Contemporary Military Innovation

Between Anticipation and Adaption

Dima Adamsky, Kjell Inge Bjerga

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136282751
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book explores contemporary military innovation, with a particular focus on the balance between anticipation and adaption.

The volume examines contemporary military thought and the doctrine that evolved around the thesis of a transformation in the character of war. Known as the Information-Technology Revolution in Military Affairs (IT-RMA), this innovation served as an intellectual foundation for the US defence transformation from the 1990s onwards. Since the mid-1990s, professional ideas generated within the American defence milieu have been further disseminated to military communities across the globe, with huge impact on the conduct of warfare.

With chapters written by leading scholars in this field, this work sheds light on RMAs in general and the IT-RMA in the US, in particular. The authors analyse how military practice and doctrines were developed on the basis of the IT-RMA ideas, how they were disseminated, and the implications of them in several countries and conflicts around the world.

This book will be of much interest to students of strategic studies, defence studies, war and technology, and security studies in general.

1 Introduction

Dmitry (Dima) Adamsky and Kjell Inge Bjerga

Contemporary military thought and innovation evolved around the thesis about the transformation in the character of war. Known in professional circles as an Information Technology Revolution in Military Affairs (IT-RMA), it served as an intellectual foundation for the U.S. defense transformation. Moreover, the IT-RMA became an umbrella term for a whole raft of military visions, doctrines and concepts, such as ‘effect-based operations’ and ‘network-centric warfare’. Since the mid-1990s professional ideas generated within the American defense milieu were further disseminated to military communities across the globe. RMA turned into an integral part of the professional military lexicon worldwide. In many ways an intellectual history of the IT-RMA encapsulates the development of contemporary military thought.

Several unique features of the IT-RMA make it relevant and important for scholars and students of strategic studies, and for decision-makers dealing with strategy and doctrine development as well as defense planning and procurements. The intellectual history of the IT-RMA is quite puzzling. The Soviets, the Americans and the Israelis, three pioneers in the field, approached this innovation in quite different ways. Whereas in the American and Israeli cases the cultivation of the technological seeds preceded the maturation of the conceptual ones, in the Soviet case theoretical activity preceded technological procurement and combat experience. The intellectual history of this innovation suggests that cultural, ideational, institutional and personal factors significantly conditioned the development of modern military theory.¹ This book aims to reflect these complexities and to explore contemporary military thought and innovation from various angles, focusing on the difficult balance between anticipation and adaptation in these matters.

In the opening chapter Azar Gat situates the IT-RMA discussion in the broader historical context of the technology-driven military innovations of the industrial age. The chapter discusses three revolutionary waves of the civil-military technological change which ‘have been nothing less than the defining developments of modernity’. The First Industrial Revolution, which centered on the steam engine and on major advances in metallurgy, machine tools, and communications, profoundly increased strategic mobility and generated a revolution in firearms. The Second Industrial Revolution was dominated by chemicals, electric power and the internal combustion engine, which introduced tactical mobility and armored protection on to the battlefield. Finally, Gat’s survey covers the latest revolutionary breakthroughs of the twentieth century — the Nuclear and the Information Technology Revolutions; he also explores the emerging revolution in WMD, specifically devoting attention to biotechnology. Gat identifies traits and fundamental problems that are common to all these revolutions. Transformations in military regimes are a dialectical phenomena: ‘force multipliers’ which produce one-sided battlefield results are usually matched by ‘canceling out-effects’ as rivals adopt countermeasures. The putative ‘growing lethality’ of military technology is balanced by ‘exponentially increased protective power’. The growing weight of advanced hardware does not become prohibitively expensive. While one can only be more or less successful in predicting the contours of the future, there is a real-time need to work out the exact practical implications of the expected changes in war and to ‘devise concrete programs of transformation in the organization and doctrine of the armed forces.’ Gat’s chapter highlights the complex and nuanced nature of revolutions in military affairs, and explains why armed forces are sometimes ‘inclined to prepare for the last, rather than the next, war’.

What is the role of military doctrine in the era of wartime adaptation and bottom-up learning? What does defense transformation mean for the experts charged with producing military doctrines? How is military doctrine to be kept elastic enough to be able to address the different domains of warfare and endless scope of missions without deteriorating into parsimonious definitions that will prove banal, when theory meets practice? Is military doctrine, as a conceptual tool that organizes behavior, a relic of the past? In his chapter, Harald Høiback deals with these practical questions while situating them in the broader context of strategic theory.

