POST-DESERT STORM ‘RMA’: BLAST-OFF TO WARFARE’S

GLORIOUS FUTURE OR BLAST OF HOT AIR?

(Sabiiti Mutengesa, Department of War Studies, Kings College London)

There are fifty-fifty chances that it will rain tomorrow, so carry half an umbrella; or

so it seemed like the strategic forecasters of the evening of the 1980s were hazarding

some guesses about the future that we are living in now. Overoptimistic and unfounded

projections were to result in a spate of euphoria typified by the closure of military bases,

the decommissioning of weapons platforms, reductions in active duty personnel and

defence budget cutbacks. 1 Part of the motivation for these actions was to reap a ‘peace

dividend’; for the lamb was now destined to sleep in the bosom of the lion; but partly

also, the military forces were to be reconfigured into a leaner machine capable of

exploiting the multiplier effect of emerging technologies in the world of automation. The

Gulf War was deemed to be the first major test for the new international mood as well as

for the new breed of military forces. This study examines whether at the end of that war,

it could be reasonably concluded that the conduct of warfare conformed to what came to

be dubbed as a ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’ or RMA.

The study argues that, a conflict between immensely unequal adversaries makes

it difficult and facetious, to attempt to discern whether a real RMA has taken place. The

study further contends that searching for RMA in the sort of conflict like Desert Storm

unduly deflects attention from other more fundamental drivers and currents of change

that have a critical bearing on why and how wars are fought. I aver that squandering

attention on such blips as Desert Storm in which the US and her allies faced a traditional

and relatively weak adversary yields an unfounded sense of triumph that may have

1
deleterious effects on long-term preparedness of the ‘victor’ for an uncertain future, and

for adversaries with matching capabilities.

This study looks critically at the pervasive preoccupation with technology by

analysts and the policy community in the field of strategy and their enduring tendency to

reduce strategic issues to mere combat. The study advances the view that, those two

tendencies are bound to have a negative influence on objectivity in the assessment of

trends in warfare; particularly in the manner in which they often eclipse the social,

political and cultural undercurrents that shape modern warfare. The study briefly reflects

on the lack of a widely embracing notion of revolutionary change in matters related to

the military and how this undermines justifications for claims of RMA.

RMA: Concept, management tool and buzzword

According to one of the initiators of the RMA debate, Andrew Marshall, RMA is:

‘… a major change in the nature of warfare brought about by the innovative

application of new which, combined with dramatic changes in military doctrine

and operational and organizational concepts, fundamentally alters the character

and conduct of military operations’ 2

Ever since RMA was inaugurated into policy and academic discourses, it has

become impossible flip through any recent publication in the field of defense and

strategy, however cursorily without encountering an entry on the ‘Revolution in Military

Affairs’ or any such allied term as ‘military revolution’, ‘military technical revolution’,

‘information warfare’, ‘cyber war’, ‘I-led RMA’, ‘revolution in strategic affairs’, ‘software

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warfare’, ‘precision warfare’, ‘revolution in warfare’, ‘Revolution in Security affairs’; a

ubiquity that has prompted Colin Gray to observe how ‘Everyone has a RMA story, a

cause to advance; 3 and how RMA ‘… was the most widely used, and abused, acronym

in the U.S. defense community in the 1990s’. 4 So commonplace is the deployment of

these terms that a Google search on only ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’ turns up close to

10 million hits. A predominance of the United States in the debate is quite palpable, just

as much as the absence of Europe is conspicuous, not to mention other parts of the

world. 5 Although it has come to acquire its own dedicated websites and library sections,

it has not escaped being dismissed variously as,

‘…a mental construct, an abstraction. It is a simplification of reality, largely

intended to help explain the way that change comes about and to provide

something of a common vocabulary to facilitate communication among scholars

and decision-makers. It has spawned a huge literature in the last twenty years or

so. But the RMA is not reality. It is no more than an approximate depiction of it’. 6

Commentator John Vest has described it as an ‘… intellectual cover for spending

largess on "precision" Buck Rogers-type weaponry that has been less than 100 percent

effective’, 7 just like ardent critic of ‘RMAnia’, Elliot Cohen has unflatteringly referred to it

as ‘a normative debate masquerading as a positivist discussion.’

