REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS

STRENGTH THROUGH COOPERATION
Military Forces in the Asia-Pacific Region

REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS: One Perspective
Thomas J. Welch

Evolution

One aspect of the revolution in military affairs (RMA) is identifying important trends of future warfare, by examining how the commercial world and the U.S. military are coping with the changes to their environments.

For the last 7 years the Office of Net Assessment, Department of Defense, has focused on three major areas of change: the proliferation of advanced weapons and associated military organizations and operational concepts, and what these developments might mean for U.S. power projection; the future security environment-the economic, social, political, and military environment in 10 to 30 years; and, the notion that we may be entering a time of revolutionary change in the conduct of warfare.

The Office of Net Assessment focuses on present and ongoing trends to describe conditions likely to be present in 10 to 30 years. Although we do not claim to predict who the superpowers will be in the next few decades nor forecast future events, it is possible to assess questions such as the probable nature of future warfare, examine the future security environment, and provide foresight to our leaders. Someone who believes that we may be entering a period of dramatic change in warfare will make decisions very different from those of a skeptic about such change. We can say some things about what is happening. There is substantial historical evidence that from time to time, technological change makes possible new military organizations using new operational concepts. We have commissioned studies of these periods. These past operational and organizational changes resulted in far more efficient and effective military capabilities. Many people have referred to such periods as revolutions in military affairs, but institutions other than the military-for example, industry-have had to change when faced with things like the information revolution.

Thomas J. Welch is Associate Director for Science and Technology, Office of Net Assessment, Office of the Secretary of Defense. He formerly served as Executive Director, President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, and the White House Federal Coordinating Council for Science, Engineering and Technology.

Definitions can be arbitrary but do provide a basis for proceeding. For us, an RMA occurs when technological change makes possible the introduction of new materiel that when combined with organizational and operational change, results in fundamental change in the conduct of warfare. What is important is not the speed with which a revolution takes place, but rather the magnitude of the change itself.

A final feature of a definition of an RMA is a "culminating event," a battle that employs the new systems, operational concepts, and organizations and that clearly demonstrates a dramatic change in the conduct of warfare. Examples might be France in 1940, or the Battle of Midway. In this sense, we do not see the 1990-91 Gulf War as the culmination of an RMA but rather as analogous to the Battle of Cambrai in World War I, where the innovative combination of airplanes, tanks, and radios hinted at what was to come later.

Other people may have other definitions for these periods and, not surprisingly, come to other conclusions. Others may proceed with no definition at all and, not surprisingly, not demonstrate anything about anything. Using our definition, one can indeed find periods of transformation in military operational and organizational concepts made possible by technological change. For example, at various times between 1917 and 1939, some people realized that an entirely new kind of operation, strategic bombardment, was possible. Some understood that a new naval weapons platform, the aircraft carrier, could cause dramatic changes in naval warfare. Internal combustion engines, improved aircraft design, and the exploitation of radio made possible the Blitzkrieg.

Earlier, the machine gun, the airplane, the submarine, and the Dreadnought class of ships dramatically altered conflict from the mid-19th century to the early 20th century. Even earlier, between the Napoleonic Wars and the American Civil War, railroads, telegraphs, ironclads, and rifled muskets and artillery dramatically transformed the nature of warfare. Union and Confederate generals trained in the tactics and operations of the Napoleonic era led their men to awful slaughter at places like Gettysburg. Eventually, both sides adapted to the new conditions. Just as the Battle of Cambrai foreshadowed the Blitzkrieg operations of World War II, the battles toward the end of the U.S. Civil War resembled the operations on the western front in the middle period of WWI more than early Civil War battles.

An American scholar, Michael Vickers, has identified a number of historical cases, beginning with the Bronze to Iron Age transition 32 centuries ago, satisfying our definition of an RMA:

Those nations that became aware of the importance of technological change and adapted operationally and organizationally accrued major advantages. Others then had to try to catch up rapidly. An example is the German blitzkrieg and the Allied attempt to master this new approach to armored warfare.
New, very different measures of merit, of effectiveness, become relevant; the old ones are more quickly discarded by the winners, who learn to adopt the new ones.
Some materiel, organizations, and operational concepts decrease in importance (sunset systems) in these periods while others increase (sunrise systems). Winners are sensitive to these changes and act on them.
Losers planned for the future by using their current organizations and practices as a point of departure. They were content to graft technological change onto existing structures and operations and to improve them at the margins.