If one accepts Plekhanov’s claim about the role of the individual in history, the name most closely associated with the IT-RMA would probably be that of Andrew W. Marshall. Stephen Rosen discusses the impact of the Office on Net Assessment, headed by Mr. Marshall, on the ideas which dominated strategic studies and professional military discourse in the U.S. and worldwide in the last decades. Rosen demonstrates the role that Mr. Marshall played, along with Albert Wohlstetter, in the course of this military innovation, and explains why Mr. Marshall’s thinking was more comprehensive than that of the Soviet theoreticians who inspired him, and broader than that of many in the American defense milieu. Based on generally available material and his own impressions, Rosen’s chapter outlines the dominant American perspective on the technological changes, the particular input brought to this matter by Mr. Marshall, and describes ‘what the Office of Net Assessment did to try to promote thinking by the American military on this subject, and what the American military did in response’.

In Chapter 5, Antulio J. Echevarria outlines the most important developments in American military theory prior to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The American military is often perceived as being practically minded with only a limited interest in theoretical approaches. Echevarria, however, argues that there exists an American military tradition emphasizing the importance of operational theory and doctrine. He then discusses the complex interaction between operational experiences and the evolution of such theories and doctrines. With operation Desert Storm in the first Gulf War as a point of departure, he draws attention to the institutional aspects of this interaction in the 1990s. Inter-service rivalry proved to be a strong driving force behind the development in theory and doctrine during this decade, resulting in different schools of thought emerging within the American military. In particular the interpretation of operational experiences varied significantly between the Army and the Air Force.

The IT-RMA stands out in terms of its depth, pace and scope of diffusion. This is particularly impressive given the traditional conceptual conservatism of military organizations. The U.S. RMA terminology was emulated by military organizations worldwide and created a normative view of a modern conventional military. In Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Russia, military professionalism became associated with the adaptation of, or at least acquaintance with, the RMA school of thought. This book demonstrates this trend through two very contrasting case studies: diffusion of the military theory to the professional community of a superpower — the case of China; and the emulation of the RMA by the small state military — the case of Norway.

Jacqueline Newmyer Deal analyzes contemporary Chinese variations on the RMA theme. Her chapter seeks to capture the essence of modern Chinese military thought, identifies its main postulates and discusses the unique lexicon of the Chinese RMA. Newmyer Deal refers to sources of inspiration, intellectual foundations, strategic tradition and frames of reference informing Chinese military theoreticians. Relying on the rich collection of primary sources, she distils the unique characteristics of the Chinese RMA that distinguishes it from other innovations under a similar heading. Newmyer Deal puts forward a critical analysis of Chinese military thought and estimates the impact of the Chinese RMA on the correlation of forces between Bejing and Washington.

Military organizations often copy colleagues from abroad that they subjectively perceive as successful and victorious. These emulations are often conducted in an uncritical manner, so that the innovation does not necessarily fit the operational requirements and cultural environment of the receiving nation. Kjell Inge Bjerga and Torunn Laugen Haaland identify this pathology by taking a closer look at the Norwegian Armed Forces since the 1990s. They found that doctrinal evolution in Norway was detached from combat experience and operational necessities; it was mainly shaped by concepts inspired by the Great Powers, specifically by the U.S. RMA-based ideas. Bjerga’s and Haaland’s findings resonate with a history of uncritical emulation of U.S. practices by the Israeli Defense Forces, recently discussed by several scholars, and they suggest the existence of an intriguing pattern.

Contemporary military thought and innovation is a child of several epochs. Using Rosen’s classic terminology, the IT-RMA concept was born as a ‘wartime innovation’ in the context of symmetrical-conventional Cold War contingency. It was boosted intellectually as a ‘peace time innovation’, facing a somewhat different set of operational challenges.³ Eventually the RMA ideas were tested and modified as a ‘transformation under fire’, but against an enemy of a completely different nature. Focusing on the enemy’s nature, the chapter by Itai Brun and Carmit Valensi brings to the research agenda an under-discussed phenomenon of the ‘Other RMA’. Brun and Valensi argue that while military theoreticians on both sides of the Atlantic engaged in producing revolutionary concepts, a parallel school of military thought originated within several state and non-state strategic communities in the Middle East. What scholars tend to see today as the theory and practice of asymmetrical or hybrid warfare and as a countermeasure to the IT-RMA, Brun and Valensi dub the ‘Other RMA’. Utilizing primary sources in Arabic and Farsi, they argue that this parallel innovation has its own anthology. They uncover its intellectual sources and demonstrate how these two streams of military thought, the IT-RMA and the O-RMA, have engaged each other operationally in actual combat since the late 1990s.