On their part, Neo-clausewitzian analysts argue that, in any recorded

history, there has never been a major change in ‘military affairs’. According to

them, the most fundamental military affair has always been and will always

remain the pursuit of political ends through violent military means, and no amount

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of technological development can change that. 8 In a means-ends relationship,

one can conceive of a fundamental change when the ends change, but not when

the means change as in the case of changes in the means of warfare. Moreover,

technology is merely a means of warfare and warfare is a means of politics. This

makes RMA even more incomprehensible given that what is actually changing

are ’the means of means’. This argument is summarized by key neo-

clausewitzians who have argued that, a revolution in military affairs can only be

logically proclaimed if ‘war is disconnected from raison d’Etat and made into a

way of life rather than an instrument of politics as it is meant to be’. 9

It is important to point out those controversies, amongst many others, because

more than anything else, they are testimony to the inchoate character of RMA both as

an analytical concept and as a management tool and the difficulty in singling out an

acceptable characterization of the term that one can employ to understand a

phenomenon that concerns not mere generalities, but a concrete historical event such

as Operation Desert Storm.

In much of the available discourse, there is no clarity on what ‘military affairs’ are

and what ‘revolution’ entails: for some analysts, the mere taking on board a handful of

reforms seems to be what revolution amounts to, yet for others being captivated by one

or two revolutionary innovations, however isolated, makes for a revolution. What

appears to be missing in most of the RMA discourse is the basic notion that first,

revolution entails ‘change of a system’ but not merely ‘change in a system’; second, in a

point made by Gray ‘… the political level is the only level that gives meaning to military

behaviour’. 10 It is the primacy of the ‘political’ that the current RMA debate particularly

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on events in the Gulf, is not oriented to accommodate. As a consequence, that debate

has not yet been able to shed sufficient light on the fundamental changes Desert Storm

may have engendered.

The mismatched fist fight: the hollowness victory in a skewed conflict

Without wishing to detract from the requirements of intellectual abstraction that

writing this script imposes, I would make the ‘experience of the Gulf war’ more

accessible by comparing it with a boxing contest in which a highly rated super-heavy

pugilist knocks out some rather cocky light feather-weight ‘opponent’, followed by eternal

proclamations by the victor that his skills have undergone a stupendous improvement of

revolutionary proportions. Borrowing from Gray’s specific caution to the Desert Storm

‘victor’,

‘…the military effectiveness of a process of revolutionary change in a “way of war”

can only be judged by the test of battle, and possibly not even then, if the terms of

combat are very heavily weighted in favor of the United States’. 11

That caution poignantly highlights the rather astonishing disregard for the

lopsided nature of a contest in which the only superpower with a population of 249

million, bolstered by finances, matériel and manpower of most of the world’s lesser

powers faced off with a solitary Third World country of 18 million people, 12 whose 1989

Gross Domestic Product was $38,000 million. 13 13,470% lower than $5,156,440 million

for the United States and a Gross National Product equal to Portugal’s and about 30% of

the defence budget of the U.S. it was confronting. 14 Very clearly, the United States was

then and still remains a hyper power whose ‘…. military superiority is so great that in the

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rankings of all the world's militaries, the U.S. is not only in first place; the next dozen or

so places are not even occupied’ (Odom, 1993). 15

The point here is that, interstate warfare is not just a violent altercation between

the armed forces of the respective disputants but is above all else a contest between the

total capabilities of each of the conflicting nation states, including what each one of them

can muster in form of human resources, diplomatic leverage, financial and economic

might, statesmanship and domestic consensus. Any assessment of warfare that

focuses exclusively on the events on the battlefield, as we see with the RMA debate,

completely misses this point and in the process makes faulty deductions.

Some have justifiably argued that the Gulf War ‘… provided no genuine test of US

fighting power and should not be permitted whatsoever to serve as a model for the

future’, 16 because it was in fact less of a revolution, but merely ‘the mother of all military

anomalies’. 17 In a similar tone, Walker observes that, Desert Storm was an anomaly,

and that the United States ‘…cannot count on each future enemy to be as poorly led,

equipped and deployed as the Iraqis’. 18 According to such analysis, most of the lessons

