58
3 THE IMPACT OF CULTURAL FACTORS ON
THE US REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS
although the American technological capability to execute deep strikes using
PGMs was significantly more advanced than that of its Soviet counterpart,
the Soviet military had fuller comprehension of the revolutionary impact
that the ALB and FOFA arsenals would have on the future battlefield than did
the US military.1
It took the Pentagon almost a decade to “become converted to
the MTR” and to emulate the Soviet proposition of major changes in the character
of warfare, which saw the “reconnaissance-strike complex” as the dominant
architecture for future operations.2
The phase of American “capabilities
formation” was followed, beginning in the late 1980s, by the conceptual birth
of the RMA. Not until Andrew Marshall and his colleagues introduced the
notion of the RMA did this conceptual innovation reach the consciousness of
the American military and defense establishment. The purpose of this chapter
is to trace the impact of the American strategic culture on the approach of the
US defense community to the RMA.
The chapter comprises three parts. The intellectual history of the American
R MA i s d iscussed i n t he first pa rt. It de scribes t he te chnological a nd
conceptual preconditions for the innovation, touches on the US intelligence
assessments of the Soviet MTR, refers to the conceptual birth of the American
RMA, and analyzes the implication phase of this innovation. The second part
concentrates on the general sources and the main traits of the American strategic
culture. It describes several fundamental societal and cognitive characteristics
and illuminates the principal traits that gave shape to American strategic
culture, such as: the “American way of war”; “a-strategic thinking”; the
engineering approach to security; time orientation; the role played by the Joint
THE US REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS 59
Chiefs of Staff; a role of technology in military affairs; and inclination to ethnocentrism.
The conclusion i ntegrates t he previous t wo pa rts a nd uses t he
characteristics of the American strategic culture to account for the conduct of
the US defense community with regard to the RMA. The analysis of the cultural
tr aits c larifies w hy t he c ultivation o f t he te chnological s eeds o f t he
American RMA preceded the maturation of the conceptual ones, and what
prevented the US defense community from grasping the emerging RMA in a
timely and proper manner.
PART ONE: AN AMERICAN REVOLUTION
IN MILITARY AFFAIRS
The Formative Period of the RMA: Technological
and Conceptual Preconditions (mid-1970s–early 1980s)
According to William Owens, one should associate a technological prequel of
the American RMA with the Pentagon officials who began in the late 1970s
to think about the application of technology in military affairs and to formulate
a so-called offset strategy3
—a program by which the US and NATO allies could
use technological superiority to n eutralize the overwhelming conventionalforces
size advantage that the Warsaw Pact members had over NATO forces in
Eu rope.4
William Perry, undersecretary of defense for research and engineering,
responsible for the development of the capabilities for the “offset option,”
stated in 1978: “Precision-guided weapons, I believe, have the potential for revolutionizing
warfare. More importantly, if we effectively exploit the lead we have
in this field, we can greatly enhance our ability to deter war without having to
compete tank for tank, missile for missile, with the Soviets. We will effectively
shift the competition to a technological area where we have a fundamental long
term advantage [emphasis mine].” Although in retrospect Perry claimed that
the offset strategy was more than just a plan to exploit “high technology” for
its own sake, the primary objective of the defense establishment was to u se
high technology to b uild better weaponry systems than those of the Soviet
Union.5
The means of precision strike, intelligence, and communication—the capabilities
on which the concepts of the American RMA would later be built—
matured technologically in various Defense Advanced Research Project Agency
(DARPA) projects beginning in the late 1970s. DARPA allocated its budget to
give qualitative advantages to American forces to offset the quantitative superiority
the Soviet forces enjoyed in Europe6
—the strategy pursued during the
60 THE US REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS
1970s a nd 1980s.7
A mong t he c ore te chnological f ocuses t hat shap ed r esearch,
development, and production efforts were: the families of land-, air-,
and sea-launched precision-guided and stand-off weapons such as terminally
guided submunitions, smart and guided missiles and bombs, and stand-off land
attack m issiles; command an d c ontrol an d auto mated reconnaissance and
target acquisition projects such as Airborne Warning a nd Control System
(AWACS), E-8 Joint Surveillance and Target Attack Radar System aircraft,
Integrated Targets Acquisition and Strike System, and stand-off target acquisition
system (SOTAS); programs to bolster anti- armor weapons, such as “fire
and follow” and “fire and forget” antitank missiles; navigation and guidance
devices ba sed o n t he g lobal p ositioning s ystem (GPS); stealth t echnology
such as F-117 aircraft or naval stealth and stand-off precision strike capabilities;
a nd unmanned aerial vehicles of various a ltitude a nd endurance.8
In
1978 DARPA integrated research and development of the above-mentioned
capabilities under one unified project entitled “Assault Breaker.” From the
1980s, t he project became a lso k nown a s t he “Smart Weapons Program.”
Tomes d efines t his p eriod o f c apabilities-developing a s t he “ formation”
stage of the RMA.9
Air-Land Battle doctrine, which was invented to stop the Soviet second echelons
deep in t he rear, laid down t he technological f undament of t he f uture
American RMA.10
Its more important contribution, however, was probably the
unprecedented introduction of the operational perspective to American military
thought, or what Shimon Naveh defines as the emergence of “operational
cognition.”11
In his landmark works on military history, Erickson claims that
the recognition of the operational level is necessary to “think big” about war. To
him, operational art is a me ans of accommodating technical change to produce
n ew w arfare c oncepts.12
C onsequently, t he i ntroduction o f o perational
perspective became the conceptual precondition for the American RMA.
There tends to be agreement among scholars that American receptivity
to operational thinking in the late 1970s was promoted by the poor performance
of the US Army in Vietnam.13
Not before the early 1980s, as Lock-Pullan
shows in his study, did US armed forces start to make the conceptual leap into
the operation level of thinking, when they embarked on the ALB doctrine.14
During this “reawakening of American military thought, the operational
level of war became a ke y focus of study and an important consideration in
defense planning.”15
In addition to other sources of inspiration,16
Soviet operational
theories stimulated more sophisticated and systematic thinking by
THE US REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS 61
American theoreticians about the nature of battlefield integration and extension.
ALB mirrored many of the developments of Soviet operational theory
from the 1920s.17
The emulation was so apparent that according to Erickson,
“Generals Svechin and Isserson and Marshall Tukhachevskii, would at once
be impressed and flattered, sufficiently so even to overlook the protracted intrusion
upon their copyright.”18
The operational corpus of knowledge facilitates
an intellectual climate suitable for systematic thinking about changes in
military affairs. Consequently, it is indispensable for the diagnostics of future
RMA. Without t he broad professional aptitude for operational t hinking in
the US military, RMA concepts would have remained an abstract idea. Tomes
concludes that the evolution of American military thought in frames of the
ALB, and specifically the introduction of the operational level of thinking,
was central to the future evolution of the American RMA.19
Azar Gat makes a s ound argument that ALB and FOFA were devised as
early as the 1970s to incorporate the new technologies outlined above. Thus,
argues Gat, although the Soviet MTR vision was more comprehensive in understanding
the revolutionary nature of the change, the US and NATO doctrines
chronologically coincided with the Soviet theorizing.20
Gat’s argument
is persuasive. However, it is important to state that these capabilities and visions
have not matured either technologically21
or conceptually during the
period under discussion. For the most part, the defense community treated the
emerging capabilities as a multiplier of the existing force effectiveness and did
not deduce from it any revolutionary implications with regard to the concept
of operations, organizational structures, or the nature of war.22
Without a deeper
understanding of the operational and organizational consequences of the new
weaponry, the mere existence of the smart weapons and technologies did not
produce the Revolution in Military Affairs. New weapons systems were produced
in compliance with very mechanical logic—to ensure that the United
States was not left behind in the area of new technology.23
It was not the futuristic
vision of military thought that was the driving force behind the innovations,
but the linear arms race logic vis-à-vis the Soviet adversary. The offset
strategy certainly reflected an American way of looking at the world and coping
with its problems through its typical way of war. Seeking technological
answers to t he operational questions of the central front reflected a c ultural
affinity to leverage the challenges to national interests by technology.24
The key capabilities developed, then, created the technological quality that
in tandem with the sophistication of American military thought produced
62 THE US REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS
the fertile soil for launching and realization of a bold defense transformation
in the 1990s.25
However, the cultivation of the technological seeds of the American
RMA preceded the maturation of the conceptual ones. The offset response
consisted of little more than sustaining a technological edge in the face of an
armored assault by the Warsaw Pact forces.26
The corpus of operational knowledge
was a solid basis for the development of new ideas but still inadequate for
generating revolutionary visions of future war. No advances in reconceptualizing
the existing paradigm about warfare were made in those years. The PGMs
were seen as just another weapon in the military arsenal. The very commu-
nity that developed the weaponry failed to recognize their potential in future
war.27
American Intelligence and the Assessment of the Soviet MTR
Although t here were a f ew ac ademicians w ho s aw t he f uture i n t he e arly
1970s,28
Knox and Murray claim that the tactical emphasis of the Pentagon’s
analysts had prevented them from seeing anything revolutionary in these new
capabilities.29
To make things worse, the phase of the technological and conceptual
preconditions of the American RMA coincided with the misinterpretation
by US intelligence of Soviet MTR concepts. The disregard of the American
defense community for the emerging change in the military regimes lasted
for about a decade. This inattention is particularly striking in light of the wealth
of information accumulated in US intelligence about t he Soviet t heoretical
writings on the MTR.
