The Impact of the Office of Net Assessment on the American Military in the Matter of the Revolution in Military Affairs

摘要

The paper re-examines our understanding of the role played by Andrew Marshall in the development of American thinking about the application of information technologies to military systems and concepts of operation that is commonly referred to as the current Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). It asks why Andrew Marshall, unlike many other American officials, saw the developments in this area as a potentially discontinuous, systematic change in military practice, rather than an incremental improvement. The paper identifies a range of prior experiences that made Andrew Marshall more sensitive to the possibility of an RMA, including his work on Soviet nuclear doctrine, and his exposure to sources of intelligence about Soviet military thinking in the 1970s and 1980s. It concludes that the 1990-91 Gulf War was not a major factor in the development of his thinking, and that that war, in fact, may have inhibited more innovative thinking about the RMA in the American military in general.