(the RMA ones inclusive) being drawn from the Gulf War experience are little more than

self-evident platitudes on what was already common knowledge about the strengths and

weaknesses of the U.S. military machine. Even America’s (first) Cold War foe has

voiced some caution to the US generals. A Russian analysis of the appraisals of the

performance of the equipment employed in the war points out that,

‘After all, to be objective, they were employed essentially under ideal conditions,

in the absence of any serious return of fire and electronic countermeasures. In

essence, the coalition conducted wide-scale testing of new and promising models

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 of weapons and military equipment … under conditions close to those of the

proving ground’ 19

Moreover, much of what is often cited as post-Gulf War RMA is very much a

function of the deceptively heartening outcome of the lopsided conflict, giving reason to

Inman et al to correctly caution that ‘the first lesson of the Gulf War is to be wary about

drawing any so-called lessons of the Gulf War’, 20 mirroring Walker’s assertion in his

paper already referred to that, warning against ‘…drawing false conclusions in a war

fought against unwilling, poorly led opponent fighting with yesterday's equipment’. 21

This partly mirrors the view of a French commentator who points to the need to ‘…avoid

overestimating a phenomenon that benefits from high visibility in part because of the

vacuum created by the disappearance of a major player, the Soviet Union’. 22

The Perils of ‘Replaying the Gulf War—Forever’

Attempts to read into the experience of the Gulf War any sort of RMA, especially

those championed by the military community are viewed by some as diversionary, a

concealment of defence of orthodoxy and an attempt to foreclose urgently needed

fundamental changes in national security management especially in the United States.

‘In truth’, asserts Bacevich, ‘as currently touted by soldiers, the very concept of a Military

Revolution is profoundly reactionary’. 23 According to this view, the RMA debate is being

paraded to perpetuate elements of the status quo most cherished by the military

profession, ignoring change with which the military establishment would otherwise be

uncomfortable, and to ward off threats to the prerogatives and autonomy claimed by the

military profession; hence the need to keep observers hypnotized with picking

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revolutionary nits form the Gulf War ‘hollow victory’ as Jeffrey Record dubbed the

outcome of Desert Storm in his similarly titled 1993 analysis already referred to above.

Just like, and possibly, because the defence analytical community have no single

definition of RMA, they are equally not agreed on past instances of transformations that

can be truly characterised as cases of RMA. While Murray and Galdi enumerate as

many as ten past military revolutions 24 , Buzan and Herring claim that there has been

only one, namely, the transition during the course of the 19th Century ‘from occasional to

frequent change in military technology’. 25 Bacevich holds that there have been two

genuine revolutions that have shaped war in modern times and for which military

professionals never devised meaningful responses; the first being the advent of total war

with the creation of nuclear weapons as its apogee and the second, a corollary of the

first, the proliferation of atomised war: terror, subversion, insurgency and ‘people’s war’.

As Snow observes, the fruits of what ever it is that pundits and analysts have dubbed

RMA may be clearly relevant to conventional warfare. However, ‘… their application to

low-level warfare, such as classical insurgency and the more chaotic pattern of new (sic)

internal war is not’. 26

One can only conclude that the aim of today’s RMA is to dismiss the problems

posed by the two genuine revolutions Bacevich points out above as immaterial.

However, any attempt to brush off the ever-lingering potential of nuclear war as irrational

and unattractive and ‘primitivizing’ atomised warfare is bound to be counterproductive.

Desert Storm is historically sandwiched between Saigon and Mogadishu and overlain by

the ever-present possibility of a confluence between terror and WMD, a combination that

leaves no justification at all to eternally ruminate over the Saddam-like adversary that

might never feature again, however sweet it may have felt to neutralize him. This is not

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to discount the true significance of the technologies that the information age promises:

precision guided munitions, sensors, stealth bombers, computers and microelectronics.

It is to draw attention to two issues that this writer considers crucial. First is Bacevich’s

observation that, ‘…if forces designed and equipped in compliance with the dictates of

the future are ill-suited for dealing with civil wars, ethnic conflict, failed states, and terror,

then they are of limited utility in the world as it exists’. 27 Similarly, Hammes holds that,

the DOD stands to lose its war fighting dominance because it does not want to deal with

the manpower intensive, low-technology conflicts, the fourth generation wars (4GW) that

are actually taking place around the world, instead being more comfortable to theorize

about future high-technology conflicts with ‘near-peer competitors’. 28 He rightly

attributes this tendency partly to the RMA-related complacency and biases that have

been borne out of the success in the wars with Iraq. Second, the military professionals

need to be alerted that they can not have their cake and eat it. They have to take note

of the fact that, those same transformations that are fomenting a ‘brave new world’ for

humanity, the soldiery inclusive; by furnishing us with new technologies, changing the

way of producing wealth and the methods of making war have cross cutting influences

on all other facets of life, whether social, political or cultural.