In its analysis of the Soviet perception of Western military capabilities, US
intelligence detected at a very early stage, and with a h igh level of accuracy,
the new d irection of m ilitary t hought t hat was evolving i n Soviet m ilitary
circles. By t he mid-1970s, the US had de veloped a g eneral understanding of
the mechanisms of how the Soviets developed their military concepts, including
exercises to test theoretical propositions, doctrinal discussions, and scientific
conferences.30
The intelligence community translated and disseminated
Soviet writings on military thought, doctrine, strategy, and operational concepts
to ma ke i mportant i nformation e asily available ac ross t he s ervices.31
The CIA had at its disposal a considerable amount of open Soviet sources that
reflected the intellectual debate about the emerging MTR and its implications
for the Soviet vision of future war.32
These sources, which included translations
from the classified journal Voennaia Mysl,’ shed a great deal of light on
the term Military- Technical Revolution within the context of Soviet military
THE US REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS 63
thinking at the time.33
In 1974, the seminal work Scientific-Technical Progress
and the Revolution in Military Affairs was translated and disseminated by the
CIA.34
In 1981, a sp ecial report was dedicated to t he Soviet methodology of
“forecasting in military affairs,” which inquired into the nature of the paradigmatic
changes i n t he nature of war a nd i nto t he essence of t he c urrent
MTR in par tic ular.35
Since the late 1970s, US intelligence closely monitored the growing Soviet
interest in microelectronics, computers, and signal processing, and Moscow’s
continuous efforts to ac quire them by both legal and clandestine means.36
The CIA reported conspicuous Soviet concern with regard to the technological
lag vis-à-vis NATO, particularly in key technologies that provided precision
weaponry capabilities.37
The analysts argued that the Soviet search for
technologies was a necessary starting point in the implementation phase of
the MTR decreed by the Soviet chief of staff. They estimated that the Russians
intended to use the MTR concepts, and especially PGM, to change the
total f orce s tructure a nd c ombat p otential o f S oviet f orces.38
The “smart”
precision-guided munitions, which the Soviet military reckoned would alter
the nature of war, relied on a variety of technologies in the field of microprocessors
and computers, and consequently their acquisition became a mo re
urgent necessity.39
On the heels of monitoring the Soviet quest for advanced technology,
US intelligence soon began to arrive at the operational essence of the MTR—
Soviet experimentation with reconnaissance-strike and fire complexes. Discussing
S oviet conventional doctrine, t he CIA u nderstood t hat t he S oviets
considered conventional weapons s o ac curate, lethal, a nd de structive a s to
approach the potential of nuclear munitions.40
A series of CIA estimates from
the early 1980s refer to s o-called reconnaissance-strike organizations (RSO),
which had been developed out of the Soviet concern for the threat posed by
the Assault Breaker, precision-guided, deep-striking, theater-level systems capable
of firing on follow-on moving Soviet echelons.41
According to the same
estimates, the RSOs were a further expression of the new MTR concept of integrated,
deep, simultaneous fire destruction of the enemy. The analysts grasped
that the Soviet RSOs consisted of an integrated triad of reconnaissance and
target acquisition complexes, automated command and control elements, and
long-range striking systems. They correctly attributed the ROK and RUK to
the operational (army) and the tactical (division) levels and envisioned them
as the main trend in future Soviet force development.42
64 THE US REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS
In the late 1980s the CIA reported that since the 1970s, motivated by the
need to counter NATO deep-attack, high-technology conventional weapons
and extended battlefield concepts, the Soviets had been able to match NATO
capabilities in nearly every major ground forces weapons category. Discussing
the Soviet conventional doctrine, the CIA acknowledged Soviet declarations
regarding their perception of the virtual parity of conventional versus nuclear
weapons. The CIA report argued that military advantages afforded to the USSR
by its numerical supremacy might be mitigated by Western progress in advanced
technology conventional weapons, especially long-range PGMs.43
Toward the
end of the Cold War, the CIA attained additional clarification of the Soviet
doctrinal vision, which reckoned that the outcome of future war would be
determined mainly by a massed strike of conventional PGMs linked to realtime
reconnaissance systems and complementary ground maneuvers, rather
than by masses of tanks, infantry, and artillery.44
However, in forecasting the development of Soviet military power for the
1980s, US intelligence concluded with an assessment that minimized the overall
i mplications of t he S oviet i nnovation. US i ntelligence predicted t hat i f
current trends continued, “new technology, whether developed or illegally acquired,
was expected to lead to evolutionary improvements in individual
systems. However, not one of these technological developments or even their
combination in the foreseeable future was expected to r evolutionize modern
warfare.”45
Similarly, while discussing Soviet writings on the MTR and RUK
concept during the early 1980s, senior DoD officials treated the issue according
to arms-race Cold War logic: if the notion of what the Soviets termed Western
“reconnaissance-strike capabilities” caused a c ertain strategic d iscomfort i n
Moscow, then the US should expand its investment in this area.46
This logic was
consistent with various administrations’ efforts—among them economic ones—
to neutralize Soviet influence, to place them at a competitive disadvantage, and
to bring the struggle to an end on American terms.47
The wealth of information concerning Soviet views on the discontinuity in
military affairs, accompanied by the poverty of comprehension regarding its
consequences, w as a si tuation t hat endured w ithin most of t he US defense
community for almost a decade. Only a few American analysts, most notably
Gen. William Odom, focused on the validity of the MTR and recognized it as
more than just another Soviet innovation.48
Most Soviet-watchers in the West, in
their analysis of Soviet theoretical writings, were unable to see the forest for the
trees of specific technologies and tactical-operational problems.49
THE US REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS 65
The Conceptual Birth of the American RMA
Without a specific date for the birth of the current American RMA, one can designate
the period of the late 1980s to early 1990s as the intellectual cradle of the
paradigmatic change of American security thought. MacGregor Knox and Williamson
Murray contend in their work on the dynamics of military revolutions
that Andrew W. Marshall and his experts within the Office of Net Assessment
(ONA) were the first to register the significance of Soviet writings on the MTR
and to introduce the notion of revolutions in military affairs into the American
defense community.50
This claim was echoed by Gen. Makhmut Gareev, the
president of the Russian Academy of Military Sciences. Gareev identified Marshall
as a theoretical luminary who fully grasped the essence of the Soviet MTR
and as a founding father of the American RMA.51
Although the technological
groundwork for the innovation had been laid down in the 1970s, for the American
defense community the RMA thesis had been nothing but a vague, abstract
term when A ndrew Ma rshall a nd Andrew K repinevich first ci rculated t heir
memorandum on the RMA in the early 1990s. The US armed forces (similar to
the British when they first began experimenting with armored and mechanized
warfare in the mid-1920s) were not consciously thinking in terms of a
revolution.52
As one scholar remarked, the US military, like Molière’s character
in The Bourgeois Gentleman, had been “speaking in prose” (the RMA) but
did not know it.53
Indeed, only a small group on the margins of American defense planning
in the early 1980s would recognize the approaching RMA.54
Albert Wohlstetter
is generally considered to be the first senior figure within the American
defense establishment to u nderstand t he dramatic impact of t he new
accurate weapons on the nature of war. Wohlstetter referred to the phenomenon
as “revolution in the accuracies of unmanned weapon systems.”55
Envisioning
t he first-generation PGMs deployed in the latter stages of the
Vietnam War, he realized t heir p otential for subs tantial reduction of t he
inefficiencies and uncertainties that had plagued large-scale industrial age
combat. In the face of what he called the “enormous inertia” of the armed
services, Wohlstetter, supported by Andrew Marshall and a few other defense
intellectuals, c ampaigned v igorously t hrough t he 1980s to c onsider more
carefully the strategic implications of an expanding family of PGMs. In his
view, the “revolution in microelectronics” opened up new vistas for the application
of force and an increasingly wider variety of political and operational
realities.56
66 THE US REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS
It was only at the very end of the Cold War that a genuine interest in Soviet
MTR theories gathered momentum in the American defense establishment.
The highest point of Wohlstetter’s national-level efforts to incline the defense
community to r econceptualize the nature of warfare came in 1987, when he
cochaired with Fred Ikle the Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy.
By this time, it was no longer the standard intelligence analyses on the doctrinal
action-reaction dynamic in the European theater that attracted American
attention, but the essence of the discussion about the emerging nature of the
future security environment. The report discussed the necessity of extending
its studies beyond Cold War military balance assessments, even though the
USSR was still alive and kicking.57
The commission’s report credited American
technological advances discussed above, such as stand-off PGMs, space,
“stealth,” radar, and targeting capabilities. However, the report stated without
hesitation t hat while t he Soviets f ully appreciated t he implications of t hese
systems on the ways of waging modern warfare, the Pentagon did not. On a
more positive note, the commission declared that if the US awoke to the opportunity
at hand, it might acquire a more versatile, discriminating, and controlled
capability to employ this technology-driven change in war.58
To further develop its initial insights, in 1988 the commission established a
working group, cochaired by Andrew Marshall and Charles Wolf. The group,
which included a few select defense intellectuals from the establishment and
academia, was entrusted with the task of projecting the likely contours of military
competition in the future security environment. The report echoed the
findings of its predecessor when it stated that the Soviets had identified roughly
the same list of technologies important for future war but had considered their
implications more systematically. It stated further that most, if not all, considerations
given to t his subject in the West had f ocused too narrowly on the
utility of highly accurate, long-range systems for raising the nuclear threshold
and enhancing conventional deterrence.59
According to the Marshall and Wolf
report, rather t han merely identifying ways to i mprove specific systems or
perform existing missions, Soviet writings had suggested that the conduct of
war would be broadly transformed by a “qualitative leap” in military technologies.
