ABSTRACT
This book has surveyed the efforts of America’s civilian and military national security bureaucracies to adjust to the technological advances of the revolution in military affairs (RMA) and the demands of the new post-Cold War era. Our chapters on the armed services show technological evolution combined with a failure to transform organizations to meet the new threat – that is, there was creation without destruction. How the US military ought to have changed since the Cold War is contro versial. That it has not changed much should not be. Today, even amid two counterinsurgency campaigns, the services’ preferences have barely budged from the days of Fulda Gap and the Northern Flank. The platform names have changed and their capability has increased, but the story is the same. The Navy wants more ships and has designs in the works for bigger and better frigates, destroyers, cruisers, carriers, and amphibious and support ships. The Army wants to refurbish equipment taxed by use in Afghanistan and Iraq, and bring into the force new systems capable of destroying the motorized rifle regiments and guard tank divisions of the future. The Air Force is worried about the aging of its aircraft and wants to expand the buy of the F-22 and acquire new tankers. The UAV era is upon us, but mostly to identify targets and assess battle damage. Both the Marines and Special Forces have new equipment on order for all their old missions. Conventional war capabilities increased, but conventional transformation never occurred. The counterinsurgency revolution never came either. All of the services’ conventional obsessions turned out to have little applicability to the small wars they ended up fighting in the second interwar period. The marines and the army made some small adjustments to doctrine, and some minor innovations were made in the use of technology, but generally considered counterinsurgency a lesserincluded case. When the services were forced to do counterinsurgency, it became clear that environmental transformation had not occurred. More generally, the major organizational changes one would expect from transformation were simply absent. From the end of the post-Cold War drawdown in 1998 until the end of the second interwar period, there was only a modest decrease in personnel and a virtual stasis in force structure. Even American nuclear forces, which underwent a severe reduction in role in national strategy, exhibited little change. This continuity illustrates the lack of transformation.1
