The liberal world order, a euphemism for American global hegemony, is crumbling at an accelerating pace. While its collapse is tangible, the outcome of such a collapse remains a matter of speculation and public debate. The US is desperately seeking to preserve the status quo, which rests primarily upon recognition of its military supremacy. For millennia, warfare has been a driving force behind changes in the geopolitical status of power configurations (whether of peoples, states or empires), and it remains so, today. Accordingly, short of actual warfare, the assessment (modeling) of relative military power plays an inordinate role in the determination of national status. Models of emerging changes in military capability range from relatively simple to extremely complex ones. Viewing the evolution of the current system of international relations outside the framework of actual, rather than propaganda-driven, military capabilities is not only useless, it is dangerous since states’ mistaken assessment of their own and other states’ military power can lead to misadventures and catastrophic mistakes. The United States’ efforts to preserve not just its dominance but the perception of its dominance are bound to fail for many important reasons, none more important than what is often misidentified in past American military-theoretical hypotheses about the future of warfare, known generically as the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). This book explains why those hypotheses are failing and will continue to fail, and addresses the real RMA. In the end, technological development in weaponry as a response to tactical, operational and strategic requirements defines not only a nation’s geopolitical status but determines the global order. Assessments of military capacity, if reality-based, serve as good predictors of the level of volatility in international relations and the level of violence globally. This book gives an insight into the evolution of weapons and the way they influenced international relations in the 20th and 21st centuries. It also defines Revolution in Military Affairs as manifested via policy, politics, and technology. It reviews some models which are useful in assessing the current geopolitical situation. This book also tries to give a forecast of the future development of warfare and the ways in which it is going to change the whole system of the international relations, hopefully towards a new geopolitical equilibrium.

This book studies the changes that have marked war in the Western World since the thirteenth century.

The contributors to this volume seek to explore the multi-dimensional (institutional, cultural, technological, and political) environments of several Asian states to determine the amenability of those host environments for the adoption/adaptation of the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMS).

The remit of this study is to encourage further studies that make an honest and successful effort to achieve synergy between social science and history when analysing the impact of revolutions in military affairs (RMAs).

The Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), unleashed by the integration of information technologies into weapons systems, military units, and operations is a phenomenon whose impacts have been felt well beyond the Gulf in 1991 or the Balkans in 1999. Technological developments lie at the center of these changes; however, the RMA is about more than technology. It includes the consequences of technological changes for defense and security. This study provides an assessment of the RMA that goes beyond a mere description of new defense-related technologies to deal with deeper, more fundamental issues. Through the contributions of American, Canadian, Chinese, and French experts, this book surveys the RMA from various perspectives and evaluates it from the standpoints of military history and military science. The authors conclude that, while the RMA represents a significant challenge for defense establishments, it may fall short of being truly revolutionary. Whether one looks at power projection or information warfare, it appears that emerging technologies will translate into significant improvements in capabilities, but not necessarily a revolution in warfare. From a comparative perspective, the United States remains well ahead in thinking of and implementing changes that stem from the RMA, although other nations may make selective use of the RMA to promote regional security goals.

"Marytanov explains why and how the US armed forces have lost the military supremacy they thought they once had and how Russia, which supposedly had been defeated in the Cold War, succeeded not only in catching up with USA, but actually surpassing it in many key domains such as long range cruise missiles, diesel-electric submarines, air defenses, electronic warfare, air superiority and many others. Andrei Martyanov's book is an absolute 'must read' for any person wanting to understand the reality of modern warfare and super-power competition." THE SAKER While exceptionalism is not unique to America, the intensity of their conviction and its global ramifications are. This view of its exceptionalism has led the US to grossly misinterpret—sometimes deliberately—the causative factors of key events of the past two centuries. Accordingly, the wrong conclusions have been derived, and very wrong lessons learned. Nowhere has this been more manifest than in American military thought and its actual application of military power. Time after time the American military has failed to match lofty declarations about its superiority, producing instead a mediocre record of military accomplishments. Starting from the Korean War the United States hasn’t won a single war against a technologically inferior, but mentally tough enemy. The technological dimension of American “strategy” has completely overshadowed any concern with the social, cultural, operational and even tactical requirements of military (and political) conflict. With a new Cold War with Russia emerging, the United States enters a new period of geopolitical turbulence completely unprepared in any meaningful way—intellectually, economically, militarily or culturally—to face a reality which was hidden for the last 70+ years behind the curtain of never-ending Chalabi moments and a strategic delusion concerning Russia, whose history the US viewed through a Solzhenitsified caricature kept alive by a powerful neocon lobby, which even today dominates US policy makers’ minds. Martyanov’s former Soviet military background enables deep insight into the fundamental issues of warfare and military power as a function of national power—assessed correctly, not through the lens of Wall Street “economic” indices and a FIRE economy, but through the numbers of enclosed technological cycles and culture, much of which has been shaped in Russia by continental warfare and which is practically absent in the US.

Since the Gulf War, a revolution in military affairs has been proclaimed in the US based on the combination of precision guidance of weapons and new information technologies. This paper argues that this revolution must be seen in the context of equally far-reaching political changes. The author examines the strategies and instruments that may be used by the weak against the strong. These include weapons of mass destruction and `information war'.