THE REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS:

PROSPECTS AND CAUTIONS

Earl H. Tilford, Jr.

June 23, 1995
LL

*******

The views expressed in this report are those of the author

and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of

the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the

U.S. Government. This report is cleared for public release;

distribution is unlimited.

*******

Comments pertaining to this report are invited and should be

forwarded to: Director, Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army

War College, Carlisle Barracks, PA 17013-5050. Comments also may

be conveyed directly to the author by calling commercial (717)

245-4086 or DSN 242-4086.
LLL

FOREWORD

The current Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) is taking

place against the background of a larger historical watershed

involving the end of the Cold War and the advent of what Alvin

and Heidi Toffler have termed "the Information Age." In this

essay, Dr. Earl Tilford argues that RMAs are driven by more than

breakthrough technologies, and that while the technological

component is important, a true revolution in the way military

institutions organize, equip and train for war, and in the way

war is itself conducted, depends on the confluence of political,

social, and technological factors.

After an overview of the dynamics of the RMA, Dr. Tilford

makes the case that interservice rivalry and a reintroduction of

the managerial ethos, this time under the guise of total quality

management (TQM), may be the consequences of this revolution. In

the final analysis, warfare is quintessentially a human endeavor.

Technology and technologically sophisticated weapons are only

means to an end.

The U.S. Army, along with the other services, is embracing

the RMA as it downsizes and restructures itself into Force XXI.

Warfare, even on the digitized battlefield, is likely to remain

unpredictable, bloody, and horrific. Military professionals

cannot afford to be anything other than well-prepared for

whatever challenges lie ahead, be it war with an Information Age

peer competitor, a force of guerrillas out of the Agrarian Age,

or a band of terrorists using the latest in high-tech weaponry.

While Dr. Tilford is optimistic about the prospects for

Force XXI, what follows is not an unqualified endorsement of the

RMA or of the Army's transition to an Information Age force. By

examining issues and problems that were attendant to previous

RMAs, Dr. Tilford raises questions that ought to be asked by the

Army as it moves toward Force XXI. Warfare is, the author

reminds us, the most complex of human undertakings and the

victors, even in the Information Age, will be those who, as in

the past, are masters of the art—as well as the science—of war.
LY

RICHARD H. WITHERSPOON

Colonel, U.S. Army

Director, Strategic Studies

 Institute
Y

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF THE AUTHOR

EARL H. TILFORD, JR. is Senior Research Professor and Director of

Research at the Strategic Studies Institute. He earned his BA and

MA in history at the University of Alabama and his Ph.D. in

American and European military history at George Washington

University. Dr. Tilford is the author of three books, the latest,

published by Texas A&M University Press in 1993, being

Crosswinds: The Air Force's Setup in Vietnam. He has published

more than two dozen articles in scholarly and professional

journals. His next book, Eagle in the Desert: A Look Back at the

Persian Gulf War will be published by Greenwood Press later this

year.
YL

SUMMARY

A characteristic of the American way of war is our

fascination with technology and the search for that technological

"silver bullet" that will deliver victory quickly and with a

minimum of loss of life. The current Revolution in Military

Affairs (RMA) is driven by rapid technological advance fostered

by the advent of the microprocessor and by decreased defense

spending. It operates against the background of a historical

watershed brought about by the end of the Cold War.

The RMA has been embraced by all the United States' military

services; especially the Air Force and the Army. As the Army

downsizes it is seeking to change itself into Force XXI; a

strategic force, trained and ready, to fight and win the nation's

wars in the 21st century. That we are in the midst of a true

revolution in military affairs is evident. What it may mean for

the Army and the nation is not so evident.

This monograph outlines where the Army is going as it seeks

to define change rather than be defined by change. It also looks

to the past to ask what have been the results of change during

past RMAs? Accelerated interservice rivalries and over-reliance

on management systems marked the last RMA, one driven by the

advent of atomic weapons at the end of World War II and the

relatively stable and sparse defense budgets of the 1950s. The

author argues that the consequence of interservice rivalry and

the institutionalization of the managerial ethos was defeat in

Vietnam.

Finally, the author warns against becoming so entranced with

the sophisticated technologies of the RMA that we lose both our

grounding in strategic thinking and our basic warrior skills. To

do so could be potentially disastrous when two peer competitor

forces meet on the 21st century battlefield and, quite possibly,

cancel each other out electronically. Then, it will be the side

which is able to fight at the lower "gut level" of warfare that

will prevail.


THE REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS:

PROSPECTS AND CAUTIONS

Introduction.

Discussions of the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), the

Military-Technical Revolution (MTR), and Information Age Warfare

often develop along technological lines. The Department of

Defense's Office of Net Assessment defines an RMA as a major

change in the nature of warfare brought about by the innovative

application of technologies which, combined with dramatic changes

in military doctrine, and operational concepts, fundamentally

alters the character and conduct of operations. What is lost in

this definition and in subsequent discussions is the nature of

war, which remains a complex interaction of political objectives,

human emotions, cultural and ethnic factors, and military skills.