The transformations pointed out above are negating the very foundation on which

was crafted the industrial age war machine that triumphed in the Gulf War, which the

current crop of defence thinkers are accustomed to and dearly cherish. As the Tofflers

convincingly argue, the post industrial era, that is, the information age will dictate its own

form of wealth production, military organizations and war-making. 29 To reinterpret the

Tofflers, an industrial age military that seems to want to benefit from information age

technologies while continuing to fight industrial age wars such as Desert Storm is akin to

the individual who wishes to enjoy the honor of inhabiting paradise while continuing to

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wallow in the base pleasures of worldly existence. The reality remains that, the

information age will leave no room for such ambivalence: it is a comprehensive culture

that will have to be embraced in its entirety. Leveraging the benefits of improvements in

information will be like establishing a new invention. What the general of yesterday has

to know is that, ‘[T]o establish a new invention … is like establishing a new religion—it

usually demands the conversion or destruction of an entire priesthood’. 30 Those stuck

to fighting the last war may be failing to make the choice between being destroyed or

being converted, thus exposing themselves to being dismissed as

counterrevolutionaries. What may turn out to be the major handicap in the long run is,

as Biddle observes, the extent to which

‘US forces are now sized and structured according to a gulf war yardstick. New

doctrines, weapons and organizations are assessed in simulations of updated

Gulf wars. Acceptable casualty levels are judged against a 1991 benchmark’. 31

This stands out as a recipe for future debacles, and a consequence of unjustifiable and

endless musings on past pseudo-victories such as Desert Storm, in the search of a

RMA.

The Combat Bias in the RMA Debate: Seeing the Forest for the Trees

What is most notable about much of the RMA debate and specifically the one

regarding the Gulf War is its combat bias, almost giving the impression that all there is to

‘military affairs’ is the violent act of ‘killing certain people and breaking certain things’ as

the common adage goes in American military circles. This combat bias may be

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testimony to the preponderance of United States military thought in the debate as a

result of which it has been exclusively coloured by the ‘American way of War’, mostly so

in the wake of such a long awaited decisive victory that the standoff in Gulf was to bring.

Colin Gray rhetorically and rightly asks, ‘If the best and the brightest among

defense professionals focus upon the tactical level of analysis that the RMA debate

encourages, who minds the store of strategy and statecraft?’ and further points out how

‘The excitement of the RMA debate, and the razzle-dazzle of the promise of cyber-

shaped and led forces, are directing intellectual traffic into the fascinating but secondary

zone of ‘how to fight’, strictly tactical issues. 32 Therein lies the fundamental feebleness

of the RMA debate: the lack of strategic utility; a problem that Lawrence Freedman

highlights extensively by urging for the elevation (if not emancipation) of the debate to

‘[T]he Revolution in Strategic Affairs’ in his similarly titled paper. 33 This is not to attempt

to discount the import of tactics, which as some would argue, hold a superior position in

the tactics-strategy nexus. 34 Tactics matter and it is at the tactical level that military

machines are called upon to justify their existence, and if key battles are lost, strategy

will not serve any purpose. However, this should not be a cause to transmute tactical

matters into a fetish, as Gulf War analyses on RMA have tended to do.

The pitfalls of ‘technophilia’

The enthusiasm with which RMA is described exclusively as a process in

technological transformation would almost give the impression that warfare is

synonymous with technology; causing the tendency for analysts to ask the wrong

question: ‘Which weapons won the war?’ instead of posing the question, ‘With which

weapons was the war worn?’

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 I would argue that dwelling on the first question as currently is the trend yields an

inaccurate impression of what went on in the Gulf War and indeed, whether there is a

RMA. In the first instance, war is a political, social and cultural phenomenon and not

only a military one and secondly, even within the military sphere there are such critical

intangibles as morale, training, quality of leadership, strategic, operational and tactical

doctrine. 35 The current tendency is to ignore those factors. This is not to simply deny

technology its rightful place in the conduct of warfare, but rather to caution the

incorrigible technophile against over glorifying gadgets and gizmo, to the point of

obscuring the limitations of technology, as the RMA debate has tended to do.

More to that, the excessive interest analysts have in the part played by

technology in the Gulf War is largely a function of the overall outcome of the conflict.

