stuart 

Poore, eds., Neorealism Versus Strategic Culture, Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 

2004.

 85. Mahnken, Uncovering Ways of War.

 86. Black, Rethinking Military History, pp. 13-22.

 87. Mahnken, Uncovering Ways of War, pp. 179-180.

 88. Clausewitz, p. 89.

 89. John Keegan, The Iraq War, London: Hutchinson, 2004, p. 6.

 90. I am grateful to Dr. Antulio Echevarria of the Army War College, Strategic 

Studies Institute, for assisting my Clausewitzian education by emphasizing to me 

the extent of the potential differences of relative influence among the trinitarian 

elements. He is right, but his valid point does not dissuade me from insisting upon 

the overall authority of Clausewitz’s absolute claim that “all wars are things of the 

same nature.” Clausewitz, p. 606.

 91. With reference to airpower, examples of the potential for the strategically 

confusing influence of a radical change in warfare include the German development 

of an unduly short-range air force, one much hampered additionally by many 

unsound operational and technical choices. The defects of the Luffwaffte may well 

have cost Germany the war. Also, the United States pursued its all-geographies 

nuclear revolution in the 1950s and 1960s with such dedication that the armed 

forces were desperately short of effective close ground support aircraft in Vietnam, 

a role partially filled by the invention of the helicopter gunship. In addition, in the 

1960s the U.S. military discovered that its prospective excellence in the delivery 

of nuclear ordnance in Europe had not equipped it well to conduct old fashioned 

dog-fights. There was a need for fighters to have guns as well as bomb racks and 

rockets. The subsequent development of the loved and hated A-10 Warthog, was a 

reluctant recognition by the Air Force that it had no choice but to share the glory 

in some wars with the army.

 92. Gray, Strategy for Chaos, esp. pp. 274-275.

 93. Lonsdale, Alexander: Killer of Men, p. 230. My argument is heavily indebted 

to this excellent work. Also, I am grateful to Dr. Lonsdale for his patient and 

enthusiastic efforts to explain just why Alexander merits billing as the finest 

strategist in history. I was convinced, a judgment I have not sought to conceal in 

the text. Not even awful movies can seriously dent his popular reputation, though 

they can threaten to do so.

 94. See Michael C. C. Adams, Fighting for Defeat: Union Military Failure in the 

East, 1861-1865, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1992.

 95. This incontrovertible claim is illustrated forbiddingly by a diagram in my 

Strategy for Chaos, p. 126, Figure 5.2: “The 17 Dimensions of Strategy.” This diagram 

may have lost me some of my less tolerant readers.
59

 96. A terse presentation of these lists is offered as Figure 5.1, Ibid., p. 123, “The 

Elements/Dimensions of Strategy: Three Cuts.”

 97. See my chapter, “The American Way of War: Critique and Implications” 

in Anthony McIvor, ed., Rethinking the Principles of War: The Future of Warfare, 

Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2005, pp. 13-40.

 98. Clausewitz, p. 75 (emphasis in the original).

 99. Gray, Strategy for Chaos, ch. 3, “RMA Dynamics.”

 100. See Keith B. Payne, The Fallacies of Cold War Deterrence and a New Direction, 

Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001; while Colin S. Gray, The Second 

Nuclear Age, Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner Publishers, 1999, explains the proposition 

of two nuclear ages.

 101. This is the utterly convincing overall conclusion to the superior studies 

collected in Goldman and Eliason, eds., The Diffusion of Military Technology and 

Ideas.

 102. Murray and Knox, “Conclusion: The Future Before Us,” p. 193.

 103. Ibid., p. 185.