In pursuit of a political objective, warfare is violence

articulated through strategy which is a balance of ends, ways and

means. Technology and technological innovations, while affecting

the way wars are or might be fought, remain means to an end.1

The Gulf War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, occurring

as they did almost simultaneously, marked an historical

watershed. Ironically, the Gulf War, with its vision of a hightech and extremely potent U.S. military, coincided with the end

of an era in which just such a force is most viable. One might

postulate that the Gulf War and the fall of the Soviet Union,

taken together, constitute a bookend to one end of an era of

Western political and military history that is bounded at the

other end by the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. One might then

argue that the West was engaged in a second Hundred Years War

between 1870 and 1989.2 But the era which is dawning, the postCold War era, is not the end of history nor is it so radically

different from all that came before that the study of the past

has no relevancy.

The end of the Cold War and the dawning of what Alvin and

Heidi Toffler have termed "the Information Age" are the two

powerful conditions that define the environment in which the

United States Army and its sister services operate today.3 In the

Information Age, one can argue that a military-technical

revolution, brought about by the advent of the microprocessor and


precision-guided munitions, is fostering a revolution in military

affairs. That may be so, but RMAs and rapid advances in

technology are not always related. The armies of Napoleon, for

instance, were part of a revolution in military affairs that

derived from the social and political upheavals of the French

Revolution. While the armies of the French Revolution coincided

with the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, the

incorporation of the people into the war effort through the levee

en masse was more important than anything issuing from the

Industrial Revolution. Furthermore, the weapons used by the

armies of 1815 were basically the same as those available in 1789

or, for that matter, in 1715. Conversely, the military-technical

revolution that issued from the maturing Industrial Revolution at

the beginning of the 20th century did not translate into a true

RMA until after the First World War, although all the

technological elements were available during the war: the

railroad, machine guns, tanks, long-range and rifled artillery,

rapid-fire rifles, electronic means of communication, and

airplanes.4

Dynamics of the Current RMA.

The current RMA is driven by three primary factors: rapid

technological advance compelling a shift from the Industrial Age

to the Information Age; the end of the Cold War; and a decline in

defense budgets. It entails a fundamental change in who, how,

and, perhaps even why wars are fought. It is driven not only by

new technologies but by new operational concepts, new tactics,

and new organizational structures. The impact of the current

confluence of social, political, economic, and technological

forces on American society and the armed forces may equal—or

exceed—what occurred during the 1960s and 1970s during the

turmoil associated with the war in Vietnam.

The armed services, the Army and the Air Force in

particular, are feeling the impact of changes compelled by this

historic shift from the Industrial to the Information Age. The

transition is forcing a change in the way the military services

are organized, how they are supplied, how they procure weapons

and how they are managed, and, most importantly, how they think

and fight.

Over the past five years the armed forces have gone through


a tremendous reduction or, in military doublespeak, a build-down.

This build-down, which actually began in 1987, now proceeds in

accordance with the Bottom-Up-Review (BUR) issued by Secretary of

Defense Les Aspin in October 1993. By the end of the century, the

total number on active duty in the Army, Air Force, Navy and

Marines will have fallen from 2,130,000 in 1989 to 1,445,000. The

Army continues to decline from 18 active divisions to 10, the Air

Force is dropping from 24 to 13 active fighter wings, and Navy

battle force ships are declining from 567 to 346. While the

Marine Corps will retain its structure of three Marine

Expeditionary Forces, personnel strength will fall from 197,000

to 174,000. According to the 1995 National Military Strategy,

"Nevertheless, the United States will retain formidable forces .

. . pound for pound more capable through enhancements and

selected modernizations."5 These changes have inconvenienced and

caused uncertainty among professional soldiers, sailors and

airmen.

The extent to which the armed forces have accepted these

changes, however, has been remarkable, particularly given that

the drawdowns, relocations, reorganizations and other fundamental

alterations to the way they operate began immediately following a

victory of immense proportions in the Gulf War; a victory which

confirmed the tremendous progress made in rebuilding the

services, especially the Army, after the Vietnam War. The Army is

not only restructuring as it downsizes, it also is changing the

very way it thinks about war. As former Army Chief of Staff

General Gordon R. Sullivan stated, "We have to prepare ourselves

for wars we haven't seen yet and that we don't understand. We are

not just changing what we think. We are changing how we think."6

The Army and the RMA.

The Army is changing from a forward-deployed and Industrial

Age army trained, equipped, and postured to stop a Soviet advance

in Europe, to an Information Age, power projection army. The Army

is drawing on the past and the present to make this transition.

Historically, the Army has a tradition as a power projection

force dating from the Spanish American War and the birth of the

American Empire.7

 In fact, during the Cold War, although there

were significant forces deployed in Europe, the Army was still a

power projection force with most of its divisions stationed in

the continental United States. Although power projection is very


much a part of the new Army's past, what is different is the

rapidity with which forces must be deployed, where they may be

sent, and the reasons for going there. According to the National

Military Strategy of 1995, "The existence of a credible power

projection capability complements our overseas presence acting as

a deterrent to potential adversaries."8 The Army is drawing on

the Military Technical Revolution as it structures, equips, and

trains an RMA force that will make this concept a reality. The

transformation of the Army into Force XXI, a power projection

army for the Information Age, will be achieved by implementing a

vision built on five modernization objectives.