Many of the ‘new’ technologies employed in Desert Storm including precision-guided

munitions, were first effectively employed in Vietnam but their achievements were

overshadowed by the unfavourable outcome of the conflict. Likewise, if the outcome of

the Gulf War had not been what it turned out to be, there is a likelihood that a discussion

on what went right, RMA inclusive would never have arisen. To underline a few

examples of this, the US Patriot antimissile defense system performed far less

effectively than originally advertised, against the Iraqi scud that in technological terms

represented a mediocre upgrade of the 50 years old German V-2 fame of World War II,

but this has not been such a big issue.

In addition, despite Air Force claims that the Gulf War vindicated the utility of the

B-2 bomber, that rather costly platform was designed to deliver nuclear ordnance on

targets in the defunct Soviet Union and had little utility for conventional bombardment as

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it was put to in the Gulf. Other doubts on the efficacy of the strategic air campaign have

been raised by Gartner et al who estimate that 50-70% of all Iraqi armor and 60% of the

artillery destroyed in the whole campaign were knocked out by tanks and Army

helicopter gun-ships but not airplanes as the air power evangelicals of the RMA debate

tend to claim. 36

Besides that, Cohen points out how ‘most of the ordnance in the Gulf War

consisted of 1950’s-technology unguided bombs dropped by aircraft developed in the

1970s or in some cases 1960s’, leaving one wondering whether Desert Storm weaponry

was indeed the dawn of a future era of smart weapons as RMA evangelists would like to

argue, or the noon of trends that had been unfolding for decades. Thus, Cohen goes

ahead to ask: ‘This being so, whence comes the contention that United States is

undergoing a revolution in military affairs?’ 37 While highlighting the datedness of those

and similar technologies, O’Hanlon points out that,

‘[I]nfrared, electro-optical, and laser systems were all seriously degraded in

performance by weather, dust, and smoke. Even high-resolution radars on aircraft

such as the F-15E had difficulty distinguishing tanks from trucks at tactical

distances. 38

But worst of all, that paraphernalia of weaponry did not; in this case, have to

operate against any countermeasures: the weather, dust and smoke Hanlon pointed out

above were not Iraqi countermeasures. This makes it impossible to envision the efficacy

of those technologies if the US and her allies had faced, not the scarecrow military of

some Third World country, but the forces of a peer competitor, in an environment

suffused with the ‘fog of war’, the elements and countermeasures.

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 There are also questions as to why, with all the revolutionary improvements in

battlefield technologies friendly fire would cause nearly a third of all casualties suffered

by coalition forces. 39

Technology-biased promoters of a post-Gulf war RMA also hold that such new

technologies as depleted uranium ammunition, stabilized 120 mm guns, new compound

Armour for the US M1A1 tank and thermal sights are features of the revolution, a view

which, according to some analysts, does not tally with the facts. For example, Biddle

shows that, during Desert Storm, the US Marine Corps was equipped mainly with 1960s-

era M60A1 tanks and fought through actively resisting Iraqi armored units but incurred

fewer losses than the better equipped Army. 40 It may therefore be imprudent

overemphasize the technological aspects of the conduct of the campaign as the bulwark

of its revolutionary promise.

Elusive search for a universal truth: RMA and Eurocentrism

Analysis of the outcome of the Gulf War and whatever radical changes it may

signify goes further to highlight the enduring weaknesses of dominant historiography and

strategic studies, namely eurocentricism - the excessive and rather stultifying focus on

Europe and the United States, and the assumption that ‘other societies and states

appear primarily to be defeated’. 41 In many ways, this longstanding frailty, an aspect of

the ‘west and the rest’ myopia has been accentuated by the RMA debate.

And yet, RMA does not present as a truly Eurocentric cliché. Assuming there is

agreement that there has been a revolution, and consensus on what it is that we really

14
mean by ‘Military Affairs’, we would also have to search for a clear notion of who the

military affairs we are making reference to belong, and once we’ve done that the next

question would be whether it is feasible to have a RMA in just a single country.

