.png){kind=icon}
Technological and scientific innovation is not a new development in warfare. Sometimes these innovations, however, produce ‘baskets’ of new weapons simultaneously. By the mid-twentieth century, for instance, the world witnessed the introduction of several new technologies and weapons—jet aircraft, ballistic missiles, nuclear weapons, earth-satellites used for surveillance and communications, nuclear-powered submarines—that made global nuclear war a reality. As Eliot Cohen notes in this masterful discussion of the impact of technology on war, by the mid-1970s new technologies were becoming available that seemed to threaten the effectiveness of existing conventional forces and doctrine. The impact of this Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) based on information-age computer and communication technologies became apparent with the ejection of Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991. The rapid and incredibly lopsided Coalition victory demonstrated that the ‘RMA’ was upending military affairs by giving ‘quality’ an advantage over ‘quantity’ and by giving networked forces that operate collectively a decisive edge over isolated units.
In this chapter from the 6th edition of Strategy in the Contemporary World, published in 2018, Cohen demonstrates the intellectual break that occurred between the common military wisdom of our cold war past and our twenty-first-century precision-guided, cyber-enabled, autonomous future. Today this revolution continues, shaped by innovations produced by the private sector.