The first is to reorganize and restructure the Army into the

kind of force that can be deployed rapidly and then sustained in

the theater. As a part of the the Army's Force XXI initiative, it

is studying the way battalions, brigades, divisions, and corps

should be organized as these entities evolve into the size and

composition needed to succeed on Information Age battlefields.9

An experimental Force XXI brigade, designated EXFOR XXI, was in

place early this spring at Ft. Hood, Texas. In 1996, the Army

plans to stand up EXFOR XXI at the division level.10

Second, Force XXI must be able to survive on the Information

Age battlefield against any foe, whether that may be a peer

competitor capable of fighting in the digitized arena or an

Agrarian Age or Industrial Age force, opponents which

historically have proven most troublesome. Survival and

sustainment will be as much elements of operational power in the

future as they were in the past. Force XXI must be considered in

relation to the capabilities needed across a spectrum military

operations which may also include relief operations,

peacekeeping, and humanitarian interventions.

Third, the Army must be modernized to win the information

war. In information warfare, the objective is to deny the enemy

critical knowledge while achieving and retaining the decisive

advantage of battlefield awareness. The actual weapons used by

Force XXI: the tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, artillery

pieces, rocket launchers, helicopters, command and control vans,

and support vehicles will look a lot like the Industrial Age

weapons of today. But they will be much smarter, deriving their

intelligence from computers and advanced technologies joined in a

digitally-integrated force that, taken as an entity, will be


qualitatively superior to the Army that won a decisive victory in

the Gulf War.

Fourth, the Army of the 21st century—Force XXI—must be

capable of precision strike. Precision strike will blind,

immobilize, and maintain the enemy at a distance while critical

targets are identified, struck and destroyed. Strike has to be

considered in terms of the degree of coercive capability

necessary to support the execution of a given mission.

Additionally, the strike function will be defined by the Army's

ability to mass the effect of its instruments (troops, tanks,

helicopters, artillery pieces, and rocket launchers) at the

critical places and at the proper time. "Decisive victory" will

be defined in terms of the objective, which may be anything from

the destruction of an enemy force to the stabilization of a local

situation brought about by natural disaster or ethnic and tribal

conflict, curbing the excesses of intrastate conflict, or

countering the more traditional forms of interstate aggression.

Finally, the modernized Information Age Army, Force XXI,

must be capable of dominating and winning the maneuver battle.

Through dominating maneuver, the right forces will be gotten to

the right place at the right time to effect the enemy's

operational and strategic collapse. The key to winning on the

fluid and multidimensional battlefield of the 21st century will

be simultaneity; the simultaneous employment of overwhelming

combat power throughout the breadth and depth of the operational

area to paralyze the enemy. Simultaneity is linked to surprise

and the disruption of the opponent's decision cycle. The

objective is, through dominating maneuver, to make the enemy

incapable of responding to a rapid succession of initiatives

devised to win quickly and decisively. If the Army does these

things right, the result will be a smaller, highly sophisticated

force, yet one able to overwhelm and defeat a foe superior in

numbers.11

Digitization is one key to unlocking the capabilities of

Force XXI, and the digitized battlefield is becoming a reality.

By integrating advanced technologies into already existing

systems, the Army is upgrading its intelligence gathering and

processing capabilities along with its command and control

mechanisms, tanks, and fighting vehicles. As Andrew Krepinevich

put it, "Establishing information dominance could well be the sin


qua non for effective military operations in future conflicts."12

Barring an unforeseen technological leap of fantastic

dimensions, no single technological advance is likely to foster a

revolution in military affairs–at least not by itself. Rather it

is the integration of capabilities, those that exist along with

new ones as they arise, that makes for an RMA. War is still a

matter of ideas, emotions and will. Weapons and technology are

tools. The masters of the art of war in the 21st century will be

those individuals who can put capabilities together in innovative

ways to achieve tactical, operational and strategic objectives.

For instance, the first blow in the Gulf War was struck by nine

Army Apache AH-64 attack helicopters from the 101st Airborne

Division (Air Assault) led by three U.S. Air Force MH-53J Pave

Low helicopters from the 1st Special Operations Wing. Just before

H-Hour, the helicopters, organized as Task Force Normandy, flew a

long, earth-hugging mission to blast two early warning radar

sites deep inside Iraq. The MTR provided the technological

advances in night-and-low-light vision devices and precise

navigational capability resulting from space-based systems such

as the Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites.13 What

indicates an RMA is the operational integration that brings

together the technologies available to Air Force and Army

helicopters and employs them to pave the way for what was

predominantly an Air Force and Navy air campaign.

Looking Back as We Look Ahead.

History is the only reliable guide mankind has to the

future. Nearly a century ago, A.T. Mahan wrote, "While many of

the conditions of war vary from age to age with the progress of

weapons, there are certain teachings in the school of history

which remain constant . . . It is wise to observe things that are

alike, it is also wise to look for things that differ."14

The world is as dangerous today as it was when the Cold War

began. Over the past 50 years, the major peer competitors in the

RMA fostered by the advent of the atomic and nuclear era managed

to avoid war with each other. Nevertheless, while the United

States was ready for war at the high end of the technological

spectrum, "atomic war, eyeball-to-eyeball and toe-to-toe with the

Rooskies" as Maj. King Kong, the demented B-52 pilot in the movie

"Dr. Strangelove" put it, some 100,000 Americans died in lower


order conflicts from Korea and Vietnam to Lebanon, Grenada,

Panama and the Persian Gulf. In 1962, at the start of the U.S.

commitment to the war in Vietnam, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of

Staff, Army General Lyman L. Lemnitzer claimed that forces

constituted for war in Europe could just as easily fight and win

against guerrillas in Indochina.15 In the Army and the Air Force,

there was a general acceptance of the notion that unconventional

or limited war was merely a subset of the kind of general and

conventional wars for which the services were structured and

equipped. If American forces could fight and prevail over Soviet

or Chinese forces in conventional or nuclear war, they could

certainly win any lesser order conflict quickly and with less

application of more or less the same kind of force.16 In Vietnam

that notion proved tragically flawed.

