Revolution in military affairs

Based on Wikipedia: Revolution in military affairs

In the autumn of 2020, a war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region ended not because one side ran out of soldiers or supplies, but because drones fundamentally changed what was possible. Azerbaijani forces deployed Turkish-made Bayraktar drones and Israeli loitering munitions—weapons that could hover over the battlefield, lock onto Armenian tanks and artillery, and destroy them while streaming video of the kill back to commanders. Armenian forces, equipped with conventional weapons and Soviet-era tactics, found themselves being picked apart from above by an enemy they couldn't see or shoot back at. The ceasefire that followed wasn't negotiated from a position of stalemate. It was brokered because one side had demonstrated that the other couldn't fight back.

This is what military theorists call a revolution in military affairs—the moment when new technologies and tactics render previous ways of fighting obsolete.

The Soviet Origins of an American Idea

The concept didn't originate in Silicon Valley or the Pentagon. It came from an unlikely source: a Soviet marshal named Nikolai Ogarkov, who in the 1970s and 1980s was watching American technological development with growing alarm.

Ogarkov called his idea the Military Technological Revolution, and his concern was straightforward: the Americans were developing precision-guided weapons that could hit targets with unprecedented accuracy. In the Cold War calculus of the time, the Soviet Union relied on overwhelming numbers—more tanks, more troops, more artillery shells—to offset American advantages. But what happens when a single American missile can destroy a Soviet tank with near-certainty? Suddenly, numbers matter less.

The Soviets envisioned a future battlefield transformed by technologies that seem almost quaint now: energy weapons, robots, space-based systems. They believed that by 2015, large ground forces would become less important. Whoever controlled the satellite networks orbiting Earth would control the flow of information, and information would determine who won.

They were roughly right about the timeline. They were precisely right about the importance of information.

The Gulf War Laboratory

The hypothesis was tested in 1991.

When Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded Kuwait, his military was formidable on paper: the fourth-largest army in the world, battle-hardened from eight years of war with Iran, equipped with modern Soviet weapons and dug into defensive positions. American military planners expected a bloody campaign. Some estimates projected tens of thousands of coalition casualties.

The ground war lasted one hundred hours.

What made the Gulf War so lopsided wasn't just that American tanks were better than Iraqi tanks, though they were. It was that American forces could see the battlefield in ways Iraqi forces couldn't imagine. Satellites provided real-time intelligence. Stealth aircraft destroyed Iraqi air defenses and command centers before the ground campaign even began. Precision-guided bombs hit specific buildings, specific vehicles, specific bunkers.

Iraqi commanders couldn't coordinate their forces because their communication networks had been systematically dismantled. Iraqi troops couldn't retreat effectively because the roads were being watched from space. The technological gap wasn't just an advantage; it was a categorical difference in how the two sides experienced the war.

The American military establishment drew what seemed like an obvious conclusion: technology had fundamentally changed warfare. The revolution wasn't coming—it had arrived.

What Revolution Actually Means

Here's where the theory gets complicated, because different people mean different things when they say "revolution in military affairs."

One school of thought focuses on the technology itself: precision weapons, information networks, unmanned systems. In this view, the revolution is about specific capabilities. Can you hit a target from a thousand miles away? Can you see enemy movements in real time? Can you strike without risking your own soldiers?

A second perspective focuses on organizational change. New technology doesn't automatically translate into military advantage—you have to restructure your forces to use it effectively. The telegraph existed before the American Civil War, but it took years for military organizations to figure out how to integrate it into command structures. Similarly, having drones doesn't help if your decision-making processes are still designed for a world without them.

A third view situates the revolution in broader political and economic changes. The end of the Cold War meant that the kind of massive conventional wars the United States and Soviet Union had prepared for seemed less likely. Globalization created new kinds of threats and new kinds of targets. Perhaps the revolution wasn't really about weapons at all, but about what military force was for.

And there's a fourth perspective, voiced by skeptics: maybe there isn't a revolution at all. Military historian Frederick Kagan and defense analyst Michael O'Hanlon pointed out that most of the "revolutionary" technologies used in the Gulf War had been in development for decades. Precision-guided munitions were first used extensively in Vietnam. Stealth technology had been maturing since the 1970s. What looked like a sudden transformation might just be the gradual accumulation of incremental improvements.

The Three-Dimensional Battlefield

To understand what changed, it helps to think about how warfare looked for most of human history.

