The notion of revolutions in military affairs – periodic and dramatic changes in the way wars are fought – has entered the public lexicon due in no small part to the work of Andrew Marshall. The beginning of his career, especially his time at the RAND Corporation, was defined by the advent of nuclear weapons. He spent more than two decades thinking through how these weapons revolutionized the character and conduct of warfare and peacetime competition.
Later, as Director of the Office of Net Assessment in the Department of Defense, Marshall drew attention to another emerging revolution in the character of warfare. Inspired by the writing of Soviet military theoreticians who believed rapid developments in micro-electronics, significant qualitative improvements in conventional weapons, and the introduction of weapons systems based on new physical principles would soon lead to what they called a Military-Technical Revolution (MTR), Marshall dedicated years of time and effort to examining the ways in which these technologies might bring about broader changes in the character of warfare. By the early 1990s, Marshall’s office had completed an assessment of the MTR that confirmed the Soviet view that, “sooner or later, leading military powers will exploit available and emerging technologies, making major changes in the way they prepare and conduct operations in war, and realizing dramatic gains in military effectiveness.”
But importantly for Marshall, technology was only part of the story. Understanding how these revolutions came about and how they would unfold required drawing not only on technical fields, but also on anthropology, economics, psychology, organizational theory, and other areas of inquiry. He read with interest the historical work on the European military revolution of the 17th century that suggested that changes in organizational practices were at least as important as technology in driving this revolution, and in his own assessment wrote that “technology makes possible the revolution, but the revolution itself takes place only when new concepts of operation develop and, in many cases, new military organizations are created.”
