Roland: War & Technology:2

TECHNOLOGY
and
WAR
(cont.)
by Alex Roland

The Transformation of Conventional War

War has changed significantly since World War II. Measuring that change and assessing the role of technology is best achieved by surveying warfare in two categories, conventional and nuclear war.

Conventional war is declared, armed conflict between two or more states that employ recently developed, non-nuclear weaponry for direct combat between organized military forces. Nuclear weapons may be deployed, and their use may be threatened, but they are not actually fired.
Nuclear war is limited to the combat or threatened combat in which nuclear weapons are the principle instruments of engagement. The weapons themselves may range from strategic nuclear weapons, which are generally aimed at the enemy's infrastructure or nuclear forces, to tactical nuclear weapons, which are aimed at the enemy's military forces on the battlefield. (The evolution of nuclear weaponry will be addressed in the next section.)

The transformation of conventional war in the second half of the twentieth century was shaped by the experience of World War II. This was a war of industrial production. The allies won because they fielded more combatants and support troops and provided them with more material than their enemies. As had been true in World War I, the conflict ended when the losing side had insufficient people and material to feed into the maw of modern combat.

Ernest and Trevor Dupuy¹⁹ have estimated that

the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union mobilized approximately 41 million people in World War II at a cost of 20 million dead (mostly in the Soviet Union) and $700 billion.

Germany, Italy, and Japan mobilized approximately 24 million people, and lost more than 6 million dead and $450 billion; they mobilized more people but produced less material.

In economic terms, World War II was about five times as expensive as World War I and produced twice as many military deaths, three times as many total deaths.

In 1945, it appeared that the next war would be different. In that conflict, most authorities agreed, quality would count more than quantity.

World War II was the first war in which the weapons in play at the end differed significantly from those employed at the outset. Jet aircraft, the proximity fuse, guided missiles, and of course the atomic bomb were all developed in the comparatively short course of the war.

While World War II was, like its namesake, a war of industrial production, it bred the perception in military circles that the next major war would be a war of research and development. Technology was still the desideratum, but the focus shifted from more technology to superior technology.

Victory in the first half of the twentieth century had gone to the alliances that produced the most war material; in 1945 it appeared that henceforth victory would go to the side that produced the best material.

Thus was born the hot-house atmosphere of Cold War research and development. In the West, the major powers carried over into peacetime their wartime associations with R&D, both in industry and academia. The military services themselves institutionalized research and development in committees, staffs, consultants, and their own research laboratories. While the United States government and industry together had spent about $1 billion a year on research and development in 1940, the Defense Department alone spent $30 billion in 1985. The ratio of defense R&D expenditures to defense production expenditures rose from five percent at the end of World War II to a peak of over fifty percent in the mid 1970s. American industry, by comparison, spent about two to ten percent of its budgets on research and development.²⁰

In the United States, President Dwight Eisenhower labeled the resulting infrastructure a "military-industrial complex." Many observers added "university" to that title; others added Congress. All the names suggested a convergence of interests that contributed to an unprecedented and alarming arms race and a concentration of society's scientific and engineering talent on instruments of war.²¹

This convergence also raised the specter of a militarization of society.

Eisenhower himself warned that "public policy itself could become the captive of a scientific/technological elite."²²

Some critics feared the emergence of "new mandarins," a class of scientific advisers and experts who would exert undue influence on national policy and subvert the scientific agenda that the country ought to be pursuing.²³

Others believed that the nation's economy would grow dependent on defense spending, setting up an economic imperative that would bind the country to war and preparation for war.²⁴

All such critics feared that the drive for superior arms was subverting society to warlike purposes. The technology of war was becoming deterministic, not just of warfare itself but of society as a whole. (These two kinds of determinism will be examined in section four of this paper.)

This qualitative arms race reversed the military's traditional conservatism toward new weaponry, a conservatism that had characterized even much of Wright's modern era since 1500.