The report found that in contrast to the American approach, the Soviet
MTR writings tended to focus not on questions of feasibility, cost, and timing
for specific innovations, but rather to assume that families of new technologies
w ould e ventually b e i ntroduced, a nd to e xamine t he t actical, o perational,
and strategic implications of technological trends. The report asserted
THE US REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS 67
that the Soviets envisioned a more distant future than American military experts,
and allowed that the Russians might be correct in their assessment that the
advent of new technologies would revolutionize war. The group concluded that if
this was indeed the case, then a transformation in the nature of war would affect
American force structures and command practices in some cases more profoundly
than the introduction of nuclear weapons.60
From the late 1980s, Andrew Marshall eclipsed Wohlstetter as the leading
proponent of inquiring into a p otentially emerging paradigmatic change in
the future security environment. Building upon its work for the above commission,
ONA embarked on a more detailed assessment of the Soviet MTR
vision, starting in 1989. The preliminary lessons from the Gulf War provided
further stimulus for this inquiry, as the US sought to conceptualize the new
type of warfare seen during Desert Storm. The US specialists claim, and the
Soviets c oncur, t hat during O peration De sert Storm t he a llies suc cessfully
executed a perfect version of the Soviet conventional theater offensive, which
encapsulated most of the doctrinal principles developed by Soviet military
theoreticians in frames of the MTR. In Ogarkov’s view, the most impressive
allied capability demonstrated during the war was the ability to conduct a tightly
synchronized, integrated joint operations assault throughout the depth of the
operational theater, striking both the enemy’s strategic centers of gravity and
its military forces, in order to produce decisive results.61
The ONA experts had
picked up on the writings by the Soviet military and offered an assessment
that had two related goals: first, to identify whether or not the Soviet analysts
were correct in their conviction that they were witnessing a fundamental discontinuity
in military affairs; and second, if a military revolution was indeed
on the horizon, to p inpoint critical issues that had to b e given a p rominent
place on the defense management’s agenda.62
This assessment of the Soviet MTR, which was completed in 1992 (with a
more comprehensive assessment a year later), is perhaps the best-known document
prepared by ONA. The ONA intellectual effort yielded what seemed to
be a total consensus that Soviet theorists had been correct since the late 1970s
about the character of the emerging MTR. The net assessment confirmed the
Soviet postulates that assumed that advanced technologies, especially those
related to informatics and precision-guided weaponry employed at extended
ranges, were bringing military art to the point of revolution in the nature of
warfare. Along with information warfare, the report identified the Soviet concept
of reconnaissance- strike complexes a s t he ma in de terminant o f f uture
68 THE US REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS
warfare.63
The 1992 and 1993 assessments called for a significant transformation
of the American military, not so much in terms of new technologies but
rather i n o perational c oncepts a nd o rganizational i nnovation. B eing mo re
advanced in these two fields was expected to be far more enduring than any
advantage in technology or weapons systems. The report underscored the importance
of a concept of operations in identifying the most effective weapons.
It criticized a tendency to utilize the advanced technologies simply as “force
multipliers” in frames of the existing approach to warfare. The assessments
attributed the highest importance to the investigation of and experimentation
with novel concepts of operations and deducing from them a new architecture
of military power.64
In contrast to t he traditional “technology-driven” mentality of the American
defense community, Andrew Marshall and his experts emphasized above
all the conceptual and doctrinal, rather than the purely technological, aspects of
the RMAs. The memorandum stated outright that although one would clearly
want to ha ve superior technology, the most important competition is not the
technological but the intellectual one. The main task is to find the most innovative
concept of operations and organizations, and to f ully exploit the existing
and the emerging technologies.65
The phrase MTR denoted too great an emphasis
on technology, and therefore an alternative term, Revolution in Military Affairs,
was adopted. It is interesting to note that this expression as well was borrowed
from Soviet military writings on the subject, though ONA experts
considered it preferable because it emphasized revolution rather than technol-
ogy.66
According to William Owens, then vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff (JCS), Soviet ideas regarding the MTR had stirred enough interest among
observers of Russia in the West to reduce it to the official Pentagon acronym. “A
higher form of praise of Pentagon officials does not exist.”67
The observations
about the characteristics of a new Military-Technical Revolution were made on
the basis of Soviet and Russian insights presented in their writings and personal
exchanges with Soviet/Russian specialists during the early 1990s.68
Marshall stressed the importance of the peacetime innovation that the US
had effected since the early 1990s—a luxury afforded by the Soviet decline. He
envisioned t he challenges to c ome, but during t he relatively peaceful years
that followed, he called for undertaking a more active search for and experimentation
with new doctrines. Addressing the implications for strategic management,
the assessment called for the following specific actions: to implement
new concepts of operations and organizations through changes in educational
THE US REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS 69
programs and changes in acquisition and to c reate new promotion paths to
train and to promote officers with appropriate skills and expertise. The memorandum
also offered the SoD and the CJCS an opportunity to establish bodies
and organizations that would develop knowledge concerning the military
revolution. The memorandum recommended encouraging the services to entrust
their very best people with the intellectual task of thinking about the
future of warfare.69
After conducting several historical studies sponsored by
ONA,70
Allan Millett and Williamson Murray concluded that “military institutions
that developed organizational cultures where serious learning, study,
and intellectual honesty lay at heart of preparation of officers for war, were those
best prepared for the challenges that they confronted on the battlefield.”71
The
MTR Preliminary Assessment became the intellectual starting point for the
future US Defense Transformation.72
Marshall and his proponents succeeded
not only in intellectually defending their vision but in actually implementing
the notion of the RMA across the US defense community.73
The evaluation
was circulated in the US defense community, initiating the most comprehensive
reforms in the DoD since the Vietnam War.74
A year after the publication
of Marshall’s legendary memorandum, t here were five task forces exploring
the RMA and its consequences.75
From the mid-1990s on, the term RMA established
itself among specialists as an authoritative frame of reference within
which the debate over the future of war unfolded.76
The Role of ONA and of Andrew W. Marshall
There were individual analysts (most notably William Odom) who had been
able to accurately assess Soviet MTR writings.77
However, a s a b ody, ONA
outperformed all other segments of the US intelligence and defense community
in this particular realm.78
Marshall and Wohlstetter were the first Americans
to i ntroduce the idea of discontinuities in the methods of fighting into
American military thought and the defense community. According to Richard
Perle, the 2003 Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) was fought exactly along
their vision of future war.79
Although the most obscure, relative to other institutions
of the American defense establishment, and most of the time below
the radar, ONA significantly influenced US defense policy for several decades
and w as p robably t he mos t i mportant i nstitution i n shap ing U S m ilitary
thought from the late 1980s.80
Because of the central role it played in the context
of the RMA, this section will discuss briefly the intellectual history of the
Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment.
70 THE US REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS
Dissatisfied with the quality of long-term strategic thinking, in 1971President
Nixon established a unit of experts that would integrate intelligence and
defense a nalysis o n na tional s ecurity t hreats, w hich w ould r eport d irectly
to National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger. The group was headed by Andrew
Marshall, a graduate in economics from the University of Chicago, who
had joined RAND in 1949 and who by 1969 had succeeded James Schlesinger
as RAND’s director of strategic studies. Marshall worked on a vast number of
strategic defense and intelligence issues, together with the leading American
defense i ntellectuals, a nd w as a c lose f riend a nd c olleague of A lbert a nd
Roberta Wohlstetter. In 1973, when the unit was moved to the Pentagon, Andrew
Marshall was named director of the Office of Net Assessment in the
Office of the Secretary of Defense. The unit focused on analyzing competitive
strategic environments between t he US a nd t he Soviet Union. To produce
assessments of the nature of Soviet capabilities and of subsequent American
countermeasures, i t s ynthesized a ll a vailable p olitical, m ilitary, e conomic,
and sociocultural data from within and outside of the defense and intelligence
community. Frequently, ONA assessments brought up scenarios and issues
that no other body had e ven considered, let alone assessed. Until now, Andrew
Ma rshall’s u nit ha s adv ised t welve s ecretaries o f def ense f rom eig ht
presidential administrations. The few available publications that discuss his
work define Andrew Marshall as a “leading defense strategist,” “unconventional
long-term thinker,” “one step ahead of the competition,” and the experts
of his office as the “Delphic Oracles” of the American defense system.
The credo of this “bastion of futuristic brainstorming” was “to think out of
the Pentagon box” on “ important but overlooked” national security issues.
