Overview

In the late 1990s, military planners must consider potential enemies ranging from fanatical terrorists to disaffected great powers and hostile acts ranging from an improvised bomb in a shopping centre to a nuclear exchange and a ""cyberwar"" directed against critical information systems. This is what the author terms ""the revolution in strategic affairs"" born of the combination of developments in weapons technology and fundamental changes in the security and political environment. This paper challenges the view that the Gulf War marked the arrival of a ""revolution in military affairs"", in which new precision technologies hold out the prospect of decisive and relatively painless conventional victories. It shows that this ""revolution"" has been anticipated for over two decades. The end of the Cold War allowed the US to contemplate major war without the expectation of nuclear escalation - but it also made more probable different types of conflicts, likely to involve weak states, which may not be fought according to Western preferences. This paper contrasts the trend towards isolating Western military organizations from their wider societies - by employing all-professional forces and seeking to confine hostilities to combatants alone - and the social character of those conflicts most likely in the future. The West may respond by avoiding conflicts that carry a high risk of turning into the wrong sort of war. The revolution in military affairs will be a revolution in name only if those who embrace it look merely for the sure and relatively painless victory.

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9780199223695

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Lawrence Freedman

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