All this raises some central issues. For example, are we in such a period today? If so, what part of the period are we in? How did this period start? How long will it last? What will the winners and losers do? If we are entering a special period, what kind of special perspective should we take? What are the strategic management issues for senior decisionmakers? For example, what are the economics of this revolution?

Much of the original intellectual basis suggesting that we are entering a period of dramatic change in the conduct of warfare came from Soviet writers, who continue to produce very good papers on this topic. They argued that precision-guided weapons and "informatics" (largely what we call the information revolution) were going to make a qualitative change in warfare. They argued that this period would be followed by one dominated by even more advanced technologies, for example, directed energy weapons, robotics, and special materials. Especially since the 1970s, their focus has been on the transition from a combat architecture called reconnaissance-fire to one called reconnaissance-strike complex-going from a kind of single, self-contained weapon consisting of sensor, fire-control, munition, damage assessment, etc., to a more effective and efficient weapon complex where the sensor, fire-control, munition, and so on are somewhat separated but still within a common organization. An example might be a World War II tank compared to indirect artillery fire.

Experts in other countries have also written about the nature of future war. Michael Pillsbury, a China scholar, has collected a number of Chinese articles focused on future warfare. One of the particularly interesting articles is by Major General Wang Pufeng, former Director, Strategy Department, Academy of Military Science. His article is noteworthy because it examines the advantages of a single battlefield information network to be used by all services. After studying Russian and other writings in the late 1980s and early 1990s, we in the Office of Net Assessment asked ourselves, "What do we think?" We set out to understand and judge the importance of these ideas and, led by Andrew Krepinevich, completed our preliminary assessment in 1992. In brief, we found that:

From our work to date, it is clear that we do not have the tools to adequately assess what is happening. We have no good models to work with; indeed, the existing models are probably more harmful than helpful. We lack measures of effectiveness to judge the properties of the kinds of things we believe will be important, like combat networks and other systems and the very different kinds of military organizations using them. In short, we do not yet have an adequate analytic framework with which to proceed. Although we have some notion of organizations, concepts of operations, and military capabilities may evolve, we are still novices at understanding the unfolding RMA.

To illustrate RMA dimensions, it is useful to consider a specific trend that has been underway for some time and that will be important over the next few decades, especially as it affects military organizations. The trend concerns what might be called "overlapping battlespace."

Battlespace is the physical volume in which military forces conduct combat operations; some would extend the meaning to also include an infosphere and other dimensions. In the distant past, the battlespace of an army was more or less circumscribed by the distance it sensed targets and the range of its weapons. With some exceptions, the battlespace of an army either coincided not at all, or only somewhat, with that of another service; land forces usually fought land forces, and so on. Operational, organizational, and materiel innovations resulted for the most part from each service's efforts to increase its own effectiveness and efficiency. However, over the past 100 years or so, there has been a trend driving a qualitatively different process for developing operational and organizational concepts. This has been made possible by two types of technological improvements: sensors and weapons reaching well beyond a service's traditional battlespace, and the ability to connect, or to network, sensors to weapons, databases, information, and people.

As noted in Joint Staff historical studies, land and sea missions seldom overlapped during the United States's first 150 years. But after the turn of the century, technological change, especially the development of the military airplane, upset the traditional definitions of land and sea missions. Overlapping aeronautic battlespace led to significant organizational struggles.

Nations reacted differently to the arrival of the aircraft. This led to differing organizations and asymmetrical capabilities. An example is the aircraft carrier. The United States and Japan both saw the potential for greatly increased battlespace and initiated fundamentally new organizations and operational concepts to take advantage of that. But others, focusing on the capability for increased "sensorspace" that could increase the power of battleships, grafted the new systems onto existing naval organizations and concepts.

