The United States and the RMA: Revolutions Do Not Revolutionize Everything

Abstract

The period between the conclusion of Desert Storm in 1991 and the onset of the Iraqi insurgency in the summer of 2003 may always be remembered as the heyday of the RMA. It was in the afterglow of the US-led coalition’s unexpectedly easy and lopsided victory over Iraq and the liberation of Kuwait that the RMA, previously little more than the obscure musings of a handful of military strategists and historians, emerged from the shadows of strategic thought to hog the limelight. The war and its outcome was, in the words of Colin Gray, “a flash in the sky of strategic consciousness.”¹ For the next decade the language of revolution was ubiquitous. Journals were filled with articles (and even essay contests) about the nature, meaning and significance of the RMA.² References to revolutionary technologies and capabilities were common whenever military officials testified before congressional committees, justifying virtually every weapons system by emphasizing its contribution to the revolution or, to use Donald Rumsfeld’s preferred terminology, “military transformation.” Defense Department posture statements and policy reviews became almost caricatures of RMA promotionalism, veritable grab bags of RMA mantras and jargon.³ Exuberance and rhetorical excess were the order of the day. But now the glow of easy victory has faded. And after more than a decade of difficult and ambiguous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the RMA bubble appears to have burst. Barry Watts notes that “given the protracted nature and exigencies of ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan,” by 2008 and 2009 “very few in the US national-security establishment were giving much thought to RMAs and transformation.”⁴ And Frank Hoffman virtually consigns the RMA to the dustbin of strategic intellectual history, dismissing it as “a blast from the past, a piece of pre-9/11 prehistory.”⁵