The literature on military revolutions and revolutions in military affairs has proliferated since historian Michael Roberts coined the former term in 1956. Among the most clear and compelling examples is MacGregor Knox and Williamson Murray’s 2001 sketch of the historiography of both concepts. First, they define military revolutions as fundamental changes to the framework of war, recasting societies and states in addition to military organizations. Revolutions in military affairs, or RMAs, on the other hand, are less dramatic; they are “clusters” of technological, tactical, doctrinal, or organizational changes that are confined to the military sphere. Knox and Murray then summarize the consensus among historians that—preceded by “anticipatory RMAs of the Middle Ages and early modern era”—five military revolutions occurred in the West from about 1618 to the present. The first was “the seventeenth-century creation of the modern state and of modern military institutions”; the second, the French Revolution; the third, the Industrial Revolution; the fourth, the combination of the first three revolutions during World War I; and the fifth, “nuclear weapons and ballistic missile delivery systems” development from the end of World War II. Each of these military revolutions was associated with and resulted in certain RMAs. I should like to modify Knox and Murray’s narrative by grouping the first three and the last two of their military revolutions into what may be termed two fairly distinct paradigms of warfare. By doing so, and then examining today’s sociopolitical, strategic, and technological landscapes, it becomes clear that we may be on the precipice of a third.
From the early 1600s until the early 1900s, what I shall call the Westphalian paradigm transformed warfare in the West and allowed a handful of Western states to conquer most of the world. This paradigm included three military revolutions, the first of which began during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) and came to fruition in the decades that followed. The 1648 Treaty of Westphalia inaugurated a system of states and of balance of power in Europe that would last until the first sounds of the guns of August in 1914. Most of the successful states in this system concentrated power in the hands of absolute monarchs, who created modern military institutions, such as standing regiments and technical academies, composed of forces loyal to them rather than to individual nobles and mercenary chiefs. They grouped themselves into temporary alliances to further their realist foreign-policy goals and conducted mercantilist exploitation of their overseas possessions to finance wars. Under the command of professional officer corps, armies incorporated Maurice of Orange’s and Gustavus Adolphus’s tactical reforms, improved the use of combined arms, and inculcated in their soldiers via drill what John A. Lynn has called the “battle culture of forbearance”—the ability to withstand indiscriminate musket and artillery fire without breaking and sometimes without even responding. Military engineers like the Marquis of Vauban in France both utilized trace italienne design techniques to build the star-shaped fortresses that still mark the European landscape today and developed siege warfare tactics to reduce them. Victory in continental war, which during the eighteenth century usually meant no more than a slight readjustment of state borders, relied on perfection of these methods. King Frederick II exemplified this mastery, managing to expand his Prussian realm despite being surrounded by foes.
The French Revolution of 1789 unleashed the second military revolution, with Napoleon Bonaparte threatening (though ultimately falling short of destroying) the entire Westphalian state system by combining French army reforms of the late-monarchical era, particularly the use of mobile field artillery, with the sociopolitical changes of the 1790s, foremost among them the levée en masse of 1793. Napoleon fought with an army that at first was several times the size of those of his opponents and drawn from all estates. Although we should not overstate it, his was a force imbued with the spirit of nationalism, which made soldiers less likely to desert. This, as well as the dramatic growth in the European population in the eighteenth century, meant that Napoleon and his generals could allow their men to forage for food when the army was on the march, no longer restricted to poor road networks and reliant on wagon resupply from caches. And this in turn facilitated dispersion, usually in corps-sized units, the avoidance of enemy strong points, and incredible speed of maneuver. Eventually France’s enemies not only adopted to an extent her tactical, doctrinal, organizational, and even sociopolitical innovations but also coalesced in a grand alliance against her, restoring the Westphalian state system and the balance of power between states in the Concert of Europe.