The end of the Cold War and the dawn of the Information Age

do not mark the advent of a technologically-based millennium of

peace and democracy. Since the Berlin Wall came down in November

and December 1989, the U.S. Army has issued over 700 Purple

Hearts and two Congressional Medals of Honor. That is more Purple

Hearts than were issued at any time between 1946 and 1989 except

when U.S. forces were engaged in Korea and Vietnam.17

Interservice Rivalry.

The current Revolution in Military Affairs, no less than the

one driven by the atomic revolution, brings with it both

opportunities and challenges. In the periods between 1947 and

1950, 1954 and 1960, and from 1961 to 1965, precipitous

technological change and the competition for defense

appropriations drove bitter interservice rivalries. The atomic

bomb and how the services adapted to its implications for

strategy, force structure, weapons acquisition, and doctrine

operated on the one hand. The defense budgets operated on the

other. Between 1947 and 1950 and from 1954 through 1960, the

competition was driven by the atomic revolution and the scarcity

of defense dollars. From 1961 to 1965, interservice rivalries

were the result of an expanding defense budget, a squabble over

roles and missions in Vietnam, and a shift in strategy from one

based on massive retaliation, which favored the Air Force and its

large nuclear retaliatory forces, to one based on flexible

response, which expanded the roles of the other services and

their conventional, nonnuclear forces. Interservice rivalry is a


part of the current RMA as well.

In the U.S. Air Force, from before 1947, an article of faith

has been that offensive strategic air power possesses the virtues

necessary to obtain a complete and unambiguous victory. Strategic

bombing and victory through the decisive use of air power are

concepts precious to air power enthusiasts. The current

international environment, however, no longer favors such a

proposition. Air Force Colonel Richard Szfranski, writing in the

Spring 1995 Joint Forces Quarterly, argues that the end of the

Soviet threat may well mark the end of the Air Force's raison d'

etre as an independent service and that, "Unless the Air Force

becomes the space force, it may not survive beyond 2010."18 Today

the competition over space is only one area in which interservice

rivalry is intense.

Additionally, the Military Technical Revolution has provided

the weapons that conceivably could turn the theory of strategic

paralysis into reality. Theoretically, the more technologically

advanced the enemy, the more susceptible the nation and its armed

forces will be to the kind of attack that will result in

strategic paralysis. Retired Air Force Colonel John A. Warden is

the most articulate advocate of this kind of warfare. He has

posited a definition of the enemy as a system of five "strategic"

rings. Listed in descending importance to the proper functioning

of the enemy system, these rings are as follows: leadership,

organic essentials (i.e., electrical power), infrastructure,

population, and fielded military forces. According to Warden, air

power is uniquely qualified to bring quick and decisive victory

because planes and missiles can transcend earthly barriers of

distance and topography to strike at the innermost ring—

leadership—to incapacitate the opponent by destroying his brain:

the command and control system. If, for political or moral

reasons decapitation is not possible, then air power can induce

strategic paralysis by attacking the outer rings to achieve a

desired level of immobility or insensibility consistent with the

objective intent.19

The MTR and the integration of precision-guided munitions

(PGMs) with the F-117A stealth fighter and into the B-1 and B-2

bomber fleets is to the current RMA what the wedding of the

atomic bomb with the Convair B-36 intercontinental bomber was to

the previous Revolution in Military Affairs. The Air Force's


dominance of the budget then was based upon the implicit

contention that its long range nuclear delivery capability made

it the dominant and decisive force in war. Air power enthusiasts

and advocates of the air campaign as depicted by John Warden have

gained impetus from the perceived "decisiveness" of air power in

the Gulf War. While air power was, indeed, critical to the final

outcome and pivotal to the success of the Allied forces, it was

not decisive.

The Army, for its part, argues that historically wars are

won on the ground and that it is the only service capable of

prompt and sustained land combat operations. It portrays Force

XXI as a technically-enhanced land combat force that can deter

potential adversaries and protect U.S. interests around the

globe. Land power advocates claim that only the Army has the

assets and staying power to operate over the entire battlefield

anywhere in the world. While successful military operations

involve controlling the air, sea and land, a nation's ability to

impose its will can only be assured if it is capable of

controlling the land.20

Currently the services, but especially the Army and the Air

Force, are engaged in a spirited dialogue over roles and

missions. Both services are in competition for funds in a

decreasing defense budget while they are also modernizing and

restructuring their forces to accommodate new technologies. For

the present, however, an unfortunate result of the current RMA

will be heated interservice rivalries.

Technological Backfire.