Before the twentieth century, most soldiers and sailors ended their careers armed as they were at the beginning. New weapons were introduced slowly, if at all, and most professionals resisted the uncertainties new arms introduced. It was better to stay with the tried and true than risk the lives of one's forces and the security of the nation on unproven instruments. In the nineteenth century, U.S. Army General Joseph Totten, Chief of the Corps of Engineers, told Congress that the army would adopt no new weapon until it had proven its worth in battle.²⁵ But it could not prove its worth short of being adopted. This dilemma slowed the introduction of new weaponry and left Totten and his colleagues armed with the familiar and the comfortable weapons they had inherited.

By the second half of the twentieth century, this traditional suspicion of new weapons had changed to a reckless enthusiasm. Many weapons were assumed to be obsolescent on introduction. By the time they entered service, their successors were being planned. This was especially true in large-scale weapons systems such as ships and aircraft. It even found its way into thinking about less complex military technologies, such as radios and computers. Armed services in the United States found themselves competing with each other to claim precedence in fielding the same technology.²⁶ Some critics have seen in the phenomenon evidence of planned obsolescence, the expectation that the life expectancy of a weapons system would be determined by the speed with which the next generation could be developed and introduced.

The trend toward planned obsolescence was compounded by the logic of large-scale development programs. Strategic weapons, such as ballistic missile submarines, intercontinental ballistic missiles, strategic bombers, and President's Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative have long lead times and consume vast resources. Even conventional arms, such as the M-1 Abrams tank and the C-5A transport aircraft are years in the making and profligate in their demands on resources.²⁷ These arms are not weapons, but weapons systems. Their conceptualization is driven by systems theory, itself a byproduct of techniques of operations research developed in World War II.²⁸

Large-scale technological systems have dynamics of their own that tend to drive events, and they are furthermore susceptible to exogenous forces that shape the technology they produce.²⁹ Weapons formerly produced in a single arsenal or shipyard now required vast networks of laboratories and contractors. The Wright Brothers built the first U.S. military aircraft in less than five years and sold it to the government for $25,000.³⁰ The B-1 bomber required twenty-nine years of development and cost the government $280 million apiece.³¹ Management of these large-scale development systems became so complex that it spawned its own methodologies. "Concurrency" in the Atlas missile program sped completion of the missile by developing its different components and support systems in parallel. PERT (Program Evaluation Review Technique) on the Polaris Submarine provided a management scheme to control complexity and facilitate integration of component parts.³² The officers who oversaw the development of such weapons and who operated them in the field found themselves transformed from warriors to "managers of violence."

The drive toward ever more sophisticated weaponry reached a climax of sorts in the American decade (1965-1975) of the Vietnam struggle for independence (1945-1975).

Prompted in part by the superiority of its weaponry, the United States military undertook the Vietnam mission of fighting a guerrilla insurgency with conventional arms developed for war on the plains of Europe.³³ Sensing devices were introduced to locate the enemy. The helicopter gunship evolved in the course of the war, a combat expedient to give Americans superior mobility and firepower in the face of an elusive and potent enemy.³⁴

Strategic bombing targeted the enemy's infrastructure as if North Vietnam was an industrialized state with the same vulnerabilities as the United States.³⁵ Even B-52s, a mainstay of the American strategic arsenal, were pressed into service to rain down still more destruction on an intractable enemy.

The wizardry brought to bear by the Americans on this "electronic battlefield" frustrated and demoralized the enemy. The arsenal exacted a horrific toll. It did not, however, win the war. In this case, at least, superior technology lost to superior strategy.

t<>he reasons for this exceptional failure of modern military technology lay in China.

Against the tide of late twentieth century warfare, against the predictions of Quincy Wright, and against the seemingly deterministic forces of ever greater technological sophistication in warfare swam Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Communist revolution. While other countries tried to join the Western arms race, or at least emulate it, Mao insisted that industrialization need not determine the course of war. It was possible, he said, for people to prevail over machines.

