Did the experience of the Gulf War justify the proclamation of a Revolution in Military Affairs?

Developments in Iraq 1991 introduced no Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). At best they could be described as representing a military-technical change, with some components of this change appearing as the forerunners of a genuine military revolution. However, even if the clear victory of coalition forces in 1991 led both the public and the military to believe that a new form of operational warfare had emerged, the war lacked some of the decisive features to qualify as an RMA, as would later become obvious during and after the Iraq campaign of 2003-04. First, the ostensible ‘full spectrum superiority‘ of predominantly US forces was at least as much a very one-sided contest in conventional break-through warfare, as it was the result of pace-making technical innovations. Second, the undeniable presence of certain elements of tremendous technological change is not sufficient to produce an RMA in all its comprehensiveness: the potential for an RMA had quickly been contained by countermeasures of real, or prospective enemies. Third, exaggerated expectations of future war as a basically casualty free, swift and decisive operations later turned out to be invalid, eventually being shunned both by the public and the military. With 15 years hindsight the RMA proclaimed in the early 1990s appears as a dark horse, soon being set back by complex irregular warfare , and a potentially faster proliferation of nuclear bombs.



Definitions of RMA

A discussion of the validity of the term “revolution in military affairs” (RMA) in regard to the 1991 Gulf War needs some fine-tuning. Relevant literature defines military revolutions either as drastic, far-reaching changes of warfare or as mere military-technical revolutions. Williamson Murray, for instance, distinguishes RMAs from great military revolutions that would shatter or ‘fundamentally recast institutions and states in their path’. Lawrence Freedman and Andrew Krepinevich, however, consider RMA as being identical with military revolution. In their view:

revolutions in military affairs occur through the interaction of technological change, systems development, operational innovation and organisational adaptation. These developments come together in a way that “fundamentally” alters the character and conduct of conflict.

To avoid confusion, this essay will follow the latter’s definition of RMA as it is the most widely recognised version. Accordingly, the RMA that reportedly shaped modern warfare beyond the 1991 Gulf War showed several characteristics. First, new technology would make it possible to reduce, or even eliminate, the “fog of war" noticeably for the side introducing the RMA. Second, there would be no more closing with the enemy, ground soldiers would become ‘little more than “sensors”, and there would be no more need to seize territory’. Future wars would thus mean ‘just people at terminals launching missiles.’ Then, thanks to new information technologies, a growing range of targets would become ‘almost irredeemably exposed to attack by “smart” weapons.’ As a result, armoured breakthroughs would be ‘a thing of the past’, [and] ‘the struggle for information superiority [would] be decisive’. Mass armed forces would wane to be substituted by professional specialists of the use of force, mostly liberating Western societies from the perils of war.

The historical record; how do we recognise RMAs ?

Military historians generally agree to recognise ten military revolutions, most of which have induced a shift in superiority between offensive and defensive forms of warfare. However, as Clausewitz has demonstrated, war outcomes are determined neither solely by offence or by defence, but respond to a dynamic relation between them. Clausewitz’s holistic understanding of strategy is essential in analysing RMAs. Thus, technical or organisational changes that are generally considered as being at the root of RMAs have become real RMAs only when a number of other, external developments have accompanied them. Let us review briefly the historical record.

Often cited as an example for an RMA is the period of the French revolutionary wars after 1793. The French levée en masse and Napoleon’s divisional warfare forced other states to copy them because no other countermeasure could be found, eventually leading to the new ‘war of nations’, and whipping out the princes’ wars from European warfare. An RMA had occurred when ‘war all of a sudden became the business of the people’. Indeed, it is only when France’s enemies eventually fought on the terms of countrywide mobilisation of all manpower and means, that France could be defeated. Thus, the Napoleonic RMA became the new standard of warfare.

The German’s 1940s flexible, mechanised forms of attacks are widely perceived to represent an RMA. But this is only partially the case for two reasons. First, armoured and flexible tactics did not emerge all of a sudden but they had forerunners in the late years of World War One with the German invention of Stosstrupps, and the Battle of Cambrai, where the innovative Allies’ combination of ‘airplanes, tanks, and radios hinted at what was to come later’. The armoured tactics of the 1940s fit within ‘a larger conceptual framework of combined arms […] that is the battlefield of 1918.’ The technological trend from Cambrai to the German mechanised Panzer warfare was thus ‘evolutionary, rather than revolutionary.’ Second, even if, by 1940 there had been a power shift from the defensive to the offensive in comparison to World War One, this had no lasting impact on the overall strategic situation in Europe. In the end, the German short term technical and operational superiority failed to insure victory against an enemy that did not have to copy the tank division to win. As Kursk had shown, German tank divisions could be defeated by conventional defensive means when properly applied. Overall, ‘[…] the success of the Panzers was possible because of a mixture of faulty Allied strategy, poor French morale, and cumbersome command structures.’