The third military revolution of this period could be termed the industrial, that which took place in the half century before World War I. It included: military exploitation of such marvels of the Industrial Revolution as the steamship, the railroad, and the telegraph; the introduction of smokeless powder, breech-loading bolt-action rifles and machine guns; and the development of antimalarial drugs. These innovations allowed Europeans to explore and conquer vast lands in Africa and Asia, well beyond the coastal enclaves to which they were hitherto confined. In Europe itself, the Prusso-German army of the late nineteenth century gained the most from the military revolution, achieving rapid victories over Denmark (1864), Austria (1867), and France (1870) and uniting Deutschland for the first time in a thousand years. In North America, the United States remained united by defeating the rebellious Southern states between 1861 and 1865; it did so only by harnessing the industrial production capacity of the North in a way never before seen and raising troops in a way reminiscent of the French Revolutionary armies. Yet in the ensuing decades, the playing field, as always, leveled off, as all of the great powers underwent the industrial military revolution. In 1914, the well-oiled German war machine rolled through Belgium and northern France and reached the outskirts of Paris in a month’s time. Once it was halted, however, the Western Front devolved into four years of attritional warfare that witnessed no major grand-tactical (not to mention operational) breakthrough until the German Spring Offensives of 1918 and no strategic breakthrough until the Central Powers reached exhaustion in November of that year.
The difference between 1914 and, say, 1792 or 1864 was that it marked not just the apotheosis of a military revolution but also that of the entire Westphalian paradigm of warfare of the preceding three centuries. On the eve of World War I, the great powers faced off against each other in two allied blocs operating under the principles of Realpolitik. These were well-established Westphalian states bringing to bear centralized power, usually situated in monarchical institutions. All had colonies beyond their borders, many overseas, which they exploited for resources and manpower. Their professionalized officer corps were trained to command relatively concentrated infantry formations, horse cavalry, and horse-drawn, line-of-sight artillery, their regulars well drilled to withstand enemy fire. Generals were imbued with offensive élan and studied in the Napoleonic corps system, which emphasized rapid movement, dispersion, and foraging in order to bypass the Vaubanian fortresses—supposedly only penetrable by long, textbook sieges—that guarded nearly all of the key terrain in Europe. Given the heightened sense of nationalism across the continent, they could expect to augment their armies’ ranks with millions of conscripts and volunteers at the sound of the war tocsin, to get them to the front within hours using the railroads that now crisscrossed Western Europe, and to issue them commands from vast distances away via telegraph and telephone. These troops would be armed with rapid-firing rifles and machine guns, churned out of industrial factories converted to wartime purposes.
But just as the Thirty Years’ War of 1618 to 1648 ended the Renaissance paradigm of warfare and ushered in the Westphalian, the thirty years bookended by the outbreak of World War I in 1914 and the end of World War II in 1945 drew the curtain on the latter and launched a new phase in military history, what may be termed the Wilsonian paradigm. At the political, economic, and social level, this system, reflecting its namesake’s Weltanschauung, was fraught with paradoxes. On the one hand, the global league of nation-states advocated by Woodrow Wilson in 1919 eventually came into being as the United Nations after 1945. International law forbade any adjustment of state borders without its consent. On the other hand, this was hardly the cooperative body the US president and his allies envisioned, divided as it was (until 1991) into pro-American and pro-Soviet blocs of states and as it has been (since 1991) into pro-Western and anti-Western groupings. And the self-determination elucidated in Wilson’s Fourteen Points opened a Pandora’s Box of national aspirations that made border revisions all but inevitable. The states that emerged after 1918, and especially after 1945, were quite different than their Westphalian predecessors: centralized still, but far more reliant on bureaucratic and technocratic experts; democratic or dictatorial rather than monarchical; and with market or command rather than mercantile economies, the former integrated like never before by institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Atomic and then nuclear weapons technology made large-scale conflicts, such as the Korean War, limited, yet massive armies composed of long-serving regulars and short-term conscripts persisted on both sides of the Iron Curtain until it was lifted, at which time most Western states reverted to small professional militaries buttressed by increasingly destructive conventional weapons. The major organizational changes of the period, tied to the political, were first, the establishment of permanent alliances (NATO and the Warsaw Pact) in Europe, and second, the rise of unconventional guerrilla forces in the developing world where they were much more effective than during the Westphalian era in hastening decolonization; they also fought successfully against the world’s superpower, the United States, and its nation-building exercises in Vietnam and Afghanistan.
