BATTLEFIELD OF THE FUTURE

THE REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS
outlined the basic features of armored warfare and amphibious
warfare . They defined these concepts decades before the
necessary systems existed and at a time when the political
circumstances of the next war were uncertain .
More recently, science fiction writers have been exploring
future war-fighting capabilities . The novels Starship Troopers
by Robert Heinlein (1957) and Ender's Game by Orson Scott
Card (1977) alluded to military systems that today equate to
artificial intelligence and virtual reality . These future systems
appeared to be pure fantasy at the time, but yesterday's fiction
has, in many instances, become today's reality . It should be
instructive to those of us engaged in looking to the twenty-first
century that military officers and authors were able to look
into the future and picture types of warfare that became real
or today are becoming real .
Achieving analytic progress requires discussion of these
issues with as much definition and certainty as possible in
order to give analysts something concrete to critique and,
thereby, improve . It is our hope that such discussion will
facilitate identifying new ideas and animate a discovery
process that includes war games and simulations over the
course of the next three to five years . It is in this spirit of
discovery that we offer the following portrayal of the unfolding
revolution in military affairs .
Lessons of Past RMAs
RMAs have risen from various sources, with many-but not
all-of them technological . Societal change contributed to a
military revolution during the wars of the French Revolution
and the Napoleonic era, in which the levee en masse allowed
for the creation of larger, national armies .
In the technologically based military revolutions of this
century, different scientific fields have provided the enabling
factor . For example, chemistry and early physics drove many
of the critical advances during World War I . In this war of
gunpowder, the rate at which weapons fired and the ranges
that the projectiles traveled decided the fate ofmany battles .
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