Where are the greatest opportunities — for the United States and allies as well as their potential adversaries — in terms of military innovation between now and 2040? Where can one expect the greatest vulnerabilities to develop or emerge?
About a quarter-century ago, a popular hypothesis contended that a revolution in military affairs, or RMA, was underway. Advocates of this view warned that if the United States failed to take advantage of new military opportunities to dramatically change how it built and equipped its forces and how it waged war with them, it could fall dangerously far behind adversaries.
Advocates argued that defense budgets might need to be radically reshaped in favor of technology development and away from traditional systems. Some believed that many combat units might need to be taken “offline” and used instead to prototype and test new technologies. A number favored cutbacks in overseas presence and deterrence missions to free up resources for innovation. Analogies were drawn with the 1930s and 1940s, when blitzkrieg, amphibious warfare, aircraft carrier operations, long-range strategic bombardment and finally nuclear weapons were all developed — ultimately largely determining the outcome of World War II.
In earlier work, I sought to challenge numerous aspects of the notion that an RMA was underway in the 1990s. Instead, what seemed more plausible was a continuation of the rapid evolution in military technology and operations that continued ever since World War II, producing breakthroughs like satellites, helicopters, modern jets, lasers, night vision sensors, stealthy aircraft and precision-guided autonomous munitions (like cruise missiles), among many other things.
Because the Department of Defense was already investing in research, development, testing and evaluation in these and many other areas, it was not obvious that revolution — rather than a continuation of rapid, incremental evolution — was the wiser philosophy. The DoD’s default assumption, at least since World War II, is that it must investigate virtually any technology that could have major defense implications, whether the United States deploys each and every new gadget it can build or not, in order to ensure that it is at a minimum never blindsided by an adversary. This stood in contrast to earlier eras of a much smaller standing American military establishment.
The RMA movement of the 1990s and 2000s is part of what influenced Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld first to try to cut back severely on U.S. ground forces and then to insist on deploying only a small invasion force to Iraq in 2003. To take another recent example, RMA proponents who had observed American technology at work in Operation Desert Storm in 1991 predicted that NATO air power could easily intimidate Serbian militias into stopping their deprivations against the Kosovo Albanian population in 1999.
Such wrong predictions were partly due to misreading politics and personalities of the Balkans and the Middle East in those eras. But political misjudgment was compounded and reinforced by breathless expectations about military technology.
Beyond the political mistakes, the technological basis for such prognostication was always weak. It did not take a doctor of physics to know why, but it did take a methodology that broke down the problem into analytically manageable chunks.
For example, in regard to Kosovo, a basic knowledge of military technology made it easy to understand that if NATO planes stayed above 15,000 feet in altitude to reduce their vulnerability to air defenses, their ability to identify and target small Serbian formations through the cloud cover prevalent in the Balkans in early spring would be severely limited. Basic science, coupled with Clausewitzian cautions about fog and friction in war, should have disabused American policymakers of any heady optimism about the likely course of the air war. There were also few technologies on the drawing boards in the years just before the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that augured well for foreign forces trying to find hostile opponents armed with small weaponry and immersed within large civilian populations.
We all should have known such campaigns would likely still be hard, even in such an advanced age of technology. While some innovations like unmanned aerial systems and mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles were helpful in those wars, on balance there were few breakthroughs that radically eased the nature of those conflicts for American and allied forces. Yet, some still predicted “cakewalks” for American and allied forces in those conflicts, based largely on a sense of the technologies and capabilities of the day.
My methodology, then and now, for assessing future trends in military technology — and thus future prospects for major war-fighting innovation — has three main elements. First, understand and invoke foundational concepts of physics to understand the realm of the possible — and the limits of the possible.
Second, examine the scientific, engineering and defense literature on various types of technological research in each of a number of prominent areas of military technology.
Finally, armed with the resulting initial estimates of the prospects for sector-by-sector military technological breakthroughs, consult with experts, including at several of the nation’s major weapons laboratories, for their feedback. This last opportunity was afforded me by years of work in the field and the connections provided by an organization like the Brookings Institution, but the first two parts of the methodology are available to all in future work as well.
Of course, technological opportunity does not immediately translate into military innovation and new capabilities. When it comes to combining technologies into systems and operational concepts that can be instrumental in fighting wars, the human dimension of organizational performance, influenced by the external combat environment as well as domestic and bureaucratic politics, introduces new variables into the mix. This is the crux of the debate about military innovation past, present and future — as the writings of experts like Stephen Rosen, Thomas Ehrhard, Barry Posen, Stephen Biddle and others attest.
The RMA debate of the 1990s underscored the reality that while technology can provide the raw materials for military revolutions, those revolutions must ultimately be sparked by entrepreneurship and organizational adaptation — requiring astute study and good judgment as to when new technological possibilities could translate into meaningful military capability.
My assessment of trends in key areas of military-relevant technology tackled four categories of systems. The first is sensors of many different types, which gather data of relevance to military operations. The second comprises the computer and communications systems that process and distribute that data. Third are major weapons platforms as well as key enabling technologies for those platforms. Fourth are other types of weapons systems and other technologies, many relatively new.
In short, my overall prognostication, as supported in my new book “Defense 101,” is that technological change of relevance to military innovation may be faster and more consequential in the next 20 years than it has proved over the last 20.
Virtually all the technological areas considered here are receiving high-level attention and substantial resources from DoD leadership. It is entirely possible that the ongoing, rapid pace of computer innovation may make the next two decades more revolutionary than the last two. The dynamics in robotics and in cybersecurity discussed here may only accelerate. They may be more fully exploited by modern military organizations. They will likely extend in important ways into the artificial intelligence realm as well. An examination of the last 20 years would seem to suggest the potential for such an acceleration. That is particularly true in light of the fact that multiple countries (most notably China, but also Russia) now have the resources to compete with Western nations in military innovation.
Some other areas of technology, perhaps most notably directed-energy systems, hypersonic missiles and certain types of advanced materials, could play important supplemental roles in making the next two decades a true period of military revolution, or at least of very fast and ongoing rapid transformation. Should such opportunities emerge, the Pentagon may indeed need to shift its funding priorities and other activities quickly to take advantage. But again, it should be recalled that all these technologies are already receiving money and attention as well as the opportunity to “prove themselves” in laboratories and in some cases on test ranges as well. As such, most arguments about a need for urgent revolution and military transformation should probably still be taken with a grain of salt.
I remain wary that an RMA of a magnitude akin to that of the World War II era will occur — partly because nuclear weapons will continue to provide an ultimate deterrent, and partly because the age of precision strike and of robotics (starting with cruise missiles) is already now roughly 30 years old by most measures.
But the pace of innovation will surely be impressive, nonetheless. My survey of numerous domains of military technology does suggest a greater possibility of true revolution over the next 20 years than the last 20, with digital capabilities and devices likely leading the way.
Michael O’Hanlon is a senior fellow and director of research in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. He also authored the book “Defense 101,” from which this essay is partly drawn.
