RMA, Cold War End for Army

DoD Buzz ^ | 1/07/2010 | Greg Grant

[ErnstStavroBlofeld]

“Ideas matter.” So says the first sentence in the Army’s newly published Capstone Concept, titled Operational Adaptability: Operating Under Conditions of Uncertainty and Complexity in an Era of Persistent Conflict. It bears the imprimatur of its primary author, Brig. Gen. H.R. McMaster, a revolutionary thinker. Not surprisingly then, its the most revolutionary document the Army has produced in a long time because it discards two very big ideas – actually it discards one and demolishes the other — that have driven Army doctrine and weapons buying over the past three decades.

The first idea retired by the new capstone concept is AirLand Battle, the big think the Army came up with in the early 1980s to defeat Soviet Shock Armies if they tried to blitzkrieg their way across the North German Plain. AirLand Battle was important as it gave the Army intellectual focus around which it could rebuild institutionally after the pain of Vietnam and develop the “Big Five” weapons systems, and in so doing produce the force that steamrolled Saddam Hussein’s army in 1991’s Desert Storm.

The second idea, the one the concept demolishes, was always rather foggy and not very intellectually refined; not surprisingly it also led to the Army’s biggest weapons buying fiasco: the Future Combat Systems (FCS). This was the whole “revolution in military affairs” (RMA) idea, more commonly known by its bastard child “transformation,” that dominated military thinking during the 1990s. RMA proponents said technology had fundamentally changed the way war would be fought: far seeing sensors and precision strike meant wars would be fought at a distance by soldiers staring at plasma screens.

[Steve Van Doorn]

This is why we are giving up the control of the air?

the logic in their thinking is amazing. They assume they will control the air even without fighter.