Technology is extremely seductive and it is easy to get

caught up in the exotic potential of the RMA. But in pursuit of a

new way of making war, one cannot allow technological romanticism

to engender visions of a mystical silver bullet which promises to

sanitize war by erasing its human dimensions. The tendency to

chase silver bullets was evident in the Vietnam War. At the

beginning of the war, during the advisory phase, Operation Ranch

Hand was one such endeavor. This involved the aerial spraying of

chemical herbicides like Agent Orange on the jungles and mangrove

swamps of South Vietnam and Laos in an effort to deny cover to

the enemy. The sad result was threefold. First, defoliation did

not work very well and the ability of the enemy to conceal its


movements was not inhibited. Second, the ill-effects of aerial

spray, not only on the people and the ecology of Indochina but

also on American troops, fed the more exotic claims of the antiwar movement, especially the contention that a cruel and unusual

technology had been unleashed on a peaceful and peace-loving

people. Third, there is the actual medical legacy of affected

veterans–American and Vietnamese.21

University of Rochester historian, Professor Loren Baritz,

in his book Backfire: Vietnam, The Myths That Made Us Fight, The

Illusions That Helped Us Lose, The Legacy That Haunts Us Still,

argued that, "One of the major by-products of technology is faith

in technology."22 In the Spring 1995 Airpower Journal, the authors

of an article, "Weapons of Mass Protection," maintained that,

"Acquiring weapons of mass protection, nonlethal, anti-lethal,

and information warfare weapons, and integrating them into

current force capabilities, may be the way that airpower can

secure for years . . . its primacy in strategic utility."23 The

Gulf War, with the rapidity of victory and low casualty rates,

may or may not be repeated in the next large-scale engagement of

American forces. But whether it is or not, one can count upon the

expectation of many Americans that it should be. And if the war

is bloody and long rather than quick and relatively casualtyfree, unless the objectives are clearly worth the cost, public

support will erode quickly.

Our national fascination with technology in the 1950s

transferred to Vietnam in the 1960s, where the Air Force, and to

a lesser degree the Army, searched in vain for a technological

silver bullet. Cluster bombs, napalm, and herbicide defoliants,

and the first manifestations of the current MTR, the electronic

battlefield, laser and electro-optically guided bombs, all

promised much. While some delivered a good deal of destruction,

in the end technologically- sophisticated weapons proved no

substitute for strategy. What technology did do, however, was to

enforce, compel, and solidify the military's managerial mindset.

Vietnam was the best-managed war in American history;

unfortunately it was also a well-managed defeat.

From PRIDE to TQM.

Resources are an integral part of the equation in affecting

the RMA. The defense budget decline is not an insurmountable


barrier. Historically, revolutions in military affairs have

occurred during times of both plentiful and scarce economic

resources. Indeed, the last two RMAs occurred during the Great

Depression and after the Korean War; both were times of

constrained budgets. In some ways poverty is the father of

ingenuity.

In the seminal 1992 study of the MTR conducted for the

Office of Net Assessment, Andrew Krepinevich made the point that

the U.S. Navy developed the concept of carrier task forces, the

U.S. Marines worked out the basics of amphibious warfare, and the

Army Air Corps laid the theoretical foundations for strategic

bombing during the Great Depression.24 In Germany, despite

economic chaos and the restrictions imposed by the Versailles

Treaty, by 1935 the theoretical and operational foundations for

blitzkrieg had been established. Furthermore, as the German

experience indicates, frequently the RMA is not a matter of some

revolutionary technological breakthrough, but the development of

doctrines and organizations that can integrate existing

technologies in a new and innovative way.

Taken together, however, technology and management

historically have constituted a challenging combination for the

U.S. Department of Defense. The managerial ethos, engendered

during World War II and institutionalized in the 1950s, took hold

in the 1960s. High-tech weapons demand effective and efficient

management, from initial research and development through

procurement and deployment. Management depends upon bureaucracies

to insure efficiency, and bureaucracies abhor the unpredictable

and the uncontrollable. Therefore, managers and bureaucrats will

promote the objectivity of the quantifiable at the expense of the

subjectivity of the creative but unpredictable.

The Vietnam War solidified the managerial ethos making it

fundamentally a part of the value systems of all the services,

but especially that of the Air Force and, to only a lesser

degree, that of the Army, Navy and Marines. In the Air Force the

managerial approach to warfare evidenced itself in the way

success was measured in Operation Commando Hunt, the aerial

interdiction campaign along the Ho Chi Minh Trail from November

1968 to April 1972. The truck count, a running compilation of

trucks damaged or destroyed by air power, was an effort to assess

victory in terms of statistical success. The Army equivalent was


the infamous body count, whereby any ground operation in Vietnam

might be evaluated in terms of the number of enemy supposedly

killed or wounded. In both cases, however, statistics proved to

be no substitute for strategy and what the Air Force and the Army

succeeded best at was fooling themselves into thinking that they

were winning the war.25

The tendency to confuse efficiency with effectiveness

continued after the Vietnam War and through the 1980s. Military

managers devised a succession of efficiency-oriented programs

with snappy acronyms like "Zero Defects" and Professional Results

in Daily Efforts (PRIDE). Management by Objective (MBO) and the

"Productivity Program" took root in the mid-1980s. Zero Defects,

PRIDE, and MBO were management systems devised for Industrial Age

military bureaucracies. The RMA is changing the military

bureaucracy just as the Information Age is changing industrial

and business bureaucracies. In the armed forces as well as in

industry, middle management positions are disappearing as their

main functions, information transfer and worker supervision

decline in importance. Computers transfer a great deal of

information digitally by "talking" to one another. In accordance

with Total Quality Management (TQM) principles, workers are more

self-regulating. Staffs and staff responsibilities are changing

as bureaucratic spans of control grow while organizations become

flatter and "process action teams" increase in importance.26 The

challenge to the military is to retain its system of values and

to enforce traditional respect for rank and order while changing

the hierarchial system of command.