CONCLUSION

This study has attempted to show that a military confrontation between

comprehensively mismatched adversaries is not a prudent reference point that the victor

in such a confrontation can use to make any meaningful deductions on the efficacy of

own capabilities or to validate improvements therein. Neither can this be helped by a

blinkered perspective on warfare that is exclusively informed by a theory of RMA that is

all about precise bombardment. Superior operational artistry and preeminent fighting

prowess is neither synonymous with a theory of mastery of warfare nor a philosophy of

military organization. The position of this writer remains that, revolution is a process that

involves root-and-branch transformations and not just reforms to accommodate a

random harvest of innovations, however revolutionary the latter may be. Military

improvements evidenced on the coalition side in the Gulf War fall way short the radical

transformations that would befit the being characterized as a revolution.

More fundamentally however, the RMA debate continues to rage in a political

vacuum. The same factors that may be leading to radical changes in the workings of the

military are also transforming the nature of other institutions and of society in general.

The feedback loops form the crosscutting transformations elsewhere will be the real

instigators of any thing like an RMA and not just a handful of adjustments in the conduct

of combat operations. The continued disregard of that fact will only make the key actors

in the Gulf comparable to early man stumbling upon gunpowder but still wishing to retain

15
his home in the caves. Desert storm will then, far from being the harbinger of a

revolution, essentially remain a rear guard action of a military machine of a passing

civilization fighting a kind of war that may never feature again. That will leave any

references to a revolution rather far-fetched, given that rear guard actions are by their

very nature reactionary.

NOTES
1
In the US, the defence budget peaked at 7% of GNP during the Reagan Administration in the
mid 1980s and the 1990s were to see it being halved to 3.0-3.5%.
2
Jeffrey Mckitrick; James Blackwell; Fred Littlepage; George Kraus; Richard Blanchfield; and Dale
Hill, ‘The Revolution in Military Affairs’ in Schneider, Barry and Grinter Lawrence E., eds., Battlefield of the
Future: 21st Century Warfare Issues (Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, 1995), 65.
3
Colin S Gray (1996), The American Revolution in Military Affairs: An Interim Assessment
(Camberley, Surrey, England: Strategic and Combat Studies Institute), 31.
4
Colin S Gray, Recognizing and Understanding Revolutionary Change in Warfare: The
Sovereignty Of Context (Carlisle, PA: US Army Strategic Studies Institute, 2006),
http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB640.pdf, accessed on 20 July 2008, p.i
5
Within the United States, RMA gained currency after the end of the (first) cold war with the
inspiration of Department of Defense officials like Andrew Marshal of the Office of Net Assessment and
Admiral William Owens , formerly of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The term is also claimed to have as its
precursor the Soviet coinage of the late 1960’s, Military Technical Revolution (MTR) that filtered down to
the United States in the 1980s, giving birth to what became known as ‘AirLand Battle’, Follow on Forces
Attack (FOFA) and Maritime Strategy (Patrick Bratton 'France and the Revolution in Military Affairs',
Contemporary Security Policy, 2002, 23:2, 87 – 112; p. 88).
6
David Mets, ‘The Long Search for a Surgical Strike: Precision Munitions and the Revolution in
Military Affairs’, presentation at the Society for Military History annual conference at the University of
Calgary, 25 May 2001, cited in Bratton, ibid, p.89.
7
The Dubious Genius of Andrew Marshall, The American Prospect, February 15, 2001,
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_dubious_genius_of_andrew_marshall
8
Cited in Gongora and Riekhoff, 2000, p. 2
9
Ibid.
10
Gray, 1996, op cit p. 34
11
Gray, op cit p.ii;
12
International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank (1991), World Devlopment
Report, 1991 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 205, at http://www-
wds.worldbank.org/servlet/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/1998/11/17/000009265_3981005112648/Render
ed/PDF/multi0page.pdf; accessed on 19 August 2008
13
Charles Duelfer, ‘Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the Director of Central
Intelligence on Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction; 2004
http://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/iraq_wmd_2004/chap2_annxD.html, accessed on 19 February 2008.
14
World Bank op. cit., p. 209.
15
Cited in Bacevich, 1994, op cit.
16
Jeffrey Record, (1993), Hollow Victory: A Contrary View of the Gulf War (Washington, DC:
Brassey’s, U.S. Inc, 1993), p. 135.
17
David H Hackworth, ‘Lessons of a Lucky War’, Newsweek Magazine, March 11th, 1991 p. 49;
cited in Record, ibid.
18
Mark H Walker, ‘Fragile Victory’; Paper submitted to the Faculty of Naval War College in partial
fulfilment of the requirements of the Operations Department, June 1994 (Newport, R.I.: United States
Naval War college, 1994), http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-
bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA279586&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf, accessed on 17 August 2006, p.26.
19
Ibid, p. 135.
20
Bobby R Inman; Joseph S Nye; William J Perry and Roger K Smith, ‘Lessons of the Gulf War’
Washington Quarterly, 1991, Vol. 15, No 68.