Since the mid-1970s, this small office consisting of a doz en experts had b ecome
an intellectual center of gravity of the American defense bureaucracy.81
Marshall is “the only prominent strategist from RAND’s golden age still in
government service.”82
The idea of net assessment was dictated by the necessity to l ink defense
policies with the anticipated reactions of opponents.83
As an analytical tool,
net assessment was neither art nor science and was distinct from system analysis,
game theory, operations research, or strategic planning.84
The se formal
analytical frameworks made p redictions on the basis of players’ rationality,
assuming t hat s trategic adversaries a re following c ost-benefit optimization
rules. Net assessment parted ways with this conventional analytical wisdom
because it lacked the tools to consider the “soft,” immea sur able asymmetries
THE US REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS 71
between the competitors. It was distinguished by the consideration of unexpected
outcomes that emerge from unforeseen and unappreciated factors, some
of which might initially seem totally irrelevant.85
As Rosen put it, “net assessments
sought to avoid the natural tendency to assume the enemy would behave
as we would, were we in his position, or that our forces will engage like
forces on the enemy side.”86
For example, when analyzing an adversary, ONA
considered sociocultural-bureaucratic operating patterns more than officially
approved strategies. Net assessment integrated the strategies of the “biased”
adversaries in a si ngle space and simulated a c ompetitive dynamic between
them. On this basis ONA specialists generated their long-term forecasting.87
The memoirs of ONA veterans indicate that Mr. Marshall’s office had developed
its peculiar style of thinking, distinguished from the one practiced by
the other segments of t he American defense establishment.88
ONA experts
cared n o l ess a bout i magination t han a bout me thodology.89
Although a cknowledging
that futurology is often wrong, Andrew Marshall’s motto was
that “one can get many things right just by thinking about them a little bit.”
According to Paul Bracken, an ONA veteran, it was “a way of tackling problems
from certain distinctive perspectives.”90
Andrew Marshall is considered
to be the central figure to apply the net assessment methodology to security
affairs.91
The multifaceted ONA net assessments were both regional and func-
tional.92
To assess the military, political, and economic relationship between
the US and the USSR meant for Andrew Marshall, first and foremost, reading
and learning about what the Soviets were saying to t hemselves.93
In 1982 he
wrote:
A major component of any assessment of the strategic balance should be our
best approximation of a Soviet-style assessment of the strategic balance. This
must not be the standard U.S. calculations done with slightly different assumptions
. . . rather i t s hould b e a n a ssessment s tructured a s t he S oviets
would structure it, using those scenarios they see as most likely and their criteria
and ways of measuring outcomes. This is not just a point of logical nicety,
since . . . the Soviet calculations are likely to make different assumptions about
scenarios and objectives, focus attention upon different variables, include both
long-range a nd t heater forces, a nd m ay at t he te chnical a ssessment le vel,
perform different calculations . . . use different measures of effectiveness, and
perhaps u se d ifferent a ssessment processes a nd methods. The re sult is t hat
Soviet assessments may substantially differ from American assessments.94
72 THE US REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS
The eclectic, synthetic grasp of reality that Marshall established and cultivated
at the ONA impelled it to go out of its way to extend its reach—outside
of the intelligence community as well—to gather empirical evidence from all
the sources it could tap. During the 1970s, Marshall hired Sovietologists to
carry out an interview project with Soviet émigrés. The CIA and DIA generally
ignored these people on the assumption that they were too biased to be
useful sources of information. Marshall, by contrast, assumed they could be invaluable
sources of insight and went out of his way to s ee what they had to
offer.95
He was behind the funding of virtually all nongovernmental research
carried out in the US on this topic.96
During the last decades of the Cold War,
Marshall was perhaps the most consistent, and retrospectively prescient, critic
of CIA estimates of Soviet defense.97
Marshall based his understanding of the
Soviet MTR literature on reading for himself what the Soviets were actually
saying as opposed to accepting official intelligence summaries. He was one of
the first researchers to notice that American expectations about Soviet strategic
behavior did not coincide with the projections of nuclear-force developments
of t he 1960s. I n 1972, Ma rshall criticized t he A merican approach to
nuclear strategy, arguing that the US “had followed a rich nation’s strategy of
attempting to compete with the Soviet Union in all areas of technology.” From
his time at RAND, he had become convinced that the Soviet military thinking
was fundamentally different from that of the Americans. In the context of
net assessment work on the US–Soviet strategic–nuclear and NATO–Warsaw
Pact balances, he had directed extensive research into Soviet military theory,
measures of effectiveness, and assessment methodologies.98
When Soviet MTR writings were regarded by most observers as signals of
new advances i n Soviet military technology, A ndrew Ma rshall saw a c ompletely
different picture.99
As Marshall himself later recalled, the Soviets were
the first to bring to his attention the idea of revolution diagnostics. The diagnostics
entailed examining entire decades, to identify the emergence of new
forms of warfare that were destined to dominate military conduct. It seemed
reasonable to him to refer to the discontinuity discussed by the Russians as a
revolution, and to diagnose it as early as possible. In Marshall’s view, when the
Soviets declared t hat t he world had en tered into a n ew period of MilitaryTechnical
Revolution, in fact “they were consciously experiencing a change in
the nature of war. Usually, when one is in the middle of it, he is least aware of
it. However, the earlier the military acknowledges the emergence of the change
in the military regime, the more efficient defense management it will generate.”
THE US REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS 73
Marshall was, for the most part, in agreement with the Soviet methodologicaltheoretical
approach to the nature of war in general as well as with the content
of t heir a nalyses regarding t he current MTR. Ma rshall explained t hat in a
number of previous military innovations, for example, as with the Germans
and the British in the interwar period, people in the military were not consciously
thinking in terms of a revolution. He deliberately wanted to introduce
practice, which was so natural for the Soviet military intellectuals, to
diagnose the periods of significant change in the nature of war. According to
his own account, the Soviet theoretical writings of the 1970s first brought to
his attention the historical period of the twenties and thirties as an exemplar
of such a c hange. In the years to f ollow, the proponents of the RMA and of
Marshall’s ideas would cite this period as a frame of reference for the discussion
about the emerging discontinuity. He wanted American military theoreticians
to self-consciously pursue and experience the emerging Revolution in
Military Affairs.100
This approach was in keeping with the traditional focus of
ONA experts on strategic diagnosis, and not prescription. Marshall believed
that getting questions right was more important at the initial stage than trying
to get the right answers.101
However, ONA had as many bureaucratic weaknesses as it had intellectual
strengths. It was a small advisory body with its own budget for independent
research but had neither command authority nor budget allocation responsibility
within the military or defense system. A small number of ONA experts,
the long-term deductive thinkers of the American defense establishment, were
engaged in activities that were being performed in the USSR by thousands of
people in military academies and in the GS. Consequently, relative to t heir
Soviet counterparts, they were less influential or gan iza tion ally and could cover
fewer topics. ONA did not inquire into the nature of warfare per se; it concentrated
on Russian perceptions of it and generated its insights from there. Since
ONA’s assessments had not been instituted as an integral part of any military
or defense program, its bureaucratic influence varied with the changing administrations.
S everal s ecretaries o f def ense made u se o f O NA a s a n adv isor,
while others preferred to draw on other sources of strategic analysis, placing
ONA in the background. As an in-house Pentagon think tank, its authority
never went b eyond g iving adv ice to t he s ecretary of defense. ONA ma intained
a “polite distance” from the rest of the DoD and JCS, and did not regard
its assessments as prescriptive. In ONA’s view, it was up to someone else
to act on its insights.102
It never had the organizational tools, nor did it regard
74 THE US REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS
channeling its insights into immediate defense programs to b e a pa rt of its
mandate. In contrast to the Soviet case, in which senior military leadership
with co mmand a uthority w as i nvolved i n g enerating l ong-term f orecasts,
ONA’s a ssessments were not ne cessarily t ranslated i nto or ganizational or
conceptual transformations.
