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"Transformation" has replaced "revolution in military affairs" (RMA) as the preferred DOD term. "RMA" was plagued by the same sort of problems as "transformation" — it also had a variety of meanings. In its unobjectionable form, discussion of a putative RMA hypothesized that "available and foreseen" technological advances in areas such as precision weaponry, surveillance, and computer systems would transform the way wars would be fought in coming decades as profoundly as did the development of strategic bombing, armored warfare, and carrier aviation during the period between the world wars, or the appearance of nuclear-armed ballistic missiles following World War II. In this view, most consistently advanced by Andrew Marshall, director of DOD's Office of Net Assessment, and Andy Krepinevich, head of Washington's Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, the RMA was about a process of transformation in response to new conditions in the security environment. Krepinevich preferred
the term "military revolution." In a seminal 1994 National
Interest article, he defined a military revolution as a dramatic increase
in combat power that fundamentally alters the character and conduct of
conflict. While technology often underpins a military revolution, there
is more to it than that: A military revolution, wrote Krepinevich, comprises
not only technology, but also systems development, operational innovation,
and organizational change. For instance, the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral William Owens, made the extraordinary claim that "technology could enable U.S. military forces in the future to lift the 'fog of war.' . . . Battlefield dominant awareness — the ability to see and understand everything on the battlefield — might be possible." According to those who saw the RMA as an outcome rather than as a process, the U.S. should radically restructure its forces now, immediately investing in command, control, communications, and computers along with intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) technologies and long-range precision strike weapons. Integrating these technologies will create a "system-of-systems," enabling the U.S. to "apply military force with dramatically greater efficiency than an opponent and do so with little risk to U.S. forces." Advocates of the RMA as an outcome apparently believe that once the desired outcome is achieved, the United States will never have to worry about its security again. DEFINING
TERMS Why does the best military in the world, one that has easily disposed of all competitors over the past decade and a half, need to be transformed? The short answer is that the world has changed — not in all ways but in important ones. The United States is a de facto imperial power. The interdependence and prosperity we take for granted is largely the result of U.S. "imperial policing." But there are obstacles to the ability of the United States to carry out its role. These "operational challenges" include the "tyranny of distance," the proliferation of militarily useful technology that potentially expands the "deadly zone" in which U.S. forces will operate, and a corollary — the likely adoption by adversaries of "anti-access" and area denial strategies. Advocates of transformation believe that in order to overcome such operational challenges, the future U.S. force will need to possess certain characteristics. This force must be highly mobile, stealthy, dispersed, and electronically networked with the ability to execute compressed operational cycles, to launch extended-range precision strikes, and to insert widely distributed forces rapidly into a theater. Such a force will ensure that the United States continues to command the world's "commons" (sea and space), protecting U.S. sanctuary while threatening the sanctuary of its adversaries. Of course, describing the characteristics of a future force is relatively easy. The hard part is determining how we get from "here to there." Indeed, this is the very essence of the debate about transformation. For instance, how quickly should the U.S. military be transformed? What are the "opportunity costs" of transformation, i.e. what do we give up today in order to get the kind of force we want in the future? Who should guide transformation? Should transformation be centralized within the Office of the Secretary of Defense or the Joint Staff, or should it remain decentralized, with the separate services innovating in accordance with their own strategic and operational concepts? Finally, what are the risks associated with transformation? One transformation strategy that has garnered support among the defense cognoscenti is to "skip a generation" of weapons. In a campaign speech at the Citadel in September 1999, candidate Bush articulated this approach when he said the United States should "modernize some existing weapon systems and equipment necessary for current tasks. But our relative peace allows U.S. to do this selectively. The real goal is to move beyond marginal improvements — to replace existing programs with new technologies and strategies to skip a generation of technology. . . . I intend to force new thinking and hard choices." Advocates of skipping a generation of weapons argue that such a step makes sense when three conditions apply: First, when near-term risks to security are relatively low, thus reducing the need to procure large numbers of incrementally improved systems; second, when incremental modernization yields an improved system that will actually see