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In recent years, the term “revolution in military affairs” (RMA) has come to be applied to the vast change that computerized intelligence and globalization have brought to the conduct of war. This catchy sobriquet, however, is only a new name for something very old. In fact, radical transformations in military practice have marked Western history at least since Sparta and Athens squared off in the Peloponnesian war in the 5th century B.C.E.

Such RMA’s are also the focus of new books by two of our most accomplished commentators on military affairs: Frederick W. Kagan in Finding the Target: The Transformation of American Military Policy¹ and Max Boot in War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today². Both of these scholars are wise enough not to be taken in by the notion that today’s technological breakthroughs in satellite communications, computers, and miniaturization have altered the nature of war itself rather than merely the present face of battle, much less that they can by themselves win wars outright. Both also share a keen interest in the contemporary “war against terrorism,” and in their articles (Kagan) and columns (Boot) have responded in similar ways to America’s purportedly erratic progress in that war. Early and vocal supporters of the invasion of Iraq, each became harshly critical of our postwar efforts at counterinsurgency; each, furthermore, has at various times called for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Such zeal is periodic in Boot’s work, more overt and constant in Kagan’s, but it informs their shared concern over a Pentagon leadership that has supposedly put too much reliance on high-tech weaponry and organizational principles borrowed from business and thereby contributed to the growing fragility of America’s current position of military superiority.

Kagan’s book, more contemporary in its frame of reference than Boot’s, centers on three revolutions in the American military since the Vietnam war: the rise of the volunteer army with its high-tech equipment and weaponry, the appearance in the 1980’s of precision-guided munitions, and the adoption of information technology. To Kagan’s mind, these often welcome developments and their consequences in policy have gone hand in hand with a decidedly unwelcome failure of American military and strategic thinking.

No country, he writes, has a more diverse and effective arsenal than America’s. At the same time, however, no nation is so bogged down fighting wars in a manner it would prefer not to. His bipartisan indictment fingers two primary culprits: Bill Clinton, who dismantled crucial elements of the cold-war military establishment, and George W. Bush, who, not understanding the larger political purposes of war, has lacked the necessary vision to reap the advantage of our vast conventional power.

Kagan is scornful of faddish concepts like “network-centric warfare” and of the idea that the American military needs to embrace the spirit and the tactics of successful American corporations—downsizing, seeking greater efficiencies through new technologies and on-demand supply trains, and overwhelming rivals with pyrotechnics. In his view, all such cookie-cutter notions miss the point of how best to defeat multifarious enemies. Old-fashioned armored divisions with tanks and massive artillery, with their expensive manpower costs, may not achieve as much bang for the buck, but they remain often better suited to war’s proper aim: bringing about long-term political settlements favorable to the United States. “War is not just about killing people and blowing things up,” he writes. “It is purposeful violence to achieve a political goal.”

Afghanistan and Iraq are his object lessons. In both places, having put the military cart before the strategic horse, the U.S. easily toppled oppressive regimes only to find itself hard-pressed to replace them with something both lasting and better. To what advantage is all our high-tech weaponry, Kagan asks, if, after lightning-quick victories over the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, our soldiers are still, years later, falling prey to crude improvised explosive devices and primitive suicide bombers?

Kagan’s advice is that the U.S. military undergo something of a counterrevolution. We need, he insists, not more gadgets, but more human know-how. In practical terms, this means providing military officers with the resources and training—especially in cultural awareness and languages—that they need to serve as proconsuls in postwar landscapes. The victories of the future will be won and will endure, he argues, only when we have sufficient boots on the ground, filled by soldiers sophisticated in the ways of diverse enemies.

Max Boot’s War Made New is a rather different creature, both in its temporal scope and in its methodology. A universal history of military transformation since 1500, it deals with four great upheavals: the gunpowder revolution that began in the late 16th century; the first industrial revolution in the late 19th century, which brought rapid communications, large-scale transportation, and the internal-combustion engine; the second and more radical industrial revolution in the early- and mid-20th century, which led to the mass production of sophisticated ships, planes, and tanks; and, finally, our own information revolution of satellites, computers, and instant wireless communications.

For each of his four eras, Boot provides graphic accounts of three representative battles and a chapter on “consequences.” His section on the second industrial revolution, for instance, opens with the 1940 Nazi blitzkrieg in France before moving on to the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor and then the firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945. Throughout, Boot provides a vivid and engaging mix of historical narrative and analysis, showing the bloody real-world results of abstract decision-making about the nature and degree of a country’s military preparedness. His twelve case studies, stretching from the defeat of the Spanish Armada to the current situation in Iraq, point to a variety of disparate lessons but some themes that are surprisingly constant over time and space.

The most important of these is that sheer numbers do not always ensure victory. In the Sudan in 1898, Kitchener’s redcoats defeated a Mahdi army that enjoyed as much as a three-to-one advantage in manpower over the English. As Boot argues, modern military success has depended less on bulk (or firepower) than on the broader capacities possessed by nations that are “intellectually curious and technologically innovative.” The dynamism of imperial Britain gave Kitchener the expertise, organization, and capital to build a railroad across a bend in the Nile, thus enabling his expeditionary force to arrive near Khartoum intact, with plenty of artillery and machine guns and better supplied than its native adversaries. A similar intellectual dynamism, illustrated in another of Boot’s accounts, enabled the innovative Japanese navy to achieve its astonishing victory over the Russian fleet in 1905 in the battle of Tsushima.

By the 20th century, modern-looking regimes, often statist like Japan, were ostensibly best positioned to harness the natural resources and industrial labor demanded by modern warfare. They also appeared most adept at raising the mass-conscript armies that would distinguish the two world wars to come. But, as Boot demonstrates, their seeming advantages proved transitory. In World War II, the American bomber plant at Willow Run, Michigan—a mammoth 3.5-million-square-foot structure that, by August 1944, was producing one B-24 every hour—ultimately counted much more heavily toward the outcome of the conflict than the innovation and craftsmanship that had given the Nazis V-2 missiles and a few hundred advanced ME-262 jet fighters. The initial battlefield successes of the Axis powers were made possible by surprise and a head start in rearming; but this was eventually reversed by the wartime defense bureaucracies of the Soviet Union, Britain, and the United States, all three of which, in their various ways, proved better at mastering the principles of interchangeable parts, the assembly line, and the fielding of millions of conscripts.

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