On the other hand, a real RMA that occurred simultaneously with the 20th century warfare had remained widely undetected by contemporaries for a long time because its impact emerged only slowly: Aircraft carriers qualify for having triggered an RMA as they made military global “super-powers” possible for the first time in history, allowing them both the deployment of massive forces all over the globe and the denial of them to their enemies. Even without the use of nuclear weapons this capacity of power projection has enabled a small number of states to dictate their strategic policies to others, invalidating the geo-strategic calculations that had previously ruled international strategy. In that case, in was not so much organisational change or technical innovation that triggered an RMA, but the strategic employment of already known capabilities. Changes in strategy should not be ignored as key determents of RMAs. Indeed, ‘[…] the historical record [of RMA] suggests that technological change represents a relatively small part of the equation.’ This did not change after Operation Desert Storm. In fact there is only one example ‘[…] of possible RMAs that is entirely technological: nuclear weapons, [which] have not changed the nature of warfare.’

The 1991 Gulf War battlefield

A surprisingly clear victory of coalition forces in 1991 resulted in the collective belief that a new form of warfare had emerged. Almost overnight, the perception prevailing since the Vietnam War that US armed forces had lost ‘their grip on the art of warfare’ changed. After Desert Storm, the US military ‘appeared unbeatable – at least when fighting on its own terms.’

The Gulf War of 1991 marked a certain degree of military-technical modernization. Especially air power qualitatively arrived at such a degree that it permitted the near-realisation of Douhet’s ideas of strategic success by application of aerial force projection. Indeed, the speed and overwhelming success of the ground campaign was a direct result of the highly successful air campaign, which destroyed ’the eyes and ears of the Iraqi forces.’ In terms of firepower, ‘no previous army was ever subject to an air campaign of this scale before the onset of ground operations.’ However, overall the ostensible ‘full spectrum superiority‘ of predominantly US forces was very much a particularly successful occurrence of classical break-through warfare, which was ‘shaped by the same tactical and doctrinal principles that have moulded land warfare since 1900’.

First, the imbalance between the opposing forces in qualitative and quantitative terms was massive:

‘[T]he United States brought to bear a force sized and trained to fight the Soviet Union in a global war, obtained the backing of almost every major military and financial power, and chose the time and place at which combat would begin in a theatre ideally suited to air operations.’

Second, thanks to the extensive hospitality of Saudi Arabia, the attacking forces benefited from a major strategic advantage as they could position themselves in the face of their enemies over a stretch of three months without being disturbed once. General Norman Schwarzkopf had described the period of force deployment as a ‘nightmare’, constantly awaiting an assault, but this never materialised. Comparisons made at the time with the casualty rate of the Normandy landing (which was higher by a factor of 1000) were thus highly unfair as the US did not have to fight its way onto enemy territory at all. Third, incompetence on the Iraqi side played a major role in securing the result of the war in so obvious a way that it evokes the mistakes of the French supreme command in 1940. Fourth, and this is often underestimated in the literature, as Germany went to war with about a hundred and sixty-five divisions, of which only four were Panzer divisions, coalition forces in 1991 used overwhelmingly ‘dumb’ bombs rather than the much-celebrated ‘smart’ bombs. Thus, the RMA hailed both in 1940 and 1991 did not materialise empirically: in both cases the elements most saliently characterising an RMA were quantitatively not significant enough to represent a revolutionary development.

The limits of the technological revolution

Certain undeniable elements of a military revolution in technical terms, like thorough battlefield knowledge (from Awacs over Phoenix UAVs to MSTAR battlefield radars ), greater accuracy of targeting, stealth technology, and the introduction of GPS systems on a larger scale, do result in better situational awareness of individual soldiers. Yet, they have not insured a real RMA in all its comprehensiveness because their potential has quickly been contained by effective (military) countermeasures. ‘Unsurprisingly’ – except perhaps to RMA proponents - the United States’ actual and potential enemies developed “asymmetric” approaches to warfare to sidestep US military power ‘by rendering it functionally irrelevant’. As ‘victory depends on creating an asymmetry that works to one’s advantage’, the hopes that this asymmetry in power could have been frozen once and for all to the benefit of one side turned out to be unjustified. Two different responses narrowed the value of the would-be RMA: irregular warfare on sub-state level, and the re-orientation of states towards nuclear weapons.