In 1958, responding in part to the overlap condition made possible by technological change, President Eisenhower pointed out that "modern weapons and methods of war have scrambled traditional service functions" and "separate ground, sea, and air warfare is gone forever." Eisenhower was concerned not only about the air-space overlap problems but also about the overlap arising from the well-publicized competition between the Polaris submarine and the long-range bomber. Of course, Eisenhower was not as successful in organizational reform as he had hoped to be.

The situation today has gone well beyond that former competition, and over the next few decades we will see a dramatically increased overlap of networked sensors and weapons and a more complete extension of each service's battlespace into that of the others. A central part of this will be the ability to "strike at a distance" with high accuracy independent of range. This will underlie many new, far more effective and efficient operational concepts. One of these will be "parallel war," i.e., the simultaneous attack of tactical, operational and strategic targets, a point articulated by Jeffrey Barnett in Future War: An Assessment of Aerospace Campaigns in 2010.

It is clear that interservice possibilities for sensor-weapon-database-intelligence-people-information combinations are increasing dramatically. The trend is important; the number of possible interservice combinations will exceed the number of intraservice combinations. The possible procedures for doing the business of combat-of orchestrating diverse organizations, firepower and maneuver-are multiplying. Over time, some current materiel, operational concepts, and organizations will be seen as ineffective, inefficient, fragile, unnecessarily costly, dangerous or wasteful, and will be discarded. Arguably, it is this new situation, the structure and processes of battlespace reach and battlespace networks, that perhaps most distinguishes this revolution in military affairs from previous revolutions.

What might be the nature of new military organizations and their operational concepts? One approach to addressing this question is to ask how networks are used today in the services and to assess their positions on overlapping battlespace. Another is to seek insights from corporations and industries-especially from those that have experienced overlap and network phenomena. Corporations have the advantage of daily feedback as to how well they are competing; this may mean they are well ahead of militaries in exploiting the information revolution. Of course, we need to be careful in mapping insights from industry to militaries. The consequences of failure are very different, for example.

Some Corporate Trends

With the revolution in information, centered at first around the computer and then around interactive systems, some companies saw that future competition would be very different and that they needed to transform the way they were organized. Today, many decisionmakers in the commercial world see their organizations as the way they use information to get things done. What are some of the things we can learn from them?

First, many companies dealing with information realized that new products were increasingly emerging from regions of technology overlap-products performing functions independently or collectively by two or more industries using different technical approaches. We are witnessing the overlap of telecommunications, broadcast TV, cable TV, multimedia, and wireless services. Some students of this "digital convergence" suggest that no one technology will dominate but that we should expect new and dominant organizations from the regions of overlap.

The deregulation of the telecommunications and cable industries is an example of coping with overlapping "commercial battlespace"-telephone companies delivering video and cable companies delivering phone services. In past years, each of these two industries had a monopoly, a kind of sovereignty, and something of a social contract with the public. Each assumed a certain entitlement and tenure. Now, technology change has caused an overlap of capabilities, the contract is no longer seen as an efficient and effective one, and entitlement and tenure are not guaranteed. A similar situation is unfolding in the electrical utilities industry.

Second, companies realized that simply adding mainframe or personal computers (PCs) to an existing organization did not in general significantly improve effectiveness or efficiency. Eventually it did make possible an awareness that, without changing organizational structure, increased effectiveness and efficiency could be achieved by changing operational procedures, simply by linking or networking the computers. Much greater improvements were realized when the network was made interactive and linked databases. Corporate headquarters was no longer thought of as a fixed place; it existed wherever management connected to the network. All this suggested to some that the information revolution was moving to an "interactive revolution."

In turn, this made possible an awareness that even more effectiveness and efficiency could be realized, but this time with organizational change. Companies concluded that if they could now design their organizations around the new networks, they would look very different from the organizations they had-in other words, existing structures were longer sensible. Among other things, companies saw that the new technologies eliminated much of the need for a class of worker-middle managers-to collect and disseminate information.

