THE buzzwords haunting the Pentagon today are “revolution in military affairs.” The idea, simply put, is that the same technologies that have transformed the American workplace may have no less profound an effect on the American way of war. In this view the information revolution, aided and abetted by advances in the material sciences (such as those which allow the creation of stealthy aircraft or long-endurance cruise missiles), will create a new era of warfare, in which not merely the weapons but also organizations and operational concepts become radically different from what they have been since World War II.
The idea that we are living in a period of revolutionary change in the conduct of war goes back some 15 years, to the writings of a host of senior Soviet officers, including the chief of the General Staff, Nikolai Ogarkov. These Soviet theorists believed that within a decade or two conventional weapons would have the military effects of small nuclear weapons—that is, that a salvo of precision guided weapons, remotely directed, could destroy scores of armored vehicles in minutes, if not seconds. Those targets (which might, they feared, be Soviet tank columns) would be detected and identified from distances of hundreds of miles, and as little as twenty or thirty minutes might pass between when American sensors would locate them and when a lethal hail of missiles would destroy them. In a second stage of change, perhaps in the second or third decade of the next century, these Russian generals anticipated a battlefield dominated by weapons based on “new physical principles”—exotic devices such as lethal lasers or microwave beams that would supplement or even largely replace conventional cannons or bullets.
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