Abstract
The RMA is an idea, not a fact. Eventually, the strength of the idea, and not the supposed fact, will determine whether there will be a revolution and who will benefit from it. The influence of the idea of the RMA on defence policies and strategies will be determined by popular and political perceptions of military capabilities now and in the future and by its effects on the structure of defence establishments. Moreover, the idea will tend to favour particular policies, institutions and strategies whenever it is characterized in particular terms: as a technical phenomenon, for example.
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Notes and references
D. Bland, Chiefs of Defence: Government and the Unified Command of the Canadian armed forces (Toronto: Canadian Institute for Strategic Studies, 1995).
As quoted in D. Hall, ‘Through a Glass Darkly: Canada’s Air Force and the Revolution in Military Affairs’, Proceedings, Graduate Symposium, Conference of Defence Associations Institute (Ottawa, 14 November 1999) p. 158.
This idea of the RMA is nicely countered by M. Owens, ‘Technology, the RMA, and Future Wars’, Strategic Review, XXVI (1998) 63–70.
General P. van] Riper and R. Scales Jr, ‘Preparing for War in the 21st Century’, Parameters, XXVII (1997
E. Cohen, ‘A Revolution in Military Affairs’, Foreign Affairs, March/April 1996 46.
S. Blank, ‘Preparing For the Next War: Reflections on the Revolution in Military Affairs’, inj. Arquilla and D. Ronfelt (eds), In Athena’s Camp: Preparing for Conflict in the Information Age (Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 1997) p. 69.
J. Cooper, ‘Another View of the Revolution in Military Affairs’, in J. Arquilla and D. Ronfelt, In Athena’s Camp: Preparing for Conflict in the Information Age (Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 1997) p. 129. (Emphasis added.)
Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Johns, ‘The Sir Frederick Tymms Memorial Lecture’, presented to the Guild of Air Pilots and Air Navigators at the Royal Aeronautical Society (London, 21 September 1999).
van Riper and Scales, op. cit., p. 8.
S. Huntington, The Common Defence: Strategic Programmes in National Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961) p. 2.
Admiral Elmo Zum wait, Chief of Naval Operations, United States Navy, for example, was resigned to the fact that there are ‘three powerful “unions” in the Navy — the aviators, the submariners, and the surface sailors — and their rivalry has played a large part in the way the navy has been directed’. Moreover, according to Zumwalt, this rivalry ‘tends to skew the work of even the fairest, broadest-gauged commander if he is given enough time’. Elmo Zumwalt, On Watch (New York: Quadrangle, 1976) pp. 63–64. An argument that might appear to challenge this view of the world, or at least its importance, is made by Edward Rhodes, ‘Do Bureaucratic Politics Matter? Some Discomforting Findings from the Case of the US Navy’, World Politics, 74 (1994) 1–41. The main thesis in this paper is that ideas matter more than place, but this argument is not inconsistent with my own suggestion that the idea of the threat may be manipulated to serve particular interests.
‘China Studies the Art of Cyber-War,’ The National Post, Monday 25 October 1999 (http://www.nationalpost.com).
Cooper, op. cit., p. 101.
Ibid., p. 102.
J. Arquilla and D. Ronfelt, ‘A New Epoch — and Spectrum — of Conflict’, in J. Arquilla and D. Ronfelt, In Athena’s Camp: Preparing for Conflict in the Information Age (Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 1997) p. 4.
Blank, op. cit., p. 72.
J. Goldstein and R. Keohane, Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions and Political Change (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993) p. 12.
S. MacFarlane, ‘International Security and the RMA’, in D. Haglund and S. MacFarlane (eds), Security, Strategy and the Global Economics of Defence Production (Kingston, Ont. School of Policy Studies, Queen’s University, 1999) p. 34.
Graham Allison, Essence of Decision (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971) p. 144.
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© 2001 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Bland, D. (2001). The RMA: Managing an Idea. In: Matthews, R., Treddenick, J. (eds) Managing the Revolution in Military Affairs. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230294189_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230294189_2
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