Military Transformation Past And Present

Transformation has become a buzz word in today's military, but what are its historical precursors—those large scale changes that were once called Revolutions in Military Affairs (RMA)? Who has gotten it right, and who has not? The Department of Defense must learn from history. Most studies of innovation focus on the actions, choices, and problems faced by individuals in a particular organization. Few place these individuals and organizations within the complex context where they operate. Yet, it is this very context that is a powerful determinant of how actions are conceived, examined, and implemented, and of how errors are identified and corrected. The historical cases that Mandeles examines reveal how different military services organized to learn, accumulate, and retrieve knowledge; and how their particular organization affected everything from the equipment they acquired to the quality of doctrine and concepts used in combat. In cases where more than one community of experts was responsible for weighing in on decisionmaking, the service benefited from enhanced application of evidence, sound inference, and logic. These cases demonstrate that, for senior leadership, participating in such a system should be a strategic and deliberate choice. In each of the cases featured in this book, no such deliberate choice was made. The interwar U.S. Navy (USN) aviation community and the U.S. Marine Corps amphibious operation community were lucky that, in a time of rapid technological advance and strategic risk, their decisions in framing and solving technological and operational problems were made within a functioning multi-organizational system. The Army Air Corps and the Royal Marines were unfortunate, with corresponding results. It is characteristic of 20th-century military history that no senior civilian or military leader suggested a policy to handle overlapping responsibilities by multiple departments. Today's policymakers have not learned this lesson. In the present time, while a great deal of thought is devoted to proper organizational design and the numbers of persons required to perform necessary functions, there is still no overarching framework guiding these designs.

A military historian describes three basic transformations that have taken place within the U.S. military since the Vietnam War, including a move to an all-volunteer force, the emergence of stealth technology, and the application of information technology after the fall of the Soviet Union.

In Buying Military Transformation, Peter Dombrowski and Eugene Gholz analyze the United States military's ongoing effort to capitalize on information technology. New ideas about military doctrine derived from comparisons to Internet Age business practices can be implemented only if the military buys technologically innovative weapons systems. Buying Military Transformation examines how political and military leaders work with the defense industry to develop the small ships, unmanned aerial vehicles, advanced communications equipment, and systems-of-systems integration that will enable the new military format. Dombrowski and Gholz's analysis integrates the political relationship between the defense industry and Congress, the bureaucratic relationship between the firms and the military services, and the technical capabilities of different types of businesses. Many government officials and analysts believe that only entrepreneurial start-up firms or leaders in commercial information technology markets can produce the new, network-oriented military equipment. But Dombrowski and Gholz find that the existing defense industry will be best able to lead military-technology development, even for equipment modeled on the civilian Internet. The U.S. government is already spending billions of dollars each year on its "military transformation" program-money that could be easily misdirected and wasted if policymakers spend it on the wrong projects or work with the wrong firms. In addition to this practical implication, Buying Military Transformation offers key lessons for the theory of "Revolutions in Military Affairs." A series of military analysts have argued that major social and economic changes, like the shift from the Agricultural Age to the Industrial Age, inherently force related changes in the military. Buying Military Transformation undermines this technologically determinist claim: commercial innovation does not directly determine military innovation; instead, political leadership and military organizations choose the trajectory of defense investment. Militaries should invest in new technology in response to strategic threats and military leaders' professional judgments about the equipment needed to improve military effectiveness. Commercial technological progress by itself does not generate an imperative for military transformation. Clear, cogent, and engaging, Buying Military Transformation is essential reading for journalists, legislators, policymakers, and scholars.

China's military transformation is one of the major geo-strategic developments of the 21st Century. Billions of dollars are being spent modernizing The People's Liberation Army (PLA) as China seeks to upgrade and expand its military capabilities to rival the US. In this cutting-edge analysis, You Ji, a leading expert on China's military affairs, explores the changes taking places within the PLA today, covering its ground, aerospace and maritime forces, its ability to meet asymmetric threats, and the growing role played by the People's Armed Police in quelling dissent in China. He shows how these transformations in personnel, technology and strategic goals are slowly driving a wedge between China's two most powerful institutions. Until recently, relations between the CCP and PLA were harmonious, but as the PLA becomes increasingly professionalized and autonomous so its unconditional loyalty to the ruling Party may weaken. The changing relationship between the CCP and PLA, he argues, is likely to have profound implications for China's own political development and the balance of power in the Asia-Pacific region. Comprehensive and incisive, this timely book is a valuable resource for anyone interested in the nature and consequences of China's military rise.

