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 THE REVOLUTIONARY PREMISE

     For all the conservativism of military institutions, there have always been innovators calling for revolutionary change. Don Morelli and the other officers charged with re-thinking how an army must fight in tomorrow's world were part of a long military tradition. In fact, historians have filled the shelves of libraries with books about "revolutions in warfare."
     All too often, however, the term has been applied too generously. For example, war is said to have been revolutionized when Alexander the Great defeated the Persians by combining "the infantry of the West with the cavalry of the East." Alternatively, the word "revolution" if often applied to technological changes - the introduction of gunpowder, for instance, or the airplane or the submarine.
     Admittedly those produced profound changes in warfare. Surely they had enormous impact on subsequent history. Even so, they are what might be called sub-revolutions. They basically add new elements or create new combinations of old elements within an existing "game." A true revolution goes beyond that to change the game itself, by changing its rules, its equipment, the size and organization of the "teams," their training, doctrine, tactics, and just about everything else. It does this not in one "team" but in many simultaneously. Even more important, it changes the relationship of the game to society itself.
     By this demanding measure, true military revolutions have occurred only twice in history, and there are strong reasons to believe that the third revolution - the one now beginning - will be the deepest of all. For only in recent decades have some of the key parameters of warfare hit their final limits. These parameters are range, lethality, and speed.
     Armies that could reach further, hit harder, and got there faster usually won, while the range-restricted, less well-armed, and slower armies lost. For this reason, a vast amount of human creative effort has been poured into extending the range, increasing the firepower, and accelerating the speed of weapons and of armies.

A DEADLY CONVERGENCE

     Take range. Throughout history warmakers have tried to extend their reach. Writing about the war of the fourth century b.c., the historian Dioderus Siculus reported that the Greek general Iphicrates, fighting on behalf of the Persians against the Egyptians, "made his spears half as long again, and the length of swords almost doubled," thus extending the range of the weapons.
     Ancient devices like catapults and ballistas could heave a ten-pound rock or ball a distance of 350 yards. The Crossbow, used in China in 500 b.c. and common in Europe by 1100, gave a soldier a "standoff" weapon of seemingly enormous reach. (So horrible was this weapon that in 1139 Pope Innocent II tried to ban its use.) Arrows reached an extreme range of about 380 yards in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Yet for all the experimentation with archery over the centuries, the furthest range of any arrow, as late as the nineteenth century, was 660 yards, achieved by the Turks. And in actual fighting, the maximum range of weapons was seldom attained.
     By 1942, Alexander de Seversky in his visionary book Victory Through Air Power urged the United States to develop aircraft capable of flying 6,000 miles, then seemingly impossible. Today - even leaving aside the potentials for space-based weaponry - there is scarcely any point on the globe that cannot in theory be targeted by intercontinental ballistic missles, aircraft carriers, submarines, refueled long-range bombers, or combinations of these and other weapon systems. For all practical purposes, the extension of range has reached its terrestrial limits.
     As with range, so with speed. In June 1991 the U.S. Defense Department made public its Alpha chemical laser, capable of producing a million watts of power, as part of the development of an anti-missle system. The laser can, if targeted correctly, reach an enemy missle at the speed of light, presumed to be the fastest speed possible.

     And, as to lethality - the sheer kill-capacity of conventional weapons has increased by five orders of magnitude from the beginning of the industrial revolution to today. This means that today's non-nuclear weaponry, on average, is 100,000 times more deadly than it was when steam engines and factories began to change our world. As to nukes, we need only contemplate the consequences of 100 or 1,000 Chernobyls to appreciate the awesome threat they pose. It is only within this last century that planetary doomsday scenarios become a serious subject of discussion.
     In short, three distinct lines of military development have converged explosively in our time. Range, speed, and lethality all reach their outer limits at about the same moment of history - the present half century. If nothing else, this fact alone would justify the term "revolution in warfare."

AFTER THE ENDGAME

     But this fact is not all. For in 1957, a mere dozen years after the first nuclear weapon was completed, Sputnik, the world's first spacecraft, burst into the heavens, opening an entirely new region to military operations. Space has already transformed terrestrial military operations in terms of surveillance, communications, navigation, meteorology, and a hundred other things. No previous breakthrough, from the first use of the sea or the air as regimes for military action, can compare to the long-range implications of this event.
     A few years later, in announcing the U.S. drive to plave a man on the moon, President John F. Kennedy declared that while, "No one can predict with certainty what the ultimate meaning will be of the mastery of space," it may well be that space will "hold the key to our future on earth."
     These qualitative, indeed fantastic changes in the nature of war and the military all have come in a short thirty-four-year span, the very moment when the dominant civilizations on earth - Second Wave, or industria, society - began its terminal decay. They came during the endgame of the industrial era, and at approximately the time when a new type of economy and society began to take form. Even as some nations industrialize, a Third Wave or postindustrial civilization is springing up in the United States, Europe, and the Asia Pacific region.
     And this helps explain why the military revolution that lies ahead will be far deeper than most commentators have so far imagined. A military revolution, in the fullest sense, occurs only when a new civilization arises to challenge the old, when and entire society transforms itself, forcing its armed services to change at every level simultaneously - from technology and culture to organization, strategy, tactics, training, doctrine, and logistics. When this happens, the relationship of the military to the economy and society is transformed, and the military balance of power on earth is shattered.
     A revolution of this profundity has happened only rarely in history.

     Oh wait, let me type up the introduction so you can see if you want to read the whole book.