The Implementation Stage of the American RMA
Following the overwhelming victory of coalition forces in Operation Desert
Storm, a good deal of discussion took place as to whether the world had witnessed
an RMA.103
The RMA discourse of the 1990s became an “organizing
principle of US defense modernization d iscussions.”104
According to B arry
Watts, this innovative effort to think about how warfare might change in the
years ahead spawned official work within the DoD as well as a wave of literature
from the think-tank industry.105
Throughout the early 1990s, the RMA
thesis shaped the cognitive landscape of American military thought. According
to Rob ert Tomes, O NA de veloped a n i ntellectual c limate t hat f avored
“thinking about changes in military affairs.”106
Marshall’s office had taken the
lead in financing studies on the history of military innovation in the interwar
period—innovation that led to de velopments such as carrier strike aviation,
amphibious warfare, and Blitzkrieg—and in sponsoring its own war games,
conferences, and other RMA studies.107
By 1995a heady vision associated with
the evolving RMA thesis aroused tremendous excitement among American
defense planners.108
The 1997 QDR “acknowledged the existence of the RMA”
and urged to transform the armed forces accordingly.109
From Desert Storm
to Operation Iraqi Freedom, the notion of the RMA transformed American
military forces tremendously.110
Current American defense establishment “transformation”
is, according to Colin Gray, a “logical and practical consequence
of RMA.”111
Although ONA experts tried to focus the professional attention of the US
defense community on the symbiotic relationship between technology, concepts,
and or gan iza tion al structures, “techno- euphoria” thrived after the first
Gulf War. “From the outset,” argues Watts, “Marshall and Krepinevich were
clear in their own minds that operational concepts and organizational adaptations
were, if anything, more important than either new technology or getting
it fielded in a significant number of systems.”112
An emphasis on very long
time frames, the development of appropriate doctrine, organization, and practical
operations, as opposed to a focus on technology alone, distinguishes Mar-
THE US REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS 75
shall’s approach to a f uture RMA from most of the US defense community
and from American cultural predispositions in general. Andrew Marshall regarded
the changes in fighting that occurred during the interwar years of 1918–
39 as combined-systems revolutions. In these kinds of innovations, while technological
advances were necessary, the underpinning was a symbiosis between
systems, doctrine, and or gan iza tion al developments.113
However, as Gray precisely states, “despite the sophisticated and originally
fairly tentative, essentially speculative view of Marshall and OSD Net Assessment,
once the RMA idea became general property it was captured by a profoundly
technological view of the revolution that seemed to beckon the Armed
Forces into a n ew golden age of enhanced effectiveness. This techno-philia
was to be expected, given America’s technological strengths, its military culture,
and its preferred way of war.”114
Lock-Pullan believes the technological
lessons overshadowed t he conceptual, social, a nd c ultural ones. The l ist of
examples he provides to support his argument is compelling.115
According to
Watts, “because the American military establishment has been so resistant to
making the intellectual effort to come to grips with the challenges of this period,
the Pentagon has probably not yet gotten even a third of the way down
the road to ma stering t he changes i n war’s conduct foreseen i n Ma rshall’s
1992 RMA assessment.”116
Flawed thinking about the impact of technology on
the character of future war occurred not only at the stage of the paradigmatic
change. H. R. McMaster has shown how the US military frequently failed to
understand t he implications of t he R MA. The superficial thinking that accompanied
the uncritical embracing of the RMA corrupted American strategic
and operational thought in subsequent decades.117
PART 2: AMERICAN STRATEGIC CULTURE
Cultural Characteristics and Cognitive Style
The normative image of American culture is individualistic. American society
tends to emphasize goals and individual accomplishments rather than the
rationale pursued by a g roup. Individuals are motivated by self-interest and
personal values. The US is a performance- and achievement-oriented society
concerned with assertiveness, heroism, and material wealth as a sign of success.
One is expected to be an ambitious and competitive achiever; the quick and
successful are respected and admired. Social hierarchy does not impose much
on the individual; social bonds are flexible and fragile. American communication
style is an example of the low-context culture. It is open, dramatic, precise,
76 THE US REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS
and explicit, ensuring that the listener/reader receives the message exactly as
it was conveyed. During negotiations, ceremonial “beating around the bush” is
not considered a virtue, while getting “straight to the point” is highly valued
in t he low-context A merican entrepreneurial culture. Using E dward Ha ll’s
terminology, scholars define Americans as a culture with a strong inclination
to monochronism—considering issues independently from one another and
contemplating one thing at a time.118
Assuming a correlation between the sociocultural structure of the society
and its cognitive style, cultural psychologists recognize a s trong predisposition
of the American culture to the “analytical-logical” type of reasoning.119
The so-called field or context independence inclines the subjects to focus on
the particular object, to detach it from its context, and assign it to categories.
Individuals with an analytical-logical grasp of reality pay attention to the salient
object independent from the context in which it is embedded. This style
of thought uses formal logic to e xplain and to p redict an object’s behavior.
An observed phenomenon is dissected into pieces, which are linked in causal
chains and categorized into universal criteria.120
Sociologists argue that Americans
assume that rational thinking is based on objective reality, where measurable
results can be attained.121
This manner of thought is well suited to the
general American functional approach that emphasizes solving problems and
accomplishing tasks. American mental formations favor procedural knowledge,
which focuses on how to get things done, in contrast to descriptions of the
way things are. This way of thinking is believed to be rational and efficient.122
This practical orientation of thought is consistent with a mental preoccupation
with causality. Relative to other cultures, the idea of “natural happening”
and “occurrence” is less acceptable to the American intellectual tradition. In
contrast to h olistic thinkers, this orientation creates a ten dency to p ut data
together in linear cause-and-effect chains along a single dimension. It is based
inter alia on the optimistic belief that there is an objective essence that can be
reached through linear processes of discovery. American experience employs
psychology, game theory, and mathematics as dominant analytical approaches
to channel human thinking and judgments into applications. It is a tendency
that exists in symbiosis with the cult of the use of probability in risk analyses,
which have penetrated through American culture.123
Systems analysis prospered
as an analytical instrument in military affairs under Robert McNamara.
During the 1960s, progress in the Vietnam War was even measured by
“body counts and track k ills.”124
Practicality and functional orientation of
THE US REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS 77
thought aims it toward the nearest future, which appears in American thinking
in the form of anticipated consequences of actions.125
When trying to envision
the future and to make effective forecasting, logical-analytical cognitive
style predisposes American mental formation to focalism—a tendency to
focus attention narrowly on the upcoming target event and not enough on the
consequences of other future events. Among other things, it is another symptom
of “field independency,” when little attention is paid to the overall framework
in which rational and effective actions take place.126
Anthropologists argue that American social institutions and educational
organizations emphasize s ystematic a nd a nalytical t hinking a nd provide a
less favorable environment for holistic conceptual reasoning.127
The subjects
of the American cultural climate have been described as manifesting a “logicalanalytical”
app roach ac ross t he l arge sp ectrum o f h uman ac tivity.128
The
American personality is distinguished to a sig nificant extent by practicality,
which acknowledges the superiority of praxis over idealized concepts or abstract
virtues. As Andrew May argues, American science and technology were
historically produced in the most rational, pragmatic, and entrepreneurial fashion.
The aim was not to create abstract, fundamental knowledge, but to create
new, applicable technologies t hat could be w idely sold or used to generate
profits.129
This predisposes American conduct toward empiricism, a t heory
of knowledge that emphasizes the role of experience and those aspects of scientific
inquiry that take shape through deliberate experimental arrangements,
in contrast to the a priori abstract knowledge that is independent of experience
and experiment. Donnelly notes the strong predisposition of the American
military tradition to value practice at the expense of theory.130
On balance, the mainstream of American thinking style has historically
manifested a strong inclination toward inductive reasoning—it derives principles
from analysis of data and generalizes from the facts to the concept.131
Robert Bathurst shows that in the military realm and in international negotiations,
the United States began analyzing situations from fragments. Keeping
with its low-context orientation, its practical approach concentrated on the most
rudimentary aspects of the problem and sought the most optimal mechanical
solution to it.132
In discussing American negotiation style and legislation, Cogan
also describes an American proclivity toward inductive reasoning. He demonstrates
how this empirically based, inductive style of reasoning contrasts
with the Cartesian mode of deduction. While the deductive approach moves
from “top-down,” first defining principles and then deducing the context, the
78 THE US REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS
American approach is “bottom-up,” moving from the particular to the general.
This orientation also exists in American legal practice.133
Comparative
studies of political reasoning suggest that induction and empiricism are characteristic
of Anglo-American societies, as opposed to the holistic-dialectical
thinking of several other cultures.134
This intellectual climate fostered America’s
cultural approach to innovation. In his most thorough and original analysis
of US strategic culture, Brice F. Harris argued that “the story of scientific
discovery in America is less the story of scientific research in its creative form—
which is to say research in the tradition of Aristotle, Newton or Einstein—than
it is one of applied research.”135
As was established above, creative holisticdialectical
thinking style has a greater aptitude than its logical-analytical alternative
to grasp paradigmatic changes in military affairs.
American Culture of War: Swift Annihilation
and Attrition by Firepower
The national mission of conquering an entire continent, together with the
nation’s prolonged frontier experience, left its mark on American strategic cul-
ture.136
The United States developed into a c ountry of unusual dimensions,
and the scale of its resources has influenced the national security enterprises
it has undertaken.137
As American society grew in size and wealth, it also accumulated
military power, with no apparent economic or demographic limits.
Restrictions on American power were not natural, but rather determined
by political and strategic considerations.138
Almost two hundred years have
passed since the United States faced an enemy with a l arger gross national
product than its own. American productive capacity, translated into overwhelming
material superiority, has played a c ritical role in t he nation’s military
successes. Its dominance in numerous industrial and technological sectors,
in skilled manufacturing, and in the ability to increase production capacity
created basic military advantages: a large defense budget, a significant pool
of machines for fighting a war, and educated manpower capable of operating
them.139
Given the abundant material resources, troops’ equipment, and excellent
managerial expertise, the United States relied less on perfectly planned
and executed strategies to win.140
Self-efficacy dictates a strategy to shift the conflict into those arenas where
one enjoys an inherent advantage over one’s enemy.141
The strategy of attrition
and annihilating the enemy with firepower was the best way to transform the
nation’s m aterial s uperiority into b attlefield effectiveness. The t ranslation o f
enormous resources into firepower, technology, and logistical ability and a con-
THE US REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS 79
sequent inclination for direct attack date back to the military experience of the
American Civil War. This “annihilation by fire” approach has been largely successful
throughout American military history.142
In illustrating this tendency in
the country’s strategic culture, Cohen points to two outstanding characteristics
of American conduct during the Second World War: a preference for massing a
vast array of men and machines, and a preference for direct assaults.143
According
to John Ellis, on the operational level, US generals relied on material superiority,
firepower, a nd overwhelming force r ather t han on creative ma neuvers
that would threaten the enemy and force them to surrender.144
Referring to the
American preference for mechanical and industrial solutions, some argue that
the United States has often waged logistic, rather than strategic, wars.145
Discussing American strategic culture, Mahnken defines this preference
for an overwhelming blow as taking a “direct approach to strategy over indirect.”