Third, in the 1970s and 1980s, a product like a personal computer defined itself by its capabilities. In the 1990s, however, the utility and importance of a personal computer and other devices are more and more defined by what they are connected to. Companies, especially information-intensive ones, began to realize that not only was the importance of a personal computer determined by a new organizing form-the network to which it was connected-but that the network was also driving the requirement for personal computer hardware and software. Consequently, we now see personal computers with built-in faxmodems and software such as "gophers" and "browsing aids." Very shortly, we will see inexpensive, "dumbed-down" personal computers where the computer's operating system, applications, and other functions have migrated to the network for use as needed.

Fourth, some of the most innovative companies noticed the potential for a dramatically increased span of collaboration. Some spoke of "work as conversation." Even though the traditional corporate command model remained centralized, it had been displace in many cases by a decentralized one, which in turn is being replaced by a model which seems to be neither. Some have called the new form a corporate confederation. It has also been suggested that while the network may be the central structure, collaboration is the central control process. Over time, the network structure may become a commodity while network processes and content become more and more valuable.

Why are networked corporations becoming far more effective and efficient? Network members have many more ways of doing their tasks and their customer needs can be satisfied in many new ways. Design, manufacturing and distribution tasks can be executed more effectively and efficiently because a corporation can at once choose among the many resources connected to its network. In many cases, a corporation can quickly decide to "build or buy", to do a task itself or to contract out. Networked corporations can do their tasks faster; they have a much better chance of reacting in a timely fashion to challenges and opportunities as they appear. Network members do not have to spend time acquiring catalogs and contacting suppliers -- they go immediately to a supplier's database and decide whether and what to buy. Finally, owners of a dominant network can offer "dominant software"-superior software that is "on the network" for network members such as user-friendly connections to databases and others on the network-and "groupware"- software to enhance collaborative work, capabilities which owners of smaller networks cannot afford. As with the personal computer, the importance of an organization and its operations is more and more determined by what the organization is connected to.

Finally, corporations have managed to cope with many of the kinds of problems one often hears about when discussing the information revolution and the military. For example, the "problems" of information overload; of top management being able to see what subordinates are doing and deciding to meddle; of limiting subordinates to what top managers think they ought to see and know; of affordability; of information security; and of loss of control coming with a diminished hierarchical structure. Indeed, the lesson from industry Chief Executive Officers seems to be one of the information revolution freeing them up to do strategic thinking and other arts of management.

What can military organizations learn from these civilian experiences? Is the corporate world leading the military not only in technology but also in operational and organizational concepts made possible by technology? Will military command structures continue to be hierarchical while control begins to look more like a confederation?

Will networking sensors, weapons, databases, and people lead to new operational concepts that will lead to new organizations, which, in turn, will define new materiel? Should the architecture of military organizations be easily connectable, open, and adaptable? Will the importance of weapon systems and military organizations be defined by what they are connected to? Should we expect parliaments to ask their militaries to "deregulate" battlespace? Or will parliaments act on its own to redefine the roles and missions of it militaries?

Service Trends

In the U.S. Army, a major theme is the so-called "digitized battlefield." The idea is to connect Army platforms-tanks, helicopters, artillery vehicles-with each other and with intelligence databases. Former Army Chief of Staff Gordon Sullivan believes that doing so will increase the effectiveness of the Army by 30 percent. This increase comes simply by connecting things together; it does not consider radical changes to Army organizations and operational concepts.

The Army has already demonstrated "telemedicine"-medical procedures carried out over global distances. The Army plans to conduct some intelligence functions in this fashion. These are cited by the Army as an example of "split-basing," putting only a portion of a functional unit into a theater of operations, thus reducing its exposure ashore and its airlift requirements, especially early in an operation. As much work as possible is done by the part of the functional unit left behind. But it is an existing organization that will be split, an organization not designed to take optimal advantage of technological change.

For the U.S. Navy, the C⁴I concept links all Navy elements. Laying claim to some of the battlespace of the Army and Air Force, a Navy concept proposes that its C⁴I capabilities support two new missions: antitactical ballistic missile defense over land as well as sea, and long-range, precision-guided weapons over vast sea and land areas. Part of this is may be possible with the Arsenal ship, which, like the "dumbed-down" personal computer mentioned above, relies on functions residing outside itself. As conceived by the Office of Net Assessment's Keith Bickel in 1993, the sensors, fire-control, and other functions needed by Arsenal ship missile and gun squadrons would be external and orchestrated via the network. It appears that the network did not simply "enable" the conception of an Arsenal ship; in large part, it defined it, transforming the meaning of a ship.

