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CIAO DATE: 05/02
Georgetown Journal of International Affairs
Volume 1, Number 2, Summer/Fall 2000
Going Beyond the ABC’s of RMA
Review by Kenneth Allard
*
Michael O’Hanlon. Technological Change and the Future of Warfare. Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2000, 210 pp. $42.95.
For most of the last decade, national security practitioners and scholars alike have focused their attention on the revolution in military affairs (RMA). The RMA represents the marriage of warfare and advanced technology–especially information technology–foreshadowed by the demonstrations of stealth aircraft, precision–guided munitions, and other information–based weaponry during the Gulf War. Two principal questions frame current thinking on these matters: Are we in the midst of a true revolution in the American way of war, and if so, what do we do about it? Michael O’Hanlon’s answers appear to be: sort of and not much.
This is a refreshing voice of sanity on a topic marked by more than the usual amount of overstatement, sophistry, and sheer fantasy. Predictably, some of the worst examples of the genre have come from the Pentagon. O’Hanlon quotes some of the more orotund of these pronouncements from “Joint Vision 2010,” a futurist publication issued by no less a personage than the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It states that instead of relying on traditional means of employing military forces, “information superiority and advances in technology will enable us to achieve desired effects through the tailored application of joint combat power.” In contrast to such overheated rhetoric, O’Hanlon is coolly on the mark in pointing out that, given the usual pace of weapons procurement, these developments are unlikely to occur before 2010.
He is equally precise in summarizing the contending schools of thought among RMA advocates, who generally accept the premise that technology is revolutionizing warfare, but differ on whether networks, sensors, or air power represent the wave of the future. A contrarian view stresses the parallel vulnerabilities of U.S. forces should other countries adopt these same technologies and apply them in innovative ways. But there is no question that these readings of the future carry price tags, because advocacy is the first step in the creation and funding of defense strategy. In one of his most trenchant passages, O’Hanlon notes that the post–war American military has institutionalized change by maintaining a “balanced approach to modernization . . . that has served the country remarkably well for decades. It is not clear that we need to accelerate the pace of modernization now.”
He backs up that case by presenting an overview of the key technologies driving the RMA and an assessment of their effects on future air, land, and sea combat. Discussions of stealth aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles, non–lethal weapons, missile defenses, and weapons of mass destruction are mercifully free from most military and scientific jargon. Presumably aided by his training in the physical sciences, O’Hanlon is able to come up with some valuable insights, beginning with the common–sense observation that, for all of the advances in information technology, computers don’t kill things on their own: “They are positioned in large part in an intermediate location in the military technology food chain.” Similarly, one of the most important issues to understand about the RMA is that it is limited by widely varying rates of change among different classes of weapons. Advances in microchip technology are not likely to be matched by corresponding improvements in propulsion systems and the overall design of ships, aircraft, tanks, and missiles.
If there is a weakness in the book, it is that O’Hanlon, for all his other attainments, is not a military insider. His is the world of think tanks and defense policy literature, to which he has made a number of distinguished contributions. That experience, however, carries with it certain limitations that occasionally surface in the book. Even the best new sensors are unlikely to allow snipers to be “detected and counterattacked after their first shot.” Despite the author’s cautious enthusiasm, arsenal ships and transoceanic blimps are similarly unlikely to make their appearance anytime soon. And he misses entirely the proverbial resistance of the Army Signal Corps to any technology, especially commercial technology, that would improve communications but potentially reduce the size and influence of that establishment.
O’Hanlon also does not consider in any depth the human and organizational dimensions of the RMA, despite noting that “military revolutions are the purposeful actions of people. They are created by a combination of technological breakthroughs, institutional adaptation, and warfighting innovation”–in other words, by perspiration, inspiration, desperation, and blood. Far more than any technological factor, the potential for an American RMA is limited principally by the very military and political institutions O’Hanlon mentions only in passing. And if experience did not suggest the importance of that perspective to O’Hanlon, then there is abundant literature in the policy and behavioral fields suggesting how difficult it is for traditional organizations to transform themselves in the face of revolutionary technologies.
It is thus hard to evaluate the wisdom of O’Hanlon’s go–slow approach to the RMA, because it is largely expressed in the language of the budget debate. Echoing the opinions of many on Capitol Hill and elsewhere, he is dubious about the wisdom of procuring four separate aircraft lines over the next ten years. And he is surely correct in arguing for more research and development funding, as well as paying attention to the chronically under–funded areas of interoperability, electronic defenses, and sealift. But it is less certain that his prescriptions for saving procurement dollars through a “hi–low mix” of combat capabilities are workable. The fact is that the high– and low–tech military equipment purchased during the Reagan administration is quickly wearing out and must be either refurbished or replaced, beginning with the next several budget cycles. Because the military has been chronically under–sized and over–deployed throughout the Clinton years, the real choices are likely to involve distinctly evolutionary “fixes”–in personnel, training, and readiness accounts–rather than the revolutionary changes of futuristic systems that are as expensive as they are exotic.
Michael O’Hanlon’s Technological Change and the Future of Warfare will certainly be read by policymakers faced with those difficult choices. Others interested in its themes of technological change and the future of war will consult the book as well, both for reference and for its succinct discussion of technologies and their applications. It is a useful addition to our understanding of the enduring, but constantly changing relationship between technology and defense.
Endnotes
Note *: Kenneth Allard is a military analyst for NBC News and Adjunct Professor in the National Security Studies Program, Georgetown University. Back.