The doctrinal, tactical, and technological innovations of the interwar years, first displayed by Germany with its Blitzkrieg operations of 1940, were soon adopted by all major powers. These included the use of armored cavalry, motorized and mechanized infantry, and long-range artillery. Air superiority, an unknown concept before 1914, became a key enabler of tactical and operational success on the battlefield. At sea too, airpower became the decisive element of victory, as the battleships of the Westphalian period were replaced by aircraft carriers with submarine escort. In the 1970s and ’80s, the United States perfected these methods of warfare, fielding the high-cost Big Five acquisitions (the AH-64 Apache attack helicopter, the M-1 Abrams main battle tank, the UH-60 Black Hawk utility and transport helicopter, the M-2 and M-3 Bradley fighting vehicles, and the Patriot air defense missile system), implementing the Airland Battle concept, employing an all-volunteer rather than a heavily conscripted force, and mastering what it called JLOTS—Joint Logistics over the Shore. In the Gulf War of 1991, the US armed forces showcased their battlefield dominance, defeating Iraqi forces in just a hundred hours. Meanwhile, satellite and digital technologies were facilitating what many commentators called another RMA, one that allowed advanced militaries to track with incredible accuracy their own (blue) forces as well as enemy (red) forces. These innovations, however, did not end up changing the framework of war: uncertainty on the battlefield remained, as counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan and Iraq—where US forces found themselves mired for the first two decades of the 2000s—made clear.
On the other hand, the US experience in the inaptly named War on Terror, along with the increasingly aggressive geopolitical behavior of Russia and China after 2008, suggested that we might be on the precipice of whole new paradigm of warfare. At the sociopolitical level, the latter powers formed BRICS with Brazil, India, and South Africa in 2009 (Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Emirates joined in 2024), a direct challenge to the Bretton Woods economic system. In 2013, China launched its Belt and Road Initiative, a means for it to expand its influence in about 150 (mainly developing) countries. Russia also enhanced its activities in the developing world and began to counter NATO expansion into the former Soviet sphere of influence in 2008 with the invasion of Georgia, followed by the 2014 invasion of Ukraine. It has in recent years formed a loose military alliance with communist China and rogue states in Iran and North Korea. Meanwhile, nonstate actors have proliferated and grown as powerful as states themselves. These include, among others, terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, private military companies like Blackwater and Wagner, and, in an era when the sources of power and influence are diversifying, multibillionaires such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. While these entities weaken the Westphalian state, mass immigration into North America and Europe from the Global South and the rise of far-right parties in response threaten to destabilize the Wilsonian nation. Universal availability of the internet and smartphone technology has created networked populations simultaneously harder for traditional institutions to control and easier for nonstate actors to manipulate. In a sense, the world is returning both to pre-Wilsonian great power competition, with revisionist leaders constantly attempting to expand their states’ borders through direct invasions and indirect imperialism, and to pre-Westphalian power dynamics, with state power constantly challenged by feudal barons and mercenary captains.
Military organizations have been slow to adapt to these sociopolitical transformations. On the one hand, the unipolar world and the RMA of the 1990s convinced some leaders that large militaries were relics of the past; on the other, occupation duties in Afghanistan and Iraq and attritional warfare in Ukraine have shown the continued need for massive numbers of ground troops. Doctrine writers, too, are unsure how to proceed: NATO mostly still adheres to the joint and combined-arms warfare it perfected during the Cold War; Russia has been more adept at using “hybrid” techniques, such as information warfare, but has found in Ukraine that these cannot replace boots on the ground. At the tactical and technological level, the twentieth-century armored formations on land and carrier strike groups at sea seem antiquated, as combat shifts to urban areas, as standoff missiles become more precise and effective, and as cyber and electronic warfare become more sophisticated. Small cells of combatants with handheld devices detonating improvised explosive devices or flying drones have prevented the concentration of forces and blunted offensive maneuver, and artificial intelligence promises soon to make some weapon systems fully automated, requiring only programmers in the rear. Taken as a whole, are these changes simply another generational RMA, are they indicative of a military revolution, or do they represent a whole new, twenty-first-century paradigm of warfare? The next few years may very well tell. What is certain, however, is that our political and military leaders must equip themselves to respond to—and ideally to anticipate—the unforeseen, to think outside of the box, to learn from the past without being shackled by it. The continued preponderance of Western influence on the geopolitical stage depends on it.
Lieutenant Colonel John F. Morris, PhD, was an armor and cavalry officer for eight years, including two years of combat in Iraq. After becoming a foreign area officer, he has served as an instructor of military history at West Point, a strategic and international affairs advisor at two NATO headquarters, chief of the US Office of Defense Cooperation in Israel, and chief of a New START inspection division in the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency. He earned his BS from West Point and his MA, MPhil, and PhD from Columbia University.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
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