It is important to note here the seductiveness of the term C⁴I. Clearly, command is not control is not communications is not computers is not intelligence. The construction of this term in the United States resulted largely from budget and turf battles and not from any detached intellectual analysis. Among the dangers is that we tend to think of a single C⁴I network when we should be open to other possibilities. This is necessary if we are to avoid serious conceptual, budgetary, and other mistakes.

The U.S. Navy's Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC) is a unique air defense system, because of the extent to which it shares information. The CEC network connects people, sensors, and weapons in ships, on airplanes, and on land over thousands of square kilometers. Everyone who is connected can see what every one else can see-a complete picture of the air space. Every sensor on the network can be cued by every other sensor, the CEC might have 50 or more radars connected at one time. Each sensor detecting a target offers a unique perspective on the target and all these data are added together and distributed to everyone. Some sensors can see a target other sensors cannot see because of terrain or other reasons, but everyone on the network sees what the detecting sensors produce.

Further, the CEC automatically selects the best placed weapon to attack the target. The sensor located with the weapon need not see the target; another sensor or sensors have done that job, and the fire control solution is automatically computed and sent to the weapon.

Organizations such as Arsenal ship squadrons and the small, highly dispersed U.S. Marine Corps units envisioned in the Sea Dragon concept, as well as materiel such as undersea sensors and undersea platforms, could easily plug into architectures like the CEC. Another possibility is to use the CEC and Arsenal ships as a mobile, terminal ballistic missile defense system. Indeed, more and more of the complete battlespace can and will be seen and used by everyone. Under these conditions, orchestrating the battle will require new operational approaches.

As mentioned earlier, simulation is one of the three technological developments making possible a very different kind of future warfare. The CEC architecture just discussed is not unlike the structure of recent military simulation arrangements, particularly Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS). A key advantage of DIS is its ability to give each simulation participant a picture of a common battlespace as it would be seen through a tank sight, helicopter windshield, or whatever. In a few years, perhaps a more important capability of DIS-demonstrating the value of giving each participant a picture of the complete battlespace-may become apparent. When this awareness becomes possible, militaries will realize they have a remarkable "system of systems battle lab" with which to try out new operational and organizational concepts, as well as to optimize the design of netted materiel. Thus, simulation will be important not only because of its better known capabilities, but also because of the coming ability to rapidly evaluate new, very different operational concepts, organizations, and materiel. This may lead to important "learning-curve dominance" for the military establishments that are more adept in using simulation tools.

In the U.S. Air Force, Project Talon Sword is noteworthy. It involves aircraft launching over-the-horizon, air-to-ground missiles using direct target information from satellites. More recently, the Air Force "Project Strike," part of its Tactical Exploitation of National Capabilities work, has established an even more diverse and expanded network. This network can connect Airborne Warning and Control aircraft, the Joint STARS, other agency satellites ("national systems"), F-15 fighters, U-2 aircraft, Rivet Joint aircraft, Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, and possibly U.S. Navy F/A-18 aircraft. Once again, capabilities have been connected to achieve more effectiveness and efficiency but, so far, without much change to existing organizations, operational concepts or materiel.

Insights as to future aerospace forces can be found in the U.S. Air Force Scientific Advisory Board report, New World Vistas, Air and Space Power for the 21st Century. This report proposes a future mix of "inhabited and uninhabited" aircraft. As with the Arsenal ship, the "uninhabited" combat air vehicle (UCAV) would be very much defined by what it is connected to. The architecture to be used provides for an "internetting of nodes"; the UCAV is seen as a node, part of a "seamless operation across networks." UCAVs could be transported and released by large airlifters. Because they carry no pilots, very high maneuver-ability is possible, and because they carry little or no sensors, the vehicles can be stealthy.

