By James L. Regens, Matthew R.H. Uttley & Charles B. Vandepeer
“I will ignore all ideas for new works and engines of war, the invention of which has reached its limits and for improvement I see no future hope.”
—Sextus Julius Frontinus (Engineer, General, and Statesman, circa 40 - 103 AD)
Militaries reaching back to antiquity have sought to leverage technologies that provide advantage against their prospective adversaries on the battlefield. History is littered with examples of surprises in combat and unexpected military outcomes caused by new technologies or the innovative application of existing technologies. The new technology or novel application of existing technology may be truly revolutionary and fundamentally alter the status quo by rapidly replacing previous conditions rendering them obsolete (i.e., the new or novel may be transformative).[1] Alternatively, the new technology or innovative application of existing technology may incrementally disturb but not immediately destroy the status quo and replace existing conditions due to thorough and dramatic change (i.e., the new or novel may be disruptive). The chariot, the stirrup, gunpowder, the steam ship, the internal combustion engine, aircraft, submarines, radar, computers, nuclear weapons, the transistor, and satellites come to mind.[2] Those advantages—whether transformative or disruptive—may enhance mass through concentration and distribution of overwhelming force at the right time and place; maneuver through mobility of forces in the battlespace to obtain positional advantage over an adversary; or surprise through unanticipated strikes at times, locations, or in ways that achieve tactical, operational, or strategic success.[3]
The conventional wisdom of technological optimism presumes that the new technology is categorically different, delivers a devastating effect, and will be decisive in warfare, especially if its introduction on the battlefield is a surprise. This vision of the future is not surprising. As the 3rd of Clarke’s Three Laws—or, more accurately, guidelines—postulates, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”[4]
In a quest to achieve this imagined future, the pursuit of innovation and technological transformation is driving military research, development, and acquisition programs around the globe, not least among the United States, its allies and regional partners, and its peer competitors. How much of a real as opposed to illusory opportunity, however, does pursuing these twin goals represent for creating and deploying a new game-changing technology whose military application changes fundamentally what has been by creating a new what is? In other words, leveraging technology and achieving long-term strategic transformation by opening up new national security options or closing off existing ones possibly changes the domains or character of warfare as opposed to temporary disruption of the status quo at the operational or tactical levels.
Air Combat - Western Front World War I, Air Service, United States Army (Wikimedia)
Because the ways in which new technologies get introduced frame expectations and interpretations, examining the historical record since World War I offers an empirical test for whether truly transformative technologies or temporarily disruptive technologies tend to predominate. This is a logical starting point, since the period from 1914 to 1918 represents a fundamental revolution in warfare, ushering in the modern three-dimensional style of war and thereby making almost all pre-1914 military doctrine about the conduct of large-scale ground and naval operations obsolete.[5] Principles of mass, maneuver, and surprise were changed by the introduction of rudimentary forms of combat aircraft, the tank, motorized transport, target acquisition and fire-control technologies, communications technologies for command and control, and submarines by 1918.[6] Taken as a whole, the application of these technologies was genuinely transformative, yet few World War I commanders grasped they had the potential to go beyond being merely disruptions or novelties.[7] Reflecting on that war, Basil H. Liddell Hart observed “two thousand years of experience... tell us that the only thing harder than getting a new idea into the military mind is to get an old idea out.”[8] This underscores the fact that actually understanding or failing to comprehend what the technology does and how it works frames the way that it is developed, adopted, and employed.
World War II similarly represented a second wave of technological innovation with a mix of disruptive and transformative technologies being deployed for military applications. [9] Most of the innovations—with the notable exceptions of radar, nuclear weapons, cruise and ballistic missiles, and rudimentary computers—were technological improvements or extensions of existing conventional weapons to a geographically expanded three-dimensional battlespace.[10] As a result, the basic elements of battlefield operations from 1939 through 1945 traced their origins to and mirrored those in 1918.
The U.S. and the Soviet Union emerged as superpowers in the aftermath of World War II and engaged in intense competition globally throughout the Cold War era lasting from 1947 to 1991. The threat of mutual assured destruction from a nuclear exchange led both countries to devote substantial financial and scientific resources to their defense industrial bases and the development of strategic military technologies, especially nuclear weapons and their delivery systems. Technological advances in offensive and defensive conventional weapon systems for ground, air, and naval forces also occurred at an unparalleled pace as the two peer competitors simultaneously sought to increase their own lethality and disrupt the adversary’s capabilities. Some cases, such as the problems with the Sparrow missile and air crews employing them effectively during Vietnam, underscore the reality that expectations of technological superiority can go unmet in combat.[11] Examples of new American and Russian technologies that delivered a devastating effect through tactical application but not necessarily victory include the development of the first generation of precision munitions and their introduction in the Vietnam War’s Operation Linebacker II and advanced anti-tank weapons in the Yom Kippur War or October 1973 Arab-Israeli War.[12] After an arms race lasting almost 55 years ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. emerged from the Cold War as the only global superpower.