16
 21
Walker, op cit, p. ii
22
Francois Gere, ‘RMA or New Operational art?: A View from France’ in, Thierry Gongora and
Harald von Riekoff, eds., Toward a revolution in Military Affairs?: Defence and Security at the Dawn of the
Twenty-First Century (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000), pp. 129-138; p.129.
23
A. J. Bacevich, ‘Preserving the Well-Bred Horse’, The National Interest, 1994, No. 37, (pp. 43-
49) , p. 47, http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2751/is_n37/ai_16315044, accessed on 20 July
2008.
24
See: Williamson Murray, ‘Thinking about Revolutions in Military Affairs’, Joint Force Quarterly
No. 16 (Summer 1997): 69–76 and Theodor W Galdi, Revolution in Military Affairs? Competing Concepts,
Organizational Responses, Outstanding Issues, 1995, http://www.iwar.org.uk/rma/resources/rma/crs95-
1170F.htm, accessed on 18 July 2008.
25
Barry Buzan and Eric Herring, ‘The Arms Dynamic in World Politics’ (Boulder, CO.: Lynne
Rienner, 1998), p.11.
26
Donald M Snow, The Shape of the Future: World Politics in a New Century (New York: M.E.
Sharpe, 1999), p. 43.
27
Bacevich, op cit, p.49
28
Thomas X Hammes, The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century (St Paul, MN.:
Zenith Press, 2006), p. xii.
29
Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: Bantam, 1980) and Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler, War
and Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century (London: Warner Books, 1993).
30
I. B. Holley, ‘Of Saber Charges, Escort Fighters, and Spacecraft’ Air University Review Vol. 35,
No. 6, 1983; pp. 2-11, http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/aureview/1983/Sep-
Oct/holley.html, 22 July 2008
31
Steven Biddle, ‘Victory Misunderstood: What the Gulf War Tells Us about the Future of Conflict’
International Security, Vol. 21, 1996, No. 2. (pp. 139-179), P. 143,
http://www.comw.org/rma/fulltext/victory.html, accessed on 18 July 2008.
32
Gray 1997, op cit., p. 33.
33
Lawrence Freedman, The Revolution in Strategic Affairs, Adelphi Paper No. 318 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998).
34
(Cited in Gray, op cit.)
35
Colin S Gray, Another Bloody Century (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2005), p. 101.
36
They also make further reference to the tendency for commentators on the air campaign in the
Balkans who claim that the air strikes brought Serbs to the negotiating table without the commitment of
ground troops, while it is known that 100,000 Croatian troops did advance into Serbian held territory to
consolidate the impact of the bombings. Likewise, they note that in spite of the ‘decisive’ six-week air
campaign in the Gulf, the land battle of old still had to be fought Heinz Gartner; Adrian Hyde –Price; and
Erich Reiter eds., (2001), Europe’s New Security Challenges (London: Lynne Rienner, 2001), p. 78.
37
Eliot A Cohen, ‘A Revolution in Warfare?’, Foreign Affairs, 1996 Vol. 75, No. 2 (pp. 37-54), p.39
38
Michael O'Hanlon , "Beware the 'RMA'nia'," Paper presented at National Defense University, 9
September 1998, http://www.brookings.edu/papers/1998/0909defense_ohanlon.aspx, accessed on 17
February 2008.
39
Earl H Tilford, Jr., ‘The meaning of Victory in Operation Desert Storm: A Review Essay’, Political
Science Quarterly, 1993, Vol. 108, No. 2. (pp. 327-331), 327
40
Some of the Marine units conducted their operations in dated wheeled, thin-skinned light
armoured vehicles and the Army deployed thousands of lightly armoured M2 and M3 Bradleys that saw a
lot of action yet suffered few casualties (Steven Biddle, ‘Land Warfare: Theory and Practice’ in Baylis,
John et al, eds. Strategy in the Contemporary World : An Introduction to Strategic Studies (Oxford : Oxford
University Press, 2002) pp. 91-122; p.105).
41
Jeremy Black , Rethinking Military History (Routledge: Oxford, 2004), 67.

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