Using these and many other illustrations, one can conclude that the services are, by and large, responding to technological change by experimenting with, and planning for, improving existing service organizations using service networks connecting sensors and weapons within service-determined battlespace. By and large, each service is developing its own unique reconnaissance-strike-complex. National capabilities, such as space observation, are to be used by each service's organizations to better support its own reconnaissance-strike-complex. It is this absence of really new organizational arrangements and operational concepts that suggests we are still in the early stages of this RMA. There may well be sufficient technological capability today to permit an RMA, but only if we are willing to change, probably quite radically, our legacy organizations and operational practices.

A recent Chinese forum on the "world military revolution" put this point sharply:

The experts of our Army (PLA) hold the view that in its bid to conduct this military revolution, the United States will encounter obstructions from all sides, especially obstructions from the (US) Army itself. The military revolution which the US Army is engaged in is no more than the use of information technology to transform the existing units as well as the existing weaponry and equipment of the army, and the US Army has already got trapped in the blind alley of technology. The new military revolution takes a transitional process. History has proved many times that due to the obstruction of outdated traditional concepts, armies with a strong military power tend to draw out this transitional process and end up falling far behind others in the new military revolution. If the United States goes on with the present practice, the military revolution it is engaged in will not be a thoroughgoing one.

But forces of change are beginning to appear-for example, the Direct Broadcast System being put in use in Bosnia, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense-Joint Staff, Advanced Battlespace Information System. These systems are transmedia in nature and thus transservice, which may over time have significant operational and organizational impacts. The Advanced Battlespace Information System is of additional interest because it clearly separates command and control from information, and thus goes a long way in a much needed deconstruction of the C⁴I artifact. Finally, ABIS may help demonstrate that the "problem" of information overload in militaries is brought on more by centralized structures than quantity of information.

Other forces of change will include the realization by parliaments that their militaries can maintain effectiveness and save money by changing-sharing information, its analysis, and its dissemination, for example. One can speculate about various potential developments, including the appearance of sunset systems and organizations-pre-positioned supply ships as well as traditional land-based materiel and organizations no longer needed if the operational concepts possible with Arsenal ship squadrons even partially fulfill expectations over the next few decades. In turn, one can then speculate as to other capabilities, such as heavy airlift, which, in large part, may no longer be needed. One can see further economic impact by speculating as to new, very different military organizations that, like the Arsenal ship squadrons, are defined or determined in large part by the network.

Another force of change will be "military misfortunes," problems resulting from the seams required by legacy organizations using legacy operational concepts to cope with overlapping battlespace. A recent example of the kind of misfortune to come is the escape of the Iraqi Republican Guard in the Gulf War. The "seam" in that case was the U.S. Army's Fire Support Coordination Line, which limited the region within which friendly Air Forces could execute unrestricted attacks. According to students of that war, the Army placed the line so far forward that it could not effectively attack the Guard, even though the Air Force could have done so. One can also look to the shootdown of the U.S. F-16 over Bosnia as the result, at least in part, of organizational seams-in this case, a failure to provide for sufficiently timely dissemination of intelligence data.

The number of seams will increase geometrically as the number of connections and the ability of forces to strike at a distance increase. An illustration of this increase in seams can be found in Joint Publication 3-0, Joint Operations, a graphic case of trying to cope with battlespace overlap without changing organizations. In a way, we are seeing a repetition of earlier behavior. An example is the U.S. Army-Navy agreement in the interwar period to limit the range of Army aircraft so as not to encroach on the naval media. Historians looking back to the 1990s may well be baffled and amused at doctrine and regulations confining media-based services to functions within that media.

These forces of change will act upon all the world's militaries. In the past, these militaries often defined their organizations in terms of operational media-land, sea and aerospace-and each was seen as sovereign within that media. Parliaments and the publics supported this in large part because it seemed to make sense. Now, as technology tends to complete the overlap and network processes, fundamental questions of appropriate jurisdiction arise.