If TQM is to the Information Age what PRIDE and MBO were to

the Industrial Age, there is reason to be cautious as the Army

and the other services transform their structures. The Department

of Defense has adopted total quality management concepts with an

enthusiasm that perhaps exceeds that accorded to earlier systems.

Throughout the services, officers and non-commissioned officers

have accepted the contentions made by W. Edwards Deming that TQM

is largely responsible for the post-war Japanese economic

recovery.27 After almost total destruction of Japan's industrial

base by bombing in World War II, the Japanese auto industry rose

like Phoenix from the ashes to achieve phenomenal success. The

program has been oversold to the military by people who forget

that Japan had the advantage of rebuilding its industrial base

and structuring it to incorporate the latest technologies. It


also ignores the unique characteristics of Japanese culture and

society that facilitated rapid adaptation to the Industrial and

Information revolutions over the past 120 years.

Parts of the military that resemble civilian industry could

profit from a businesslike culture; acquisitions and finance in

particular. But TQM may be as threatening to military culture as

Zero Defects, PRIDE, and MBO were earlier. War is, and in the

information age is liable to remain, a bloody, horrific, and

passionate undertaking. The bottom line is always victory, and

that sometimes comes at an exorbitant price in human suffering

and resources. The Defense Department's general managers, and the

services' manager generals, did not serve the nation well when

they took the world's premier Industrial Age military to war (and

defeat) in Vietnam. In the RMA we must ensure against raising up

a generation of leadership composed of techno-wonk managers.28

The RMA, Force XXI and the Future.

Reservations aside, the American military, especially the

Army and the Air Force, are embracing the RMA. As the services

move into the Tofflerian Third Wave as Information Age

militaries, they are preparing to fight other Information Age,

Third Wave armed forces. Just as it was necessary for the Air

Force, Army, Navy and Marines to be prepared to fight their

Soviet counterparts during the Cold War, it may be just as

prudent to prepare for the most potent possible future threat.

But will being able to fight in the Third Wave also ensure that

the armed forces will be able to fight effectively against First

and Second Wave foes? Historically, the record has not been good.

Since World War II, U.S. military failures have come at the

hands of opponents who had little or no air or sea forces and

whose ground forces were composed largely of light infantry.

During the Korean War, and on those occasions during the Vietnam

War when the enemy was good enough to confront American forces

conventionally, they were almost always drubbed. First and Second

Wave forces, however, often prevailed over first-class Industrial

Age forces when they employed a combination of unconventional

strategy and tactics with a willingness to sustain higher

casualty rates. Defense analyst Dr. Jeffrey Record, in a paper

delivered at the Army War College, made the point that American

forces were stalemated in Korea, defeated in Vietnam, and


humiliated in Lebanon and Somalia when their opponents took the

strategic initiative and forced the kind of fight where high

firepower and air power could be used effectively.29 The French

experience in Indochina and the Soviet experience in Afghanistan

were similar. Even in the Information Age, the dialectic is at

work. There may well be another Mao Tse Tung or another Vo Nguyen

Giap capable of developing a counterstrategy or devising a

tactical solution that may reduce or even eliminate any Third

Wave force's supposed advantage in Information Age warfare. Given

the inevitability that this will occur, any strategy that may be

developed during the RMA that does not anticipate and plan for

these counterstrategies will not serve the nation well.

Then there is what Krepinevich described as the "dreadnought

factor." What if the United States is not the nation that makes

the next dramatic technological leap? What if someone else takes

that giant step that renders everything else irrelevant? As the

future unfolds it may be easier to do that than in the past,

especially if the breakthrough involves harnessing the mind to an

already available, off-the-shelf technology. What if one, two, or

ten exceedingly bright and innovative techno-wonks figure out how

to electronically "blow up" the New York Stock Exchange or the

Federal Reserve System? What would be an appropriate response?30

There is danger here in cultural myopia. The atomic bomb may

have been invented in the United States, but it might not have

been if Albert Einstein and others had remained in Germany. We

must keep in mind that we are raising up a generation of

Americans dependent on hand-held calculators to do their basic

math.

Finally, the possibility of the rise of a peer force

competitor cannot be discounted. Despite political instability

and economic chaos, Russia is still moving ahead in its military

modernization programs. Despite the loss of the Ukraine, it is

rich in natural resources and its population has produced an

abundance of premier physicists. The collapse of the Soviet Union

will be more likely to affect Russia's ability to engage in the

RMA than it will to continue its participation in the MTR. If

Russia reconstructs itself politically, especially in the form of

a military dictatorship, its participation in the RMA could bring

it to peer status with the United States relatively quickly.31

Currently, other than Russia, the only nations that can


participate even partially in the RMA are France, Germany, the

United Kingdom, Israel, and Japan. They are friendly.