Irregular warfare

Technical advantages are insufficient if the enemy decides to avoid the way of fighting preferred by the West. This has been amply demonstrated by the wars of the past few years. In Iraq, the “system of systems” proved notoriously incomplete to accomplish the mission in 2003. Even if a 200 miles square box battlefield was dominated by an ‘unblinking eye over the battle-space’, what became clear is that the operational environment had to include social networks as well as wired soldiers as part of the war. Instead of relying on their technological superiority, US forces then had to improvise counter-insurgency skills to fight the way of war that was chosen by their enemy. In a way a small military revolution was imposed on the Western powers who found themselves in a ‘three block war’, as described a few years earlier by the Russian General Krulak. Here, like on the operational level, technological superiority did not result in overall mastery of the battlefield. On the contrary, ‘[…] events in Afghanistan and Iraq have reinforced the military’s turning away from the earlier, techno-centric orientation.’ So much so that some analysts already present “complex irregular warfare”, as the ‘next RMA’.

The nuclear response

Potential US enemies do not accept the terms according to which the US is trying to redefine the rules of warfare: As one Indian general concluded from operation Desert Storm: ‘Never fight the Americans without nuclear weapons’. As the case of Iran and of North Korea exemplifies, the US’s search for unchallengeable conventional superiority is interpreted elsewhere as paving the way for more wars of political regime change. Going the nuclear way is the only way to escape US pressure. As Hirst writes ‘Nuclear weapons are still there in their silos and submarines’. The pursuit of the nuclear option, if it were to be confirmed and extended to even more actors, would further nullify the early 1990s RMA.

Unfulfilled promises

A key effect expected from the purported 1991 RMA was that it would consign war to be a public non event. RMA proponents promised basically casualty free, swift and decisive operations after the motto . “see first, act first, finish decisively”. Operations like the occupation of Granada would be applauded; protracted fighting with American casualties like in Somalia would have to be avoided. The RMA was supposed to be the appropriate answer for a time of ‘public intolerance for drawn-out conflicts, since engagements would theoretically play themselves out rapidly’. Thus, the ‘key political constraint’ on decision-making about the use of force in a “post-heroic age”, as described by Luttwak, would be lifted.

This core aspect of the RMA transformation concept caused exaggerated expectations of future wars that were deeply questioned by events in Iraq after 2003, causing a political ‘hangover’ with both politicians and the military. This is even more important as the 1991 war had resurrected the legitimacy of the armed forces, which had long struggled to overcome the remembrance of the Vietnam War. The ongoing war in Iraq – and to some extent in Afghanistan – has disappointed the hope that future wars would be occurrences in which network centric enabled armies would ‘kill more of the right people quicker [and] with fewer civilian casualties warfare would [therefore] be more ethical’. Lessons from Afghanistan and Iraq imply that the empty battlefields of the RMA responding a ‘never-put-a-man-where-you-can-put-a-bullet’ attitude, were unrealistic. Wars would remain as described by Tecumseh Sherman, ‘hell’, rather than an anti-septic operation, and they would rather smoulder on (schwelen ) than be quickly finished.

Conclusions

The strengths of 1991 style warfare in Kuwait have been over-estimated. Although the militarily one-sidedness of the conflict ‘provided an opportunity to display [the] potential of modern military systems’ , the campaign failed to prove the general validity of an RMA as the technological innovations were soon being responded to by different countermeasures like complex irregular warfare and a potentially faster proliferation of nuclear bombs. As Laurence Freedman has put it, ‘Revolution involves more than change, and certainly more than simply change of an incremental variety’. The 1991 RMA has fallen victim to a counter-revolution, initiated by those who should never be forgotten in military planning: the opponents, both actual and prospective. One can seldom deliver the war of one’s own taste to the population at home, even if the desire for doing so is strong. Then, if a theory does not fit reality, there are two possibilities: to modify the theory or to change the reality. At this point in time, the former appears more easily within our reach. The military of future wars will have to fight the wars it will get, and those are unlikely to be repetitions of the contest of 1991. When General Tommy Franks said that due to the RMA modern commanders would have ‘the kind of Olympian perspective that Homer had given his gods’ he forgot that the fighting was still done by Hector and Achilles, who were mortal.

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