Armies met on fields. They maneuvered. They fought. The side that could concentrate more force at the decisive point usually won. Geography mattered enormously—rivers, mountains, and fortifications could multiply the effectiveness of defenders. Wars were won by seizing and holding territory.

The airplane changed that.

Within a decade of the Wright brothers' first flight, aircraft were influencing battles. Within four decades, a nation's survival could depend on air combat: Britain's victory in the Battle of Britain in 1940 kept the country in the war when its army had been driven from continental Europe.

By the Second World War, the battlefield had become three-dimensional. Ships could be sunk by aircraft or submarines. Armies could be destroyed from above before they engaged in ground combat. The United States, in particular, developed a way of war that relied heavily on air power to shape the battlefield before ground forces committed.

This trend continued through Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, and beyond. American forces increasingly inflicted damage through air attack. Ground combat still mattered, but it happened in a context where the enemy's communications, logistics, and reinforcements had already been degraded from the air.

What precision weapons did was make this three-dimensional approach vastly more effective. Instead of dropping dozens of bombs hoping one would hit a bridge, you could destroy it with a single missile. Instead of needing hundreds of aircraft for a major strike, you could accomplish the same result with a handful.

The Network-Centric Dream

Admiral William Owens, who served as Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the 1990s, became one of the most influential advocates for what he called a "system of systems" approach to military affairs.

His vision integrated three overlapping capabilities. First: intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance—the ability to see the battlefield. Second: command, control, communications, and computing—the ability to process what you see and direct your forces. Third: precision strike—the ability to destroy what you've identified.

When these systems work together, the result is what theorists call "network-centric warfare." Every soldier, vehicle, and aircraft becomes a node in a vast information network. A drone spots an enemy position. The information flows instantly to commanders. Within minutes—sometimes seconds—a precision strike eliminates the target.

The promise was extraordinary: a military that could see everything, communicate instantly, and strike precisely. Casualties would plummet because you wouldn't need to send soldiers into danger. Wars could be won quickly, decisively, and with minimal loss of life.

In 1999, during the Kosovo War, the United States demonstrated what this looked like in practice. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) conducted an air campaign against Serbian forces without losing a single American life in combat. Critics called it "virtual war"—fighting that seemed almost disconnected from the bloodshed and horror that had defined warfare throughout human history.

The Limits of Revolution

Then came Afghanistan and Iraq.

The initial invasions seemed to confirm everything the revolution's advocates had predicted. The Taliban regime collapsed in weeks. Saddam Hussein's government fell in days. Precision strikes decapitated enemy leadership. Special operations forces, supported by overwhelming air power, achieved results that would have required massive ground armies in earlier eras.

But what came next exposed the theory's limitations.

The United States spent years hunting Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the September 11th attacks, without success. The world's most sophisticated surveillance systems couldn't find one man hiding in the mountains of Pakistan. In Iraq, an insurgency emerged that all the precision weapons in the American arsenal couldn't suppress. Improvised explosive devices—homemade bombs built from artillery shells and cell phone triggers—killed and maimed American soldiers who had been promised a revolution in safety.

The problem wasn't technological. It was conceptual.

The revolution in military affairs was designed for a specific kind of warfare: state-on-state conflict where the goal was to destroy the enemy's military capability. It excelled at finding and destroying tanks, aircraft, ships, and fixed installations. It was far less effective against enemies who didn't present those kinds of targets—guerrillas who blended into civilian populations, insurgents who avoided direct confrontation, terrorists who operated in networks that looked nothing like traditional military organizations.

This asymmetric warfare, as theorists called it, represented the obvious counterstrategy to American technological dominance. If you couldn't match American precision, you avoided situations where precision mattered. If you couldn't compete in information networks, you operated in ways that made information less valuable.

The Human Cost of Distance

There's another critique of the revolution in military affairs that has nothing to do with battlefield effectiveness.

When soldiers fight at close range, they experience the horror of what they're doing. They see the enemies they kill. They witness the destruction they cause. This is psychologically devastating—but it's also, arguably, a feature rather than a bug. The trauma of combat serves as a natural check on the willingness to wage war.

What happens when you remove that experience?

Drone operators sit in air-conditioned facilities thousands of miles from the battlefield. They watch targets through video feeds. They press buttons. People die. Then they drive home to their families.

Some analysts worry that this distance makes war too easy. When killing doesn't feel like killing, the natural human reluctance to take life gets short-circuited. Decisions that should be agonizing become routine. The psychological barriers that have historically limited violence get eroded.