Indeed, most of the IT-RMA militaries found themselves on battlefields that did not fit the visions of the idealized RMA and were forced to significantly modify their concepts of operations and adjust them to current security environments. Historically, most of the defense transformation ideas were generated deductively and were disseminated in a top-down manner. However, when this innovation turned into ‘transformation under fire’, significant intellectual energy and conceptual insights originated from the operational echelons on the ground. Utilizing unique primary sources, Theo Farrell and James Russell look into the interplay of RMA theory with actual operational practice, and examine how the bottom-up (battlefield) wartime learning process significantly informs a professional approach to warfare.

Theo Farrell shows that military innovation is not always a necessary factor for an improvement of operational performance or for a major victory in war. Analyzing British combat experience in Afghanistan from 2006–2009, Farrell distils a more definite requirement for operational improvement — military adaptation. He separates this concept from the term innovation and suggests military adaptation as a separate theory for scholars of strategic studies. James Russell carries out a similar theoretical mission on a different empirical battlefield. He uncovers the sources of adaptation and innovation of the American forces by exploring their recent counterinsurgency experience in two Iraqi provinces. He found that the lion’s share of the transformation of the tactical units was informed by organic, ground-up learning, which was not always in accord with the initial, top-down doctrinal expectations.

The critique of the IT-RMA became an essential driver for the development of the modern military theory. Current theoretical debates go beyond initial discussions of whether the recent transformation in the nature of warfare represents a revolutionary or an evolutionary discontinuity in military affairs, an issue debated vigorously following the publication of Stephen Biddle’s renowned Military Power.⁴ Today the critiques blame the proponents of the RMA for self-delusion, arguing that they outlined the preferred way of war and then assumed that the preference was relevant. Utilizing empirical evidence from the recent American campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, Biddle shows in his chapter how ideas of defense transformation face difficulties during the most frequent types of modern warfare (counterinsurgency, and stability and support operations), arguing that the RMA thesis might be invalid even for major conventional combat.

While Biddle bases his criticism on an analysis of recent operational evidence, Rolf Hobson proposes a critique from the perspective of a scholar of the RMA’s intellectual history. In the early 1990s, argues Hobson, American theoreticians of the IT-RMA enquired into the historical examples of revolutionary innovations in military affairs, to inform their thinking about the emerging military regime. The examples from inter-war innovations in Europe, particularly the case of the German Blitzkrieg doctrine, fascinated them, and the lessons they learned improved their ability to conceptualize the RMA that was under way. Dealing with the case of Blitzkrieg as a frame of reference for the American theoreticians in the 1990s, Hobson argues that from the outset this example was based on outdated or irrelevant historical interpretations. Hobson refers the reader to the growing wave of revisionist literature on Blitzkrieg that devalues this supposed doctrine as a credible example of an historical RMA. Without necessarily disqualifying the IT-RMA thesis per se, Hobson argues that the most important historical precedent it cites is in fact an illustration created in its own image.

Andrew W. Marshall, the luminary of the American defense milieu, repeatedly emphasized the intellectual challenge associated with the development of military thought. Foreseeing an RMA is not a talisman for military victory, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contemporary Military Innovation
• Cass Military Studies
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and table
• List of Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The ‘revolution in military affairs’ (RMA) as an analytical tool for the interpretation of military history
• 3 What is doctrine?
• 4 The impact of the Office of Net Assessment on the American military in the matter of the revolution in military affairs
• 5 Restoring the primacy of battle: U.S. military theory and the RMA
• 6 The revolution in military affairs with Chinese characteristics
• 7 Doctrinal innovation in a small state
• 8 The revolution in military affairs of the ‘other side’
• 9 Improving in war: Military adaptation and the British in Helmand, 2006–2009
• 10 Innovation in the crucible of war: Counterinsurgency operations in Anbar and Ninewa, Iraq, 2005–2007
• 11 Blitzkrieg, the RMA and defense intellectuals
• 12 Conclusion: Military innovation between anticipation and adaptation
• Bibliography
• Index