its effectiveness decline, because of emerging changes in the threat environment; and third, when rapidly advancing technological change provides the opportunity to field substantially different capabilities oriented to meeting the most important operational goals associated with the emerging military regime. Secretary Rumsfeld's recent decision to kill the Army's Crusader artillery system was based on such reasoning. Not only does the rationale for the Crusader fly in the face of the Army's own transformation plan, the weapon itself is far from "transformational." Of course, for some, the Crusader is only small potatoes. A new report from the libertarian Cato Institute called "Empty Promises" argues that efforts to transform the U.S. military "died" in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, killed by the "Iron Triangle" of Congress, the defense industry, and the Pentagon bureaucracy. Increases in defense spending in the 2003 budget have "merely slathered the Pentagon with additional money instead of insisting on the massive reallocation of spending needed to effect a transformation." The report contends that the F-22 should be cancelled and the money used to fund a new bomber; Navy carriers should be reduced and the F/A-18 E/F cancelled in favor of a navalized version of the F-117; Army divisions should be cut and armored divisions put into the National Guard; the Marines' MV-22 Osprey should be terminated; and the Marines should focus on amphibious raids. Transformation skeptics
point to the Cato report as an example of a dangerous extreme in the defense
debate. To paraphrase Richard Hart Sinnreich, a retired Army colonel who
has my vote as the most level-headed defense analysts writing today: Do
we scrap current weapon systems or let them just continue to age while
we bet the military farm on so-called "leap ahead" technologies
that have not yet migrated from the drawing board, and in many cases are
unlikely to do so for some considerable time to come? And Philip Gold of the Discovery Institute in Seattle writes that a transformed force "will continue to use traditional systems, perhaps even bring back and update items long considered obsolete: a process sometimes known as 'retro-tech.'" An example of what both he and Krepinevich are talking about is the marriage of the 50-year-old B-52 and a high tech bomb guidance kit, the Joint Direct Attack Munition, which permits astoundingly accurate high-level bombing. It is also apparent in the "networking" of existing forces, permitting a vast increase in the speed of command and compressed operational cycle rates, i.e. enabling U.S. forces to make and implement decisions far more quickly than an adversary. While it is absolutely imperative to transform the U.S. military, there are some real dangers. The first is that like "military reform" in the 1980s, transformation will be used by some as an excuse to cut the size of the military below what is necessary to carry out its current functions. Others will use it as a way to reduce defense spending — the Newt Gingrich "cheap hawk" syndrome. There is also the corollary problem that some will use planned systems to kill existing programs, just as some members of Congress tried to use the promise of the B-2 to kill the B-1. The fact is, as Loren
Thompson has pointed out, that real transformation will not be cheap.
It will require more spending on procurement of weapons, not less. IN
THE CONTEXT OF WAR Since war is a human enterprise, the human dimension is central to the proper understanding of the phenomenon. Accordingly, war involves intangibles that cannot be quantified. War is shaped by human nature, the complexities of human behavior, and the limitations of human mental and physical capabilities. Any view of war that ignores what Clausewitz called the "moral factors" — fear, the impact of danger, and physical exhaustion — is fraught with peril. As the great Prussian observed, "Military activity is never directed against material forces alone; it is always aimed simultaneously at the moral forces which give it life, and the two cannot be separated." And again: "The art of war deals with living and with moral forces. Consequently, it cannot attain the absolute, or certainty; it must always leave a margin for uncertainty, in the greatest of things as much as in the smallest." A transformed military is a valid objective. But a transformation strategy based on a conception of war that is linear, mechanistic, and overly technocentric, which banishes friction, chance, and uncertainty from war, and which is wholly disconnected from what an adversary may think, want, or do, is a recipe for disaster. — Mackubin Thomas Owens is professor of strategy and force planning at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. He is currently working on a book tentatively entitled Sword of Republican Empire: A History of U.S. Civil-Military Relations.
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uzzwords
and bureaucracies go together. This is especially true with regard to
government bureaucracies. The current buzzword within the Department of
Defense (DOD) is "transformation." Loren Thompson of the Lexington
Institute described the problem with the term not too long ago: "The
popularity of the word within the Pentagon suggests that it means different
things to different people. For some, it is a way of rescuing threatened
ideas and institutions. For others, it is a way of sweeping those ideas
and institutions away. And for many, it is a ritual incantation —
the latest buzzword used to bless business as usual." 