There's also a practical concern: as the number of soldiers exposed to direct combat decreases, the amount of collateral damage doesn't necessarily follow. Studies of tactical strikes suggest that while long-range attacks preserve friendly forces, they may actually increase civilian casualties. The drone operator who can't smell the smoke or hear the screams may be more willing to authorize strikes in ambiguous situations.

Critics call this the dehumanization of warfare. The revolution promised to reduce casualties. It may have just redistributed who bears the cost.

The Price of Revolution

There's a more mundane problem with military revolutions: they're expensive.

The F-35 Lightning II was supposed to be the revolutionary fighter aircraft for the twenty-first century—a stealthy, networked, precision-strike platform that could do almost everything. The program developed the aircraft concurrently with production, rushing to get revolutionary capabilities into service.

The cost penalty for this concurrent approach is estimated at two billion dollars. The aircraft is so expensive to operate that the Air Force began searching for a cheaper alternative almost as soon as the F-35 entered service.

The Navy's USS Gerald R. Ford, the most advanced aircraft carrier ever built, introduced twenty-three new technologies simultaneously. The Chief of Naval Operations later admitted this was a mistake. The ship's weapons elevators, critical systems that move munitions from storage to the flight deck, didn't work properly for years after launch.

The Army's Future Combat Systems program, an ambitious effort to create a networked family of ground vehicles and sensors, was cancelled in 2009 as too ambitious for its time. A subsequent review recommended dissolving the Army's entire research and development command.

Revolution sounds exciting. Evolution might be more practical.

The Current State of Affairs

Despite the setbacks and critiques, the underlying trends haven't reversed.

By 2021, the United States had developed long-range precision fires capable of striking targets more than 1,725 miles away, with initial deployment scheduled for 2023. The Space Development Agency was building a national defense space architecture to support these capabilities—exactly the kind of satellite network the Soviets predicted would become essential back in the 1980s.

The implications are profound. No headquarters, command center, air defense installation, missile battery, or logistics hub belonging to a potential adversary is truly safe. In a major conflict, the United States could systematically dismantle an enemy's military capability before ground forces ever engaged.

China's People's Liberation Army has incorporated revolution in military affairs thinking into its strategic doctrine. So have the militaries of Canada, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Singapore, Taiwan, India, Russia, and Germany. Not every nation has adopted the concept—the infrastructure and investment costs are prohibitive for many—but the ideas Nikolai Ogarkov articulated in the Soviet Union half a century ago have become the common currency of military theory worldwide.

The Doctrine Question

Stephen Biddle, a professor at Columbia University, wrote an influential 2004 book called Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern War that challenged the entire framework.

His argument was simple: doctrine and tactics matter more than technology.

The same weapons in different hands produce radically different results. Well-trained forces using effective tactics can defeat technologically superior opponents. Poorly-led forces with the best equipment in the world can lose to determined enemies with rifles and improvised explosives.

This isn't a new observation. Military history is full of examples where the side with better technology lost: American forces in Vietnam, Soviet forces in Afghanistan, Israeli forces in Lebanon. Technology creates possibilities, but it doesn't guarantee outcomes.

The revolution in military affairs isn't wrong, exactly. But it might be incomplete. It focuses on the tools while underemphasizing the people who use them and the organizations that direct them.

What We Know and What We Don't

So is there a revolution in military affairs or not?

The honest answer is that we're still figuring it out.

What's clear is that the relationship between information, precision, and lethality has fundamentally changed. A soldier today can call in a strike from thousands of miles away with an accuracy that would have seemed like magic to earlier generations. The battlefield really is three-dimensional—or perhaps four-dimensional, if you count cyberspace and the electromagnetic spectrum.

What's less clear is whether these changes add up to a revolution or just a particularly rapid phase of the evolution that's been ongoing since the first human picked up a rock. Every generation thinks its new weapons are transformative. Most of the time, the fundamentals of conflict—politics, will, adaptation, chance—reassert themselves.

The drones that ended the Nagorno-Karabakh war were genuinely revolutionary for the soldiers on the receiving end. But drones can be countered. Electronic warfare can jam their signals. Air defenses can shoot them down. The next war might look completely different.

The one constant in military affairs is that the revolution is never quite finished. The technology keeps changing. The doctrine keeps adapting. The theorists keep arguing.

And somewhere, some adversary is watching, learning, and developing the counter to whatever we think is revolutionary today.