It is important to understand what is happening here. First, the designers of today's materiel, organizations, and operational concepts never envisaged the notion of networking as we have described. Second, just as in the corporate experience, militaries will undergo a sequence of awareness levels before the end-state of this period is reached. At first, as former Chief of Staff for the Army General Sullivan noted, just connecting existing materiel and organizations will be seen to increase effectiveness. Later, it will become apparent that the materiel in use was never designed to be optimized on a network, and new, far more effective and efficient materiel designs will appear.

The defense industry will discover a growing number of customers who see existing platforms not as "stand alone" weapons but rather as part of an interactive network. The kind of platform improvements important to customers intent on optimizing a networked system will be very different from that of customers trying to optimize the platform. Astute defense corporations, anticipating the coming of networks and the gradual shift in customer requirements, will soon attempt to have it both ways by offering "network ready" product improvements for platforms. Still later, militaries will realize their operational concepts are not optimized for use on the network and they too, will be replaced. Probably last, militaries will realize their traditional organizations are no longer sensible, and they will reluctantly consent to their change. Being open to this last level of awareness will be particularly difficult, because to meet the highest level of efficiency and effectiveness in this period, organizations, like materiel and operational concepts, must be designed to contribute to a single combat system occupying a single battlespace.

Some militaries will likely implement some of the materiel, operational and organizational changes in parallel, and not in the sequence described. Some may even leapfrog stages. In any event, the process of awareness and the willingness to change will be a central feature of the long-term competition among militaries.

Conclusion

The Office of Net Assessment has concluded that the United States is in the early stages of an RMA, made possible by the information revolution, long-range precision weapons and simulation capabilities. We do not yet know the military organizations and operational concepts that will characterize this revolution. However, we can speculate as to their nature. We can gain insights by studying history and trends in the military and industry.

It may be that the most efficient and effective military organizations will be based on the ability to network, to connect everything and everybody, to everything and everybody else. As predicted by some Russian writers, we are more and more able to connect diverse entities so as to have today's reconnaissance-strike complexes subsumed by a transservice, reconnaissance-strike system. To illustrate this point, we will see satellite-based sensors detecting and roughly locating SCUD launches, passing this information onto people in the apparent impact zone as well as ground-based antimissile batteries and JSTARS aircraft. The JSTARS sensors, cued by the satellite sensors, are directed at the suspected SCUD launch site and a more precise location obtained. The SCUD is attacked by an antimissile battery and the launcher attacked by an Arsenal ship with the bomb damage assessment done by a UCAV. Sensor-to-shooter architecture is being replaced by a sensor-to-network one, where the "network" means many other sensors, weapons, data bases, etc. This will have dramatic organizational effects.

It appears to be more important to learn how to merge technologies than simply to pursue emerging technologies; architecture seems more important than engineering. It will no longer be helpful to think in terms of service-unique battlespace. Notions like tooth-to-tail ratio and supported or supporting forces need to be challenged and rethought. Up or out retention criteria may have to be replaced by a demonstrated ability to network, resulting in something like a "sideways or out" standard. Because much of the technology needed is available now, disparaging remarks about the duration of the acquisition cycle may be displaced by concerns about the length of the operational and organizational cycle, the time needed to field new doctrine and new organizations to take full advantage of networked materiel.

Over the next few decades, we may no longer structure our organizations by media or around a platform like aircraft carriers. Instead, the organizing principle may be the network, resulting in a discontinuity in the meaning of organizational essence. As this happens, the network may assume the primacy if not the sovereignty now enjoyed by media-based services. It is from such speculations that one can proceed to concept papers, war gaming and simulations. One can ask concept paper authors to think about the kinds of new networks and long-range, precision-guided weapons we envision and ask them to conceive future forces starting with a clean slate, to think discontinuously, and to organize as to be most effective and efficient. This was the process used by Thomas Mahnken in his award-winning essay in Joint Force Quarterly 10 (Winter 1995) on the RMA. Repeated war gaming of these concepts produces new organizational forms, some of which seem to endure. In time, these new organizations can be simulated and the best ones field tested. The same can be said for new operational concepts. In time, net assessments of one's networked organizations, operational concepts and materiel-a combat system occupying a single battlespace-versus that of another power will be possible and necessary. Perhaps one of the first of these will be a "Blue CEC" afloat versus a "Red CEC" ashore.