It takes more than technology to become a full participant

in the RMA.32 The national and military culture have to be

accommodating to change and decentralized execution. For

instance, while Japanese business culture may be able to operate

under TQM principles, the Chinese might find it culturally more

difficult to accept and employ. The technological barriers to

full participation are themselves significant, and only a

handfull of countries have the necessary advanced data-processing

systems, space-based sensors, and access to usable stealth

technologies–to name a few required basics.33 Not many nations

possess the right combination of culture, wealth, and access to

technologies. And military cultures may be more resistant to

change than the societies which support them.

But the number of those nations that can participate in the

MTR in a limited way is much larger and the list is growing.

Today some 20 nations can produce precision-guided munitions.

That number may well double within a decade. And the pace of

technological evolution is likely to increase, with the

possibility of a dramatic breakthrough on the part of someone

other than ourselves.

If and when an Information Age force meets a peer

competitor, contesting forces could cancel each other out at the

electronic level early on. Alternatively, one side may

electronically zap its opponent in the cyberwar equivalent of a

Pearl Harbor. What then would be the alternatives?

If both sides cancel one another out, the alternatives are

twofold. First, a war of attrition might develop, perhaps

resembling what happened on the Western Front in World War I.

Then the two sides are likely to fight to exhaustion, especially

if the leadership on both sides has been so focused on

Information Age warfare that they have forgotten—or never

learned—basic military strategy or the operational art extant in

the 1980s and 1990s. The second alternative would be to fight a

Second Wave or even First Wave kind of war. The side which can

fight at that lower level, at the Industrial Age or Agrarian Age

level where superior strategy, innovative tactics, and human

courage and determination are the critical—often decisive—


factors, will win. The danger is that in the current RMA we may

be neglecting the warrior skills and relinquishing the kind of

military culture that would be needed to pursue warfare at the

gut level.

If one peer competitor gains an immediate advantage by

establishing cyberspace dominance and Information Age superiority

over the other, there again will be two alternatives. First,

surrender is always an available solution. Second, if the

victimized forces are able to fight at the lower level, and if

they can take the offensive, they may well win. There is no

reason to believe that in the Information Age victory will not

accrue—as it has in the past—to the side which develops the

superior strategy and which has the greater capacity for

enduring suffering. Historically, that has not always been the

side which has possessed the edge in technology and weaponry.

In conclusion, strategic thinkers in all the services need

to address the nature of war in the Information Age. The U.S.

Army, and the military in general, still view war as combat—the

clash of forces to establish superiority on land, in the air, or

at sea. War in the future may well be waged in any one or all

three of these arenas but it may also be fought across the

spectrum to include economic warfare, ecological warfare, and

terrorism. Clashing titans on the battlefield may be the

exception rather than the rule, with future war dominated instead

by wire-heads on the Internet. That brings us back to the central

question of strategy: how do we balance ends, ways and means in

the Information Age?

ENDNOTES

1. General Gordon R. Sullivan and Lieutenant Colonel James

M. Dubik, Land Warfare in the 21st Century, Carlisle Barracks,

PA: Strategic Studies Institute, February 1993, pp. 22-24.

2. A similar argument is made by John Lukacs in The End of

the Twentieth Century and the End of the Modern Age, New York:

Ticknor and Fields, 1993, pp. 4-9. Lukacs, however, claims that

the 20th century lasted only 75 years, from 1914 to 1989. I would

suggest that World War I was the inevitable result of the FrancoPrussian War, much as World War II was historically determined by

the First World War and the Versailles Treaty.


3. See Alvin and Heidi Toffler, War and Anti-War: Survival

at the Dawn of the 21st Century, Boston: Little, Brown and

Company, 1993, pp. 15-17.

4. See Richard A. Preston and Sidney F. Wise, Men in Arms:

A History of Warfare and its Interrelationships with Western

Society, 4th edition. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979,

pp. 238-250; and Andrew F. Krepinevich, "The Military-Technical

Revolution: A Preliminary Assessment," Office of Net Assessment

unpublished manuscript, July 1992, pp. 2-5.

5. National Military Strategy of the United States of

America: A Strategy of Warfare and Its Interrelationships with

Western Society, Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office,

February 1995, p. 17. Hereafter referred to as National Military

Strategy, 1995.

6. Sullivan quoted in David Wood "Unlikely Radical Inspires

Army to Do More With Less," Sunday Patriot News, Harrisburg,

Pennsylvania, April 2, 1995, p. A-12.

7. Allan R. Millet and Peter Maslowski, For the Common

Defense: A Military History of the United States of America, New

York: The Free Press, 1984, pp. 273-289 and 299-325.

8. National Military Strategy, 1995, p. 2.

9. See The Honorable Togo D. West, Jr., and General Gordon

R. Sullivan, A Statement on the Posture of the United States

Army, Fiscal Year 1996, Washington: U. S. Government Printing

Office, April 1995, p. 55; and Sullivan and Dubik, War in the

Information Age, p. 19.

10. General Gordon R. Sullivan, "America's Army: Strategic

Force for Today and Tomorrow," Defense 95, Washington: U.S.

Government Printing Office, April 1995, p. 14; and conversation

with Professor Doug Lovelace, Strategic Studies Institute, May 3,

1995.

11. See General Gordon R. Sullivan and Lieutenant Colonel

Anthony M. Coroalles, The Army in the Information Age, Carlisle

Barracks, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, March 1995, pp. 7-8


and pp. 12-13; and West and Sullivan, The Army Posture Statement,

1996, p. 57.

