Irresistible Force or Immoveable Object? The 'Revolution in Military Affairs' and Asymmetric Warfare

摘要

The existence and implications of an information technology-led "Revolution in Military Affairs" (RMA) has been, perhaps, the central debate in strategic studies over the past 20 years. If anything challenges it for this top spot, particularly more recently, it is the fact that the concept emerged at the same time as significant changes in the prevalent type of conflict and the nature and strategies of the principal opponents facing the leading state powers. For some, this "asymmetric warfare" has now become the main military threat and, moreover, fatally undermines the RMA paradigm. This clash between two concepts that tend to be treated as mutually exclusive or polar opposites, encapsulates much of the debate about the changing nature of war and the appropriate policy responses to it. Some, of course, would elegantly curtail this debate by dismissing both concepts as merely irritating buzz-words that confuse more than they reveal, applying misunderstandings of history to distort the present. For sceptics, each of the concepts is nonsense, so applying the two to each other would be (to borrow Jeremy Bentham's phrase) "nonsense upon stilts".