In his discussion of American strategic culture, he dubs this phenomenon
“an industrial approach to war.”146
Echoing this claim, Chester Wilmot
argues that the Americans have adhered to the theory that if a military
machine was big enough, it could be driven wherever they wanted to g o.147
The conflicts in Korea and Vietnam provide further examples of the military
doctrine of annihilation and a resource-based approach to w arfare.148
Capitalizing
on this industrial approach, the US has often outproduced its enemies
in the amount of military power that it is able to generate.149
Criticizing this
formulation, other scholars have insisted that the American armed forces have
pursued a much wider range of strategies beyond pure attrition or annihilation.
American military tradition, they argue, is also rich in fighting small wars
and insurgencies and in developing excellence in deterrence strategies.150
However,
Mahnken has claimed, even in these cases, a preference for attrition and
annihilation “stands up remarkably well as a portrayal of American military
strategic culture and the aspirations of the US military.”151
It is most likely for
this reason that US strategic culture, which seeks decisive battles, ultimate
victories, and measurable national security outcomes, is less at home with
stability and support missions, on which swift annihilation by massive firepower
is less relevant.152
A-strategic Thinking
Longstanding American superiority in resources translated into a traditionally
low incentive to engage in patient strategic considerations and in thorough
operational calculations.153
Scholars agree that the materially wealthy
United States has, throughout its military history, preferred an approach to
80 THE US REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS
war based on annihilation and attrition by means of technology and firepower
over a s tyle o f fighting r esting on ma neuverability or on s trategic
thoroughness.154
The American military sought to t ake the war to t he enemy
as rapidly and as destructively as the machinery of industrial age warfare
permitted, while maneuver was considered to b e simply the means to
impose firepower on the opposing force.155
It almost took for granted that it
would be able to mass forces and firepower whenever and wherever it de-
sired.156
This i ndustrial approach to wa rfare accounts, according to some
scholars, for the relative disfavor with which traditional military theory is
regarded.157
Lock-Pullan notes that the United States did not historically
develop “excellence in strategy and military thought because it did not have
to.”158
Scholars report the strong predisposition of the American military
tradition to v alue practice at the expense of theory.159
Although a professional
military education of the US officers’ corps was strongly emphasized,
Murray argues that American strategic culture frequently tended to be antiintellectual
a nd a ntihistorical. A ccording to h im, t he U S s enior m ilitary
leadership’s “overall attitude at best appears to be that education is a luxury
for the American military rather than a necessity.”160
According to Gray, this
neglect of a professional military education at the top results, in part, in a
tendency to think a-strategically.161
The philosophy of a continuous and profound
professional military education was simply not that important an attribute
to American military culture. Intellectual curiosity in military science
never became a criterion for promotion.162
The above observations also reflect on the American approach to developing
professional theoretical knowledge about the nature of war. No theoretical
approach for the organized study of war in all its aspects (the impact
of social, economic, political, and technological phenomena on the methods
of fighting) was ever formulated in the West.163
Fundamental studies of war
and predictions about its future obviously did take place in the US. However,
when scholars compared them to those done in the USSR, they found the former
to b e fragmented, not integrated, uncoordinated, and rarely linked directly
to the development of the state’s military machine.164
Edward Luttwak,
in an essay written in 1981in International Security, pointed out that despite
the long-standing recognition of an operational level of warfare in classical
military literature, there was no adequate term for this in Anglo-Saxon military
thought.165
John Erickson and Raymond Garthoff have concurred that
the term operational art was foreign to Western military thinking.166
This was
THE US REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS 81
a serious conceptual shortcoming, since it is generally on this level that paradigmatic
changes in the nature of warfare are debated. Strategic and tactical
implications are an outgrowth of the initial insights produced in the milieu of
operational art.167
The American disinclination to invest in operational thinking
comes as no surprise. The idea of “collapsing the enemy” by operational
maneuver rather than simply annihilating it by firepower c onceptually d iverged
from the established American strategic tradition.168
It was only in the wake of the Vietnam War that ALB concepts began to
emphasize warfare maneuverability and the necessity to de velop theoretical
knowledge on the operational level. It was not until 1986 that the US army reoriented
from battles of integral annihilation in favor of a more dynamic and
complex understanding of war,169
and officially recognized operational art as
an integral part of US military thought.170
In general, the American strategic
community developed an approach to strategy that accounts less fully “for
the range of strategic dimensions” than does that of Russia or China.171
Optimistic and Engineering Approach to Security
The belief of t he founding fathers t hat A merica represented a “ new beginning”
contributed to a national identity based on liberal, democratic, Protestant,
and capitalistic principles. Individual freedoms, pragmatism, and rationalism
formed the cornerstones of the new society.172
The capitalist economy,
liberal political structures, and a strong spirit of exploration produced a belief
that as nature could and should be understood, potentially almost any problem
can be solved. Optimistic entrepreneurship became a value in all fields of
American social activity and created a society based on notions of efficacy,
rationalism, and pragmatism. Compounded by repeated success, it produced
a romantic engineering creed that viewed social and security problems as essentially
mechanical in nature and, consequently, consistent with the logic of
man- mademachines.173
American history is rife with “miraculous” achievements, typically in the
face of challenging geography. Conquering the wilderness bred a frontier pragmatism
that was translated into an engineering, problem-solving ethos. This
approach often regards political conditions as a set of problems,174
and pushes
strategists, influenced by engineering, to “attempt the impossible.”175
A belief
evolved in popular culture that problems could always be solved.176
As a society
whose Declaration of Independence affirmed the “pursuit of happiness” as
the natural right of every citizen, the Americans tended to t ake a p roactive
82 THE US REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS
approach, viewing sources of unease and discomfort as “engineering prob-
lems.”177
The political challenges posed by the American Indians or menacing
European or Asian empires were transformed by the United States into military
problems that could be resolved definitively by means of machine war-
fare.178
The absence of national-level security disasters reinforced optimism as
an American national philosophy.179
Such a strategic culture is more at home
with administration than with the art of diplomacy or strategy.180
It is inclined
toward reductionist methods of problem solving, by minimizing the
complications created by culture, time, and distance.181
Similar engineering positivism is manifested in American military thought.
Though Carl von Clausewitz might be considered the father of the American
approach to civil-military relations and strategy, many claim that the true mentor
of US military thinking is Antoine Jomini. He wrote about war as an art,
but his quest for reducing complexity to a f ew apparently simple principles
has characterized the cultural preference of American military thought for
simplicity over complexity. Armed with the Jominian belief in the effectiveness
and power of basic axioms, American practicality sought to reduce strategic
problems to equations. Historically, American strategists have assumed
that they could calculate the answers to the issues of deterrence and war. The
country’s domestic history encouraged the belief that American know-how
would inevitably find a solution to any problem.182
This tendency is reinforced
by an American fascination with technology that dictates, drives, and organizes
the managerial mind-set in military affairs.183
American Time Orientation—“Present and Immediate Future”
Scholars of American strategic culture describe how the need for immediate
action, the rapid resolution of problems, and achieving results went hand in
hand with a strong American time orientation toward the present instead of
the past or distant future.184
The practicality of American thinking “condemns
the irrational past” and directs it toward the immediate future, making the
orientation more functional than that in other societies, where the future is
measured in decades or generations. American time, argues Edward Hall, is
linear.185
The future appears in American thinking in the form of anticipated
consequences of actions.186
American culture usually considers the newest to be the best. Thi s inclination
is clearly reflected in the US military’s approach to weapons acquisition
policy. While Soviet weapons research, development, and procurement were
THE US REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS 83
driven by consumer requirements, the Western armed forces often procured
what industries produced and sold. In the West it was possible for a weapons
system to be procured because it represented state-of-the-art technology, and
not necessarily because its use was prescribed by the doctrine.187
The fascination
with novelty and rapid transformations predisposes American society to
accept change more readily than do other cultures. However, as Downey and
Metz have noted, with little attention paid to the past, the tendency is to look
ahead—not to the distant future, but more to the demanding present time.188
Although US strategic planning has not always focused solely on the here and
now,189
observers characterize it as generally averse to a n extended strategic
outlook and more comfortable with near-term crisis management than with
long-term strategy planning.190
As Murray put it, referring mostly to Vietnam,
“the American nation’s worst defeat resulted largely from a military and civilian
leadership that prized modern technology over the lessons of the past.”191
This lack of historical and cultural curiosity frequently results in a situation in
which the enemy of the US understands the Americans far more coherently
and effectively than the Americans understand him.192
Democratic Tradition, Bottom-Up Organization,
and the Role of the JCS
As a s ocial-organizational phenomenon, t he JCS ma nifested t he A merican
strategic culture just as the Soviet GS was consistent with the Russian cultural
characteristics. The American political modus operandi prevented the concentration
of an ultimate authority in a single military organization. Consolidating
bureaucratic power in one central place (i.e., in the hands of the JCS
chairman) would have contradicted the American democratic tradition of
checks and balances. In keeping with the liberal tradition of American society,
a uthority w as del egated do wn to t he s ervices. C onsistent w ith a n
entrepreneurial culture, the competition between services was expected to be
beneficial and to serve as an impetus for innovative initiatives.193
As a result,
one of the most significant bodies of the American military system, the JCS,
was also one of the most controversial. Although the JCS was designated as
the principal military advisory body to the civilian leadership, the chairman
lacked the statutory mandate for independent long-term recommendations.