12. Krepinevich, "The Military-Technical Revolution," p. 22.

13. Final Report to Congress: Conduct of the Persian Gulf

War, Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1992, p. 115.

14. A.T. Mahan, The Influence of Seapower Upon History, 12th

edition, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1980, p. 2.

15. JCSM-33-62, Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense, 13

January 1962, Subject: The Strategic Importance of the Southeast

Asian Mainland," in The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department

History of the United States Decisionmaking on Vietnam, Vol. 2,

Senator Mike Gravel edition, Boston: Beacon Press, 1971, pp. 663-

666.

16. The Army and the Air Force were never truly committed to

the counter-guerrilla or, as it was known after 1961,

"counterinsurgency" effort in Vietnam. The leadership in both

services seemed convinced that once regular forces were

committed, the war could be won. See John F. Loosbrook, "What

Kind of War?" Air Force Magazine, November 1956, pp. 44-49; and

Lieutenant Colonel Charles E. Trumbo, Jr., Director of Plans, 2d

Air Division, interview with Joseph W. Grainger, Ton Son Nhut Air

Base, Vietnam, July 13, 1963, Interview No. 271, USAF Oral

History Program, U.S. Air Force Historical Research Center,

Maxwell Air Force Base, AL.

17. Sullivan, Defense 95, p. 8.

18. Colonel Richard Szfranski, Joint Forces Quarterly,

Spring 1995, p. 79, emphasis in original.

19. See Colonel John A. Warden, III, "The Enemy as a

System," Airpower Journal, Spring 1995, p. 43; and Major David S.

Fadok, "John Boyd and John Warden: Air Power's Quest for

Strategic Paralysis," Maxwell AFB, AL: Air University Press,

February 1995, p. 2.

20. "Report of the Secretary of the Army," in William J.

Perry, Annual Report to the President and Congress, Washington:


U.S. Government Printing Office, February 1995, p. 279.

21. William A. Buckingham, Jr., Operation Ranch Hand: The

Air Force and Herbicides in Southeast Asia, 1961-1971,

Washington, DC: Office of Air Force History, pp. 183-185.

22. Loren Baritz, Backfire: Vietnam, The Myths That Made Us

Fight, The Illusions That Helped Us Lose, The Legacy That Haunts

Us Still, New York: William Morrow and Company, 1984, p. 32.

23. Chris Morris, Janet Morris, and Thomas Baines, "Weapons

of Mass Protection: Nonlethality, Information Warfare, and

Airpower in the Age of Chaos," Airpower Journal, Spring 1995, p.

16.

24. Krepinevich, "The Military-Technical Revolution," p. 34.

25. See Raphael Littauer and Norman Uphoff, editors, The Air

War in Indochina, Revised Edition, Cornell War Study Group,

Boston: Beacon Press, 1971, pp. 67-75; and USAF Operations in

Laos: January 1, 1970-June 30, 1971, Honolulu: Headquarters

Pacific Air Forces (PACAF), May 31, 1972, pp. 25-27, in USAF

Historical Research Center, Maxwell AFB, AL, K717.0432.6.

26. Sullivan and Dubik, War in the Information Age, p. 8.

27. Too much credit may be given to TQM and not enough to

Curtis LeMay. Japanese heavy industry, totally destroyed during

the war, was rebuilt by American largess and that rebuilding had

the advantage of beginning at a higher level of technological

sophistication. In that regard, the bombs of XXth Air Force had

as much to do with the post-war Japanese recovery as W. Edwards

Deming.

28. Dennis M. Drew, "Air Force Should Pull the Plug on its

TQM," Air Force Times, September 26, 1994, p. 2.

29. See Larry E. Cable, Unholy Grail: The U.S. and the Wars

in Vietnam, 1965-68, London: Routledge, 1991, pp. 33-35; and

Jeffrey Record, Ready for What and Modernized Against Whom?,

Carlisle Barracks, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, April 1995,

p. 7.


30. I want to acknowledge the ideas and thoughts of my

colleagues Dr. Steven Metz and Dr. William Johnsen. They are on

the cutting edge of thinking in this area. I am grateful to their

patience and generosity in sharing many of the ideas expressed

throughout this portion of the paper.

31. "The Defense Technology Gap," unpublished speech by

Senator Joseph Lieberman, March 3, 1995.

32. It is difficult to say for sure that only "modern" and

technically-advanced nations can participate in the MTR and RMA.

Germany, in the throws of political and economic chaos, and

limited by the Versailles Treaty, would not have been a logical

candidate to bring together the elements of an RMA by laying the

foundations for blitzkrieg in the 1920s and early 1930s.

33. Krepinevich, "The Military-Technical Revolution," p. 40.
U.S. ARMY WAR COLLEGE

Major General Richard A. Chilcoat

Commandant

*****

STRATEGIC STUDIES INSTITUTE

Director

Colonel Richard H. Witherspoon

Director of Research

Dr. Earl H. Tilford, Jr.

Author

Dr. Earl H. Tilford, Jr.

Editor

Mrs. Marianne P. Cowling

Secretary

Ms. Rita A. Rummel

*****

Composition

Mr. Daniel B. Barnett

Cover Artist

Mr. James E. Kistler