Revolution in Military Affairs

The “revolution in military affairs” (RMA) is a central recurring framework in The Kill Chain. The book attributes the term to Andrew Marshall, the Office of Net Assessment director (“Mr. Marshall,” nicknamed “Yoda”), whose 1992 report — influenced by Soviet writings on a coming “military-technical revolution” and “reconnaissance-strike complex” — foresaw that new sensors and precision weapons would transform how wars are fought. Marshall defined RMAs as periods “when major technological developments transformed the weapons and ways of war,” pointing to historical analogues like machine guns, steam-powered ships, and airplanes, while stressing that technology alone is not enough: militaries must also “develop new ways to employ that technology operationally and reform old institutions for new strategic purposes.”

In the 1990s and 2000s the RMA became official doctrine — the 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review made it a priority to “Exploit the Revolution in Military Affairs” — but the book’s argument is that the US defense establishment “never really changed its thinking,” remaining “focused on building and buying platforms rather than kill chains.” This is the book’s critique of technology fetishism: preaching the language of military revolutions while pouring money into better versions of the same exquisite platforms. RMA is distinct from but adjacent to the Evolution of Warfare thread, and it sets up the book’s Anti-Platform thesis — a shift from few expensive platforms to many cheap, networked, autonomous nodes, the endpoint the book associates with Anduril.

Where this appears

• The Kill Chain — Marshall’s 1992 coinage and its 1990s/2000s rise as doctrine; the book’s frame for why the US kept buying platforms instead of building kill chains, leading into its anti-platform argument.