The Art of War in the Network Age

2The Epistemology of RMA

The use of military revolution as a way to explain the integration of new types of weaponry and systems in the politico-strategic reality has been widely misused, as much in its definition as in the impact of its contributions to foreign and defence politics. The conceptual complexity of these definitions, or the enthusiasm for these technological evolutions were difficult to put into perspective, can be symptomatic of a partial, sometimes biased theoretical foundation of the phenomena of “military revolution” or “revolution in military affairs”. Additionally, most literature does not consider RMA from an epistemological point of view, and rather focuses on its operational and technological aspects. Admittedly, what is traditionally understood by “the RMA” can be found in its own definition. But beyond this, relatively few contributions examine its relation to time or, more simply, to the notion of “paradigm shift”, often referred to in order to justify the revolution itself. Epistemological elements prior to the creation of the concept are then most often scattered. Admittedly, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, T. Kuhn stated that a revolution implies a shift in the rules determining a (scientific) practice as the result of a confrontation of theories. Many authors who worked on RMA agree on this subject [KUH 72]. Therefore, in this chapter we will successively examine:

• – the relation of different authors to the temporality of their subject ...