This book explores the idea of arevolution in military affairs (RMA), which underpins the transformational agenda of the US military, and examines its implications for smaller states.The strategic studies literature on the RMA tends to be American-centric and directed towards the strategic problems of the US military. This volume seeks to fill t

"The U.S. Army is now in the process of transforming itself to meet security interests and the need for land power that span the globe, now and in the future. The following essays are representative of current thinking at the U.S. Army War College by students considering the nature and direction of this transformation. Dr. Williamson Murray s introduction sets the historical context for military transformation, comparing the modern European example with recent U.S. efforts in military innovation. The remaining essays address four themes: the nature of the transformed Army, building irreversible momentum for transformation, improving strategic responsiveness, and how to achieve transformation in key areas."--SSI summary.

At no time since the end of the Cold War has interest been higher in Russian security issues and the role played in this by the modernization of Russia’s Armed Forces. The continued transformation of its Armed Forces from Cold War legacy towards a modern combat capable force presents many challenges for the Kremlin. Moscow’s security concerns domestically, in the turbulent North Caucasus, and internationally linked to the Arab Spring, as well as its complex relations with the US and NATO and its role in the aftermath of the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine in 2014 further raises the need to present an informed analytical survey of the country’s military, past, present and future. This collection addresses precisely the nature of the challenges facing Russian policymakers as they struggle to rebuild combat capable military to protect Russian interests in the twenty-first century. This book was based on a special issue of the Journal of Slavic Military Studies.

As the United States enters a new century, its army confronts the difficult problems associated with transformation in an uncertain world. Moreover, the strategic environment makes it entirely unclear where, or when, or for what strategic purposes U.S. ground forces will find themselves committed to battle in coming decades. Yet, both the strategic environment as well as the harsh lessons of the past have a direct bearing on why the Army has begun the processes of transformation. The study of the past cannot lead to prediction as to the nature and conduct of war in the 21st century, but it does underline that sometime in the future the Army will find itself committed to a major conflict. Moreover, the nature of the current strategic environment suggests the parameters within which the future Army will have to operate. Finally, history is crucial to understanding what factors and approaches might best prepare the Army to meet future threats. This introduction, then, represents an attempt to set out for the reader the issues-past, present, and future-that could best frame the Army's approach to transformation and innovation. The past is crucial to understanding why ground forces will always be essential to achieving the political aims for which wars are fought. Moreover, the current strategic environment indicates that U.S. military forces are going to have to readdress the two old questions of time and distance. The United States cannot escape the geographic realities that two great oceans separate it from much of the rest of the world by two great continents.

Crimea in War and Transformation is the first exploration of the civilian experience during the Crimean War to appear in English. Beginning with Russian mobilization in 1852 and lasting through demobilization in 1857, the conflict devastated the peoples and landscapes of Crimea as well as the volatile southern borderlands of the Russian Empire, leading to the largest war recovery program yet undertaken by the Russian government.

At a time when unprecedented change in international affairs is forcing governments, citizens, and armed forces everywhere to re-assess the question of whether military solutions to political problems are possible any longer, Martin van Creveld has written an audacious searching examination of the nature of war and of its radical transformation in our own time. For 200 years, military theory and strategy have been guided by the Clausewitzian assumption that war is rational - a reflection of national interest and an extension of politics by other means. However, van Creveld argues, the overwhelming pattern of conflict in the post-1945 world no longer yields fully to rational analysis. In fact, strategic planning based on such calculations is, and will continue to be, unrelated to current realities. Small-scale military eruptions around the globe have demonstrated new forms of warfare with a different cast of characters - guerilla armies, terrorists, and bandits - pursuing diverse goals by violent means with the most primitive to the most sophisticated weapons. Although these warriors and their tactics testify to the end of conventional war as we've known it, the public and the military in the developed world continue to contemplate organized violence as conflict between the super powers. At this moment, armed conflicts of the type van Creveld describes are occurring throughout the world. From Lebanon to Cambodia, from Sri Lanka and the Philippines to El Salvador, the Persian Gulf, and the strife-torn nations of Eastern Europe, violent confrontations confirm a new model of warfare in which tribal, ethnic, and religious factions do battle without high-tech weapons or state-supported armies and resources. This low-intensity conflict challenges existing distinctions between civilian and solder, individual crime and organized violence, terrorism and war. In the present global atmosphere, practices that for three centuries have been considered uncivilized, such as capturing civilians or even entire communities for ransom, have begun to reappear. Pursuing bold and provocative paths of inquiry, van Creveld posits the inadequacies of our most basic ideas as to who fights wars and why and broaches the inevitability of man's need to "play" at war. In turn brilliant and infuriating, this challenge to our thinking and planning current and future military encounters is one of the most important books on war we are likely to read in our lifetime.