Evolution of Warfare

A framework Kyle returns to repeatedly across his military-technology reading: warfare evolves through successive dominant paradigms, and each one is eventually invalidated when the technology of war shifts around it. From Skunk Works, the chain reads soldiers → planes/tanks → radar/missiles → stealth → drones — an arms race between offensive and defensive technology that is, in Kyle’s reading, “the actual structure of military history.” Kelly Johnson’s stealth dominated until precision weapons and networked sensing began to overtake it; Russia was slow to adopt stealth precisely because it was anchored to the old radar-and-missile paradigm. The recurring lesson Kyle pulls out: platforms get bigger, better, and more “exquisite,” but if warfare changes around them, they’re invalidated — and “today’s limitations create tomorrow’s opportunities.”

The Kill Chain gives the same idea its formal name, Andrew Marshall’s “revolution in military affairs”: periods when major technological developments (machine guns, steam-powered ships, aircraft) transform the weapons and ways of war — but only when militaries also build new operational doctrine and reform old institutions. Brose’s argument is that the U.S. broke this evolution by continuing to buy ever-better versions of the same exquisite platforms rather than the disaggregated, networked Anti-Platform battle networks the information revolution made possible. Kyle’s marginal note on the failure mode: “Evolution of military technology broke; why?”

Context: “Revolution in military affairs” (RMA) is an established defense-studies concept describing how new technologies plus new doctrine periodically reshape the conduct of war; Andrew Marshall’s Office of Net Assessment popularized the term in U.S. strategic planning in the 1990s.

Where this appears

• Skunk Works — Kyle’s soldiers → planes → radar → stealth → drones arms-race framework, returned to across his notes on stealth’s rise and eventual limits.
• The Kill Chain — the “revolution in military affairs” thread (Marshall) and the argument that the U.S. broke the evolution by buying platforms instead of kill chains.