His advice centered more on budget allocations and less on long-term strategy
or development of American military power. The JCS was, for the most part,
disconnected from the operational realm, rarely held command responsibility
84 THE US REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS
of its own, and as a rule, delegated considerable authority, including doctrinal
development, to the services.194
De facto, the services, and not the JCS or the
Department of Defense, were the most powerful institutions of American
national security.195
The establishment and subsequent functioning of the JCS was a d istinct
manifestation of American military parochialism. Its members faced a constant
built-in dilemma, between representing the interests of their respective
services a nd t hinking jo intly a nd b roadly a bout t he na ture o f t he a rmed
forces in an existing or emerging security environment. It was the former that
prevailed. Rather than an elite military organization that concentrated the
finest professional capital, the selection process produced narrowly focused,
combat-oriented line officers, committed to t he pa rochial i nterests of t heir
ser vices. The officers were selected late in their careers and were not formally
educated for duty in the JCS. In striking contrast to the Soviet GS, the JCS by
no means consisted of the intellectual crème de l a crème of the American
military.196
Strategic and long-term defense planning were weakly institutionalized
in the JCS. It lacked the powerful cadres required to produce effective
c ross-service v ision a nd adv ice t hat w as c apable o f a ffecting the
long-term development of the US military. By definition, the chairman was
a budgetary manager and occasional operational planner, but not a deductive
thinker about the nature of war. He was neither a doctrinal luminary nor an
initiator of long-term strategic decisions. The JCS remained a captive of the services
and lacked the intellectual mechanisms to generate broad, cross-cutting,
long-term recommendations. The institutionalized conceptual centers of gravity,
suc h a s T raining a nd Do ctrine C ommand (T RADOC), were d iffused
among t he s ervices, w hich i nitiated mos t A merican m ilitary i nnovations.197
Lacking strategic guidance, the services’ innovations were often piecemeal, inconsistent,
a nd s ectarian, a nd t hey r arely e xpanded b eyond t he o perational
level. “Each branch developed its distinctive strategic paradigm,” and the JCS
rarely offered conceptual alternatives to the views developed in the services.198
As a r ule, American military innovated bottom-up, from t he services to t he
leadership.199
No single institution existed in t he A merican military t hat possessed a
synthetic grasp of the security environment. Given the structure of the JCS,
there was no institution capable of systematically thinking through the discontinuities
in military affairs along the entire spectrum of their implications
for the services. Without that perspective, it was virtually impossible to ana-
THE US REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS 85
lyze the impact of the scientific-technological changes on the nature of warfare
in general and on the doctrine and organization of the American military
forces in par tic ular. The state of professional periodicals serves as a c ase in
point. Following the 1986 military reform, the JCS established its own professional
publication, Joint Fo rces Q uarterly, for t he d issemination of k nowledge
among senior military professionals. This vanguard of American military
thought was established only in 1993. In contrast, the professional publications
of the American military services had been established several decades earlier
than the quarterly of the JCS. For the sake of comparison, the Soviet GS had
established its periodical Voennaia Mysl’ (Military Thought) in the late 1920s.
The titles of the journals also manifest which raison d’être their founders attributed
to t hem. Murray, in discussing the relatively insignificant attention
paid to doctrinal conceptualizations and theory development within the framework
of American military culture, argues that the Joint Staff never constituted
the intellectual center of gravity of the US military forces.200
Thro ugh
the years, the above-mentioned weaknesses of the JCS system were observed
and noted by several American defense intellectuals.201
Technological Romanticism in Military Affairs
The strong bias toward techno-centric warfare is an essential component of
American strategic behavior. Scholars do not condemn prudent exploitation
of the technological dimension of war, but rather its misuse and overreliance
on machines.202
According to Mahnken, “technological optimism has historically
a nimated U S def ense p lanning”; “no o ther na tion ha s p laced g reater
emphasis upon the role of technology in planning and waging war.”203
Reliance
on new technology is a corollary of the predisposition to solve problems
quickly and in simple, direct terms.204
Initially, America’s romance with machinery,
particularly with mechanical means of transportation, was a result of the
need to conquer the wilderness. Population density on the frontier, together
with an acute shortage of skilled artisans, obliged Americans to invent substitutes
for human skill and muscle.205
The new society responded to this shortage
by ingeniously embracing machines and taking the lead in the production
of mechanical tools. Since the early nineteenth century the United States has
been a land of technological marvels and has developed an extraordinary rate
of technology de pen dency.206
The fascination with technology was not unique to the military; it characterized
the culture as a whole. In the popular narrative, technology is generally seen
86 THE US REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS
as bringing benefits. In contrast to Europe, American history has few examples
of mobs destroying industrial machines. The capitalist economy demanded ongoing
innovation, while the character of the competition pushed scientists, technologists,
and consumers closer together and produced unusually enthusiastic
thinking with regard to technology.207
The machine acquired symbolic meaning,
and the liberal American tradition saw technology as an instrument for preserving
the nation’s immunity from war, rather than as new means for waging it.208
One of t he principal by-products of te chnology w as a f aith i n te chnology.209
American strategic culture viewed technology as a panacea in global affairs and
sought ways to expand its scope and to apply technical solutions to strategic is-
sues.210
Weigley, in discussing the American way of war, argues that the pragmatic
qualities of the American character have fostered a national penchant for
seeking refuge from difficult problems of strategy in technology.211
This predisposition
to te chnicity—to t he e xaggerated sig nificance o f t he te chnical—was
characteristic of American defense policy makers, as well.212
Many military historians
regard the technology of warfare as one of the most important independent
variables in the country’s military thought.213
Technological romanticism
engendered visions of a mystical silver bullet promising decisive victory.214
The zeal for technology was further fueled by a desire to get more “bang
for the buck” while minimizing American, if not enemy, casualties.215
The desire
to minimize human losses is another trait of American strategic culture.
American society could not abide a h igh rate of casualties, and the military
sought a s tyle o f fighting designed to minimize fatalities. Thus, i t b ecame
American practice to send metal into battle in place of vulnerable flesh.216
The
preference to expend bombs and machines rather than personnel also led the
United States to prefer to wreak destruction from a distance.217
According to
Cohen and others, these elements are mutually reinforcing. The armed forces
opt for airpower, strategic bombing, stand-off strikes, overwhelming firepower,
and high technology as a means to reduce the forces’ vulnerability in military
operations.218
This technological enthusiasm varies across the distinct subcultures
of the American military services.219
The air force and navy were traditionally
the most techno-friendly and techno-dependent. The army kept its
distance from such techno-bias, and the marines valued technology the least.
Being “boots-on-the-ground” services, the army and marines rely to a r elatively
g reater extent on t he human element t han on machines a nd put t he
former at the center of warfare; hence, the saying that the air force and navy
man the equipment, while the army and marine corps equip the man. How-
THE US REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS 87
ever, scholars agree that in spite of these differences, optimistic techno-centric
romantic culture was ingrained in all four of the American military services
and also served as a common denominator for civilian policy makers involved
in military affairs.220
Within the defense establishment, debates about technology and budgets
frequently usurped the place of strategy. The traditional orientation toward
quick action and results, an attachment to t hings new and futuristic, and a
disinclination to wage long wars were frequently in keeping with the almost
instinctive reliance of American strategists on technology as a panacea in national
security affairs.221
This pragmatism can result in a technical approach
to international security, and a conception of complicated issues as problems
requiring engineering solutions.222
American reliance on technology, according
to Mahnken, was a poor but ubiquitous substitute for strategic thinking in
international security.223
An Inclination to Ethnocentrism
The US ha s h istorically seen itself a s a n a rbiter of morality, w ith a sp ecial
moral-political mission in the world.224
It has been argued that this vision,
fueled by t he i solationist t radition, ha s sometimes c reated a n e thnocentric
belief among Americans that they occupy the moral high ground, as well as
their inclination to view the world primarily through the perspective of their
own culture.225
The early ideologies of American colonists were influenced by
the Protestantism of the Puritan settlers, who believed that they were God’s
people—chosen to lead the other nations of the world. John Winthrop gave this
notion metaphoric expression in his description of America as a “City upon a
Hill.”226
The successful course of political and military history in the US has
provided justification for its belief in its own optimism, a self-confident sense
of superiority and invulnerability.227
Americans’ high estimation of themselves
as a nation, including a collective narrative that emphasizes political and
moral uniqueness, liberty, a divine mission, and a multidimensional sense of
national greatness, has made it difficult for them to accept the beliefs, habits,
and behaviors of foreign cultures.228
American history, at least up until the Vietnam War, was presented as an
extremely positive narrative. Young colonies evolved into a p ower capable
of carrying out the world’s most important endeavors. This generated an extraordinary
optimism regarding what could be achieved by the American way
of war.229
The early wars—the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), the Revolutionary
88 THE US REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS
War (1775–83), and the War of 1812—regardless of how they had begun, were
victorious at a relatively small cost. The late American entry into both World
Wars was followed by a steady march toward victory. Successful involvement
in both wars is recounted with considerable ignorance, minimizing the role
played by Britain, Russia, and France, and with a belief that the United States
had ultimately won in both cases.230
This was a narrative that perpetuated ethnocentricity
and bolstered the existing strategic culture.231
The overwhelmingly
victorious historical experience kept Americans from examining counterproductive
conduct that might undermine military effectiveness.232
Ethnocentrism is known to produce a phenomenon known as mirror imaging,
a cognitive situation in which decision makers or intelligence analysts
project their thought processes or their value system onto the subject of refer-
ence.233
The tendency toward m irror i maging a lso c omes f rom i nsufficient
interest in the opponent’s way of thinking. This “pathology” has been diagnosed
in the American security and intelligence experience.234
It primarily
hampers the ability to properly identify and assess emerging foreign methods
of warfare, and inclines to assess technical developments on the basis of the
analyst’s own technology.235
Bathurst has reported on constant “mirror imaging”
in the routine work of American intelligence officers analyzing the
Soviet military doctrine and technological capabilities during the Cold War.236
The adversary’s practices are studied not only in order to understand the potential
enemy, but also in order to learn alternative military art to emulate valuable
ideas. In this regard, ethnocentrism can prove to b e a s erious obstacle.
