Revolution in military affairs

Broadly stated, RMA claims that in certain periods of the history of humankind, there were new military doctrines, strategies, tactics and technologies which led to an irrecoverable change in the conduct of warfare.

It slowly gained credence within official military circles, and other nations began exploring similar shifts in organization and technology.

According to Stephen Biddle, part of the growth in popularity of the RMA theory after the Gulf War was that virtually all American military experts drastically over-estimated the coalition casualty count.

"[6] One of the central problems in understanding the current debate over RMA arises from many theorists' use of the term to refer to the revolutionary technology itself, which is the driving force of change.

This approach highlights the political, social, and economic factors worldwide, which might require a completely different type of military and organisational structure to apply force in the future.

Advanced versions of RMA incorporate other sophisticated technologies, including unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), nanotechnology, robotics, and biotechnology.

In 2021 the Chief of Naval Operations stated that it was a mistake to concurrently introduce 23 unproven technologies onboard carrier USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) before land-based testing, in particular the weapons elevators.

[9] By 2021 the concept and capability for Long range precision fires had developed sufficiently to be able to schedule their initial fielding by 2023, in its various materiel forms, as well as to be able to communicate the necessary doctrine for their application by the United States.

In reviewing a few points from the military history of the 20th century, within roughly a decade of the first flight of an airplane, aircraft were having an occasionally decisive effect on the battlefield.

By the midst of the Second World War, three-dimensional attack (from above and below the surface) had become the primary means of sinking both vessels at sea and destroying the combat capability of armies on land.

In fact, for the United States, this trend of inflicting losses and material destruction primarily through air attack continued after the second world war for Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf, Bosnia, and other, lesser, conflicts.

credited Allied fighter attacks on fuel trucks and supplies as being the decisive factor in halting their drive), in the opening and closing stages of the Korean War, and confronting the 1972 North Vietnamese Spring Invasion—or, more recently, in destroying the Khafji offensive of Saddam Hussein in 1991.

Given its historical underpinnings, we should not be surprised that the revolution in warfare that has been brought about both by the confluence of the aerospace and the electronic revolutions, and by the offshoot of both—the precision guided munition—is one that has been a long time coming, back to the Second World War, back, even, to the experimenters of the First World War who attempted, however crudely, to develop "smart" weapons to launch from airships and other craft.

Used almost experimentally until the latter stages of the Vietnam War, the precision weapon since that time has increasingly come to first influence, then dominate, and now perhaps to render superfluous, the traditional notion of a linear battlefield.

A cease-fire in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war was brokered by the effective use of armed drones, loitering munitions which would lock-on to a ground target, and strike it while transmitting pictures of the kill.

On the other hand, others claim that RMA technology severely inhibited the U.S. military's ability to respond to guerrilla tactics and that efforts to incorporate advanced weapons like Patriot missiles were unsuccessful.

In the wake of RMA technologies such as drones, unmanned ground vehicles, and clean bombs there are several concerns about the distancing and disassociation that eclipse the realities of war.

In a conflict, friendly forces (denoted in black) [ 12 ] work as an integrated force against adversaries (denoted in red). The force operates in Multi-domains ( gray , yellow, light gray, dark gray, and dark blue) —Space, Cyber, Air, Land, and Maritime respectively— severally and simultaneously cooperating across domains. [ 13 ] These operations will disrupt the adversaries, and present them multiple simultaneous dilemmas . The operations are designed to encourage adversaries to learn the advantages of a return to competition , rather than continuing a conflict, [ 14 ] or avoiding conflict altogether (deterrence). [ 15 ] A multi-domain task force (MDTF) can simultaneously operate across multiple stages of the conflict continuum , [ 16 ] : minute 32:45 and engage antagonists at thousands of miles, [ 17 ] for sustained periods.