F-14A in flight over burning Kuwaiti oil wells during Operation Desert Storm, 1 Feb 1991 (Wikimedia)
Combined with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the first Gulf War in 1991—often referred to as Operation Desert Storm—signaled the potential for the United States military to exert its unrivaled technological preeminence in conventional warfare vis a vis its international rivals.[13] In parallel, Russian military power declined precipitously. For example, as evidenced by its performance in the 1994 battle for Grozny in Chechnya, Russian conventional capabilities were in a precarious state. The destruction of the 131st Maikop Brigade, for example, came as a shock to the Russian military and government as well as western intelligence services, all of whom had anticipated a quick victory. The Chechen campaign followed more than a decade later by the 2008 war with Georgia clearly demonstrated Russia’s diminished conventional capabilities. Although Russia’s strategic systems were better insulated from the relatively low levels of investment that degraded its conventional forces until after Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012, these events profoundly impacted perceptions about the Russian military’s capabilities and competence within and beyond Russia.[14] Putin subsequently moved aggressively to fund and implement a doctrine first articulated in 1996 by then Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov that Russia would position itself globally as an alternative center of power to the U.S. and its allies.[15] In parallel, the People’s Republic of China observed in real time the stark disparities between the American military approach and capabilities relative to the Chinese military’s ability to wage modern conventional warfare successfully.[16]
The initial phase of the Iraq War—sometimes called the second Gulf War or Operation Iraqi Freedom—lasted just three weeks, ended with Saddam Hussein's overthrow, and reinforced how to fight and not fight future conventional wars.[17] The extensive use of precision-guided munitions by American forces leveraging networked operations and near-instantaneous global communications and intelligence provided confirmation that the revolution in military affairs had profoundly changed the way in which the U.S. waged conventional warfare.[18] At least for the Chinese and Russians—as well as other potential peer or near-peer U.S. and NATO adversaries—it also underscored the imperative to modernize military technology and doctrine as well as to identify new domains for warfare in information operations, cyberspace, and space.[19] And, at least with respect to Russian doctrine, the concept of nuclear escalation to de-escalate, which significantly lowers the threshold under which the use of nuclear weapons is permitted, added a potential consideration for the U.S. and its Western allies to factor into their decision calculus.[20] As a result, unlike the immediate post-Cold War era of the 1990s through roughly the first decade of the 21st century, the United States no longer can assume either unrivaled technological preeminence in conventional warfare or that the battlespace will be restricted to the conventional warfare domain.[21]
This article closes by returning to the questions posed in the introduction: Is technological optimism justified? And, if so, are disruptive or transformational technologies more likely? The weight-of-evidence over the past 100 years demonstrates that accurate interpretation of the impact of technologies is critical. Despite the proclivity to assume technological optimism, examination of the actual historical experience indicates the introduction of a new technology or innovative application of existing technology tends to be disruptive rather than genuinely transformative. This may stem from several key factors. First, militaries have a capital stock of equipment and doctrine as well as training tied inextricably to that capital stock. Second, each military organization has a complex web of norms and expectations about how it should and does function that conditions and constrains how forces are used in combat. Ethical, legal, and moral values also shape decisions about developing and using or not using a particular technology.[22]
Consequently, as demonstrated by the World War I experience, new technologies may have a lag time between initial tactical introduction and commanders’ ability to employ them effectively. Similarly, the World War II experience indicates that disruptive technologies can deliver devastating effects operationally or tactically—Operation Barbarossa comes readily to mind—but fail to achieve long-term strategic success.[23] The disconnect may come from a tendency to underestimate resiliency, or the ability to recover if given sufficient time. This underscores why transformative technologies may by their very nature be decisive, as the use of nuclear weapons demonstrated.[24]
Despite the seductive appeal of technological optimism, truly game-changing technologies that radically alter the status quo and simultaneously create a new present and possible future are rare. This is not surprising, because transformational technologies are contingent on the ability to translate fundamental paradigm changes and breakthroughs in scientific knowledge into practice as progress in physics, quantum computing, synthetic biology, and neuroscience is leveraged.[25] Transformational technologies, by definition, significantly alter military capabilities and generate new threats to national security spanning the tactical, operational, and strategic levels. In essence, they exert truly revolutionary effects to alter radically the balance of mass, maneuver, and surprise between adversaries. This follows because the adoption and application of new technologies can impact both the adversary and the operators. For example, the development and deployment of strategic bombers and submarines in World War II impacted the battlespace. Strategic bombing campaigns in Europe resulted in some of the highest casualty rates for Allied units due to air crew losses. Similarly, due to submarine warfare in the Atlantic, the loss rates for U-boat crews were among the highest if not the highest for German units on a per capita basis.
As a result, history suggests on balance that game-changing technologies are more likely to be disruptive militarily to the operational or tactical status quo rather than transformational unless they radically change an existing domain or create a new domain of warfare. This stems from several factors. First, by its very nature, truly revolutionary change that raises to the strategic level is extremely rare. Second, despite expectations or predictions to the contrary, the arc of history is malleable rather than unidirectional. This is illustrated by a clear link between the development of weapons in World War I and their adaptation and ongoing development in World War II. For example, Liddell Hart in 1925 correctly identified the importance of aircraft, tanks, and submarines—including Britain’s vulnerability to blockade.[26] However, he fortunately erred in over-estimating the impact of poison gas on warfare. There is not necessarily a linear relationship between technological development of weapons and their application in warfare, nor do they automatically involve improvements mirroring previous conflicts. The imagined future of war’s domains or character, therefore, is a necessary precondition for military innovation and technological development but does not pre-ordain automatically what tomorrow’s warfare becomes.
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