While the Soviet Army showed no reluctance to imitate and copy ideas from
the US, this was not usually the case in reverse. Western nations, and the American
military in particular, were less flexible in their attitudes, exhibiting a
“not invented here” mentality.237
CONCLUSION: CULTURAL FACTORS AND
THE AMERICAN RMA
The cultivation of the technological seeds of the American RMA preceded the
maturation of the conceptual ones. The US developed technology and weaponry
f or a bout a de cade w ithout r ealizing i ts r evolutionary i mplications.
Why did it take the US defense community close to a decade to acknowledge
the accuracy of Soviet assumptions and to t ranslate MTR theoretical postulates
into a r adical military reform? Several qualities of American strategic
culture prevented its swift comprehension of the paradigmatic change in the
nature of warfare discussed in the case under study.
THE US REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS 89
The general American cultural predisposition to a logical-analytical cognitive
s tyle made t he U S m ilitary l ess r eceptive to t he k ind o f r easoning
needed for perceiving and comprehending dialectical transformations in military
affairs. According to observations of cultural psychologists, American
cognitive style was “field independent.” It had a s trong inclination to f ocus
on the central object of the observed phenomenon and to pay little attention
to the overall framework in which the action took place. During forecasting
attempts, the logical-analytical style predisposed American mental formation
to focalism—a tendency to focus attention narrowly on the upcoming event
and to de tach it from the overall implications. The pragmatic and practical
American s trategic p ersonality p redisposed to ac tion, f avored p rocedural
knowledge that focused on how to get things done, and was inductive.
During the introduction of the PGM weaponry into the battlefield, mainstream
American military experts concentrated on the focal point—mechanical
application of the new technologies on the tactical level—and detached it
from the context, that is, the implications of this new weaponry on the ways
and means of waging operations. The concentration on the focal technologies
at the expense of the broader contextual implications hindered the US military
from the swift comprehension of the paradigmatic change in the nature
of war. The US forecasting efforts were piecemeal and extrapolated from current
capabilities, rather than trying to anticipate qualitative leaps in military
regimes. The ALB innovation aimed to satisfy specific requirements related to
a narrow, techno-tactical yet relevant set of operational threats. The US military
for a long time saw in the stand-off PGMs no more than a perfect and immediate
remedy to t he Soviet echelonment doctrine. The US possessed only
an intuitive understanding of the revolution that was about to occur, and was
not consciously thinking in terms of a revolution. Not until Andrew Marshall
and his colleagues from ONA introduced the notion of the RMA into
the professional military discourse did the emerging discontinuity reach the
consciousness of the American defense community. In keeping with the inductive
approach to understanding reality, a paradigmatic change among the
mainstream of the US military did not occur before the particular empirical
experience (Gulf War) was observed and generalized.
Why did ONA experts reach better assessments than the rest of the American
intelligence community on what the Soviets were thinking? As Gray noted
in one of his publications, “a security community may have more than one
strategic culture.”238
Indeed, several American leaders and analysts have challenged
a techno-phile inclination of the US defense community. In Mahnken’s
90 THE US REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS
words, these “latter-day Luddites decry the American military’s seeming fascination
with technology.”239
Taken over by Andrew W. Marshall ever since,
the ONA experts succeeded in grasping this discontinuity because they did
not embody—in fact had consciously suppressed—most of the traits of American
strategic culture. The intellectual conduct of ONA was the striking exception
to the rule, which proved the rule. Eclectic, holistic, and synthetic in
nature, the thinking style and the intellectual atmosphere inside ONA were
remarkably divergent from the logical-analytical approach of mainstream
American strategic culture. ONA experts consciously stressed the importance
of context dependence in the course of their analytical activity and sought to
distance themselves from mainstream mechanical focalism. In contrast to
the prevalent American cost-effectiveness approach, which was procedural
and prescriptive, ONA was consciously committed to producing descriptive
knowledge.240
Better manifestation of ONA’s deviation from logical-analytical
thought a nd its i nclination toward a h olistic-dialectical t hinking s tyle c an
hardly be found. However, its influence was too limited to reorient and retool
the fundamental American approach. ONA was too weak to s truggle effectively
against the general decontextualized thinking, technological romanticism,
and intellectual myopia.
American strategic culture was less prepared institutionally and intellectually
to t hink in terms of revolutions in military affairs. Institutionally, in
keeping with decentralized liberal culture, relevant conceptual and organizational
military innovations, such as ALB, originated in a bottom-up manner,
from the services, and not top-down from the JCS or DoD. In keeping with
the A merican c ultural ten dency to d ivide st rategic p roblems i nto d iscrete
parts in order to s olve t hem, discerning t he whole was frequently difficult.
American JCS had no ethos of being a “brain of the military,” and consequently
strategic and long-term defense planning was weakly institutionalized there.
The J CS l acked a p owerful b ureaucracy c apable o f p roducing a n e ffective
cross-service vision and advice that could affect the long-term development of
US military power. The chairman was a b udgetary manager and occasional
operational planner, but not a deductive thinker about the nature of war. He
remained a c aptive of the services’ parochialism and lacked the intellectual
capital to generate deep, cross-cutting, long-term observations.
Intellectually, the US military was unprepared for grasping the RMA. For
generations, an integral battle of annihilation and enemy attrition by superior
firepower had been an American way of war. This industrial approach to war-
THE US REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS 91
fare ac counts f or t he r elative d isfavor o f t he A merican t heoretical m ilitary
tradition. One implication was that the notion of the operational art as a theoretical
concept was rejected by the US military tradition until the 1980s. The
aim of “collapsing the enemy” by operational maneuver rather than simply annihilating
it by firepower conceptually diverged from the established American
strategic tradition. Because ideas about paradigmatic changes in the nature of
war originate on the operational level of military thought, the lack of this intellectual
layer was a s erious obstacle t hat prevented t hinking i n ter ms of t he
RMA.
The traditional orientation toward quick action and results, an attachment
to things new and futuristic, and a disinclination to wage a long war resulted
in almost instinctive reliance of American strategists on technology as a panacea
in national security affairs. An optimistic and engineering approach to
security, an industrial approach to warfare, annihilation and attrition by firepower,
the positive role of machines in the American cultural narrative, and the
desire for cost-effective firepower, while minimizing casualties, made the US
probably the most techno-centric military in the world. In this atmosphere,
functional and mostly tactical application of advanced technologies took center
stage. With certain variations, techno-euphoria was deeply ingrained in
all four military services. During the 1970s, this technological romanticism
disinclined the defense establishment to p erceive the broader impact of this
technological breakthrough upon the nature of war and to make a quantum
leap in the sphere of military thought. American thinking appeared to focus
more on how new technologies could be used to enhance performance of existing
missions. The PGMs were seen as just another, albeit significant, force multiplier
in the military arsenal. Notwithstanding ONA’s intent to focus the professional
attention of the US defense community on the symbiotic relationship
among technology, concepts, and organizational structures, techno-euphoria
blossomed once again during the implementation stage of the American RMA
in the late 1990s.
Historically, ethnocentricity was a considerable factor in American strategic
culture. The US saw itself as an arbiter of morality, with a special moralpolitical
mission in the world. This vision inclined to view the world primarily
through the perspective of its own culture. Ethnocentricity increased the likelihood
of such analytical pathologies as “mirror imaging,” in which foreign
security developments were measured by American standards. This unmotivated
analytical bias of the US analysts made t hem less receptive to c ertain
92 THE US REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS
military innovations from abroad, since they did not correspond to the common
w isdom of t he A merican defense establishment. In keeping w ith t his
cultural trait, in their evaluations of the Soviet MTR, American experts projected
their own perceptions. They measured the Soviets by the standards of
the US military and on the basis of American technology. Until the ONA assessment,
the US defense community had f ailed to g rasp the essence of the
Soviet MTR developments and avoided accepting controversial futuristic conclusions
offered by the Russians. Soviet writings about the revolutionary impact
of the new weaponry were skeptically treated by the US experts as futuristic
nonsense.
Ironically, Soviet theories ultimately provided a kind of a “mirror” for US
strategists. By analyzing how American military power was reflected in Soviet
eyes i n t he early 1980s, US strategists were able to r ealize during t he early
1990s the value of the revolutionary treasure they held in their hands.