Mao called his method People's War. With it he restored human agency to the battlefield of the late twentieth century. He provided the great counterpoint to the inexorable trend of late twentieth century warfare toward ever greater reliance on technology. It is instructive to consider Mao's achievement in some detail, because this single exception casts the rest of late twentieth century warfare in a clearer light. Except for Mao, all other warfare since Wright's analysis appears to have been moving in the direction Wright foresaw.

Mao had developed his theory in the face of two different enemies, both of whom deployed arsenals and material resources he could not hope to match. First, the Kuo min Tang Party, with aid from the United States, drove Mao's peasant army on the Long March into the mountains of northwest China. There Mao wrote "On Protracted War" and then joined forces with his erstwhile enemy to fight the still more powerful army of Japan.³⁶ "On Protracted War" argued that a communist revolution could be based on a rural peasantry, not necessarily an urban proletariat, as Marx and Lenin had preached.

Mao's strategy for employing this peasant army to defeat a modern industrialized force such as Japan was based on three pillars:

First, his army would need a secure sanctuary, such as he enjoyed in the mountains.
Second, it would fight in the enemy's rear without a base, relying on the people to support the troops in three stages of warfare: guerrilla (sabotage), mobile (ambush), and finally positional (conventional) fighting.
Third, drawing on Clausewitz via Lenin, Mao posited that such a war was political and would be won by political means: domestic and world public opinion would force the Japanese leadership to abandon its war of aggression against China.

Mao's plans were overtaken by events in World War II, but his methods succeeded in the civil war that resumed with Chiang Kai-Shek. More importantly, People's War triumphed in the later conflict between North Vietnam and the United States. The North Vietnamese enjoyed sanctuaries in Cambodia, Laos, and their own country. Allies supplied them with weapons. They had the will to persevere in the face of punishing assault. And public opinion in the United States and around the world gravitated toward their position. No technology the United States could bring to bear was able to overcome these advantages. As Mao had predicted in "On Protracted War," an underdeveloped, agrarian society could defeat a wealthy, industrialized state by winning political victory in the court of public opinion. The individual guerrilla found a way to resist the dominance of high technology on the modern battlefield.³⁷

This jarring setback forced a major re-evaluation of American military thought, especially ideas about the tools of war. The Army was particularly diligent in examining this experience and measuring its implications.³⁸ The result was AirLand Battle, an operational concept directed at Soviet forces in Europe but informed by experience in Vietnam.

The Army concluded from Vietnam that it needed not less technology but more. It was not that smart weapons were bad; rather, they were not smart enough. The research and development revolution born in World War II had not been misdirected; it had stopped short.

Furthermore, believed the Army, the weapons that might have won the Vietnam War would be just the weapons that could win the most dangerous conventional war facing the U.S., a confrontation with the Soviet army on the plains of Europe. There, the overwhelming superiority of Soviet numbers would challenge the qualitative superiority of American technology. In main battles tanks, heavy artillery and mortars, and armored vehicles, the Warsaw Pact outnumbered NATO more than two to one in the mid 1980s.³⁹

AirLand Battle envisioned combat in which American forces would win out over superior numbers by establishing intelligence superiority. It would use that knowledge to attack the enemy where he was most vulnerable.

Developments in microelectronics would allow the United States to gather, process, and transmit data at rates far beyond the capability of the enemy. This information would enable field commanders to discern weaknesses in the enemy's deployments and lines of communication, to discover the location of key nodes of supply and communication, and to strike those nodes with precision and frequency.

Just as microelectronics technology in an earlier form had been used to seek and destroy guerrillas in the jungles of Vietnam, so could it now be used to find and attack the weaknesses in the enemy's dispositions. Only now the weapons would be smarter, faster, and more reliable than those deployed in Vietnam.

And the casualties of Vietnam, which had turned public opinion against the war, would be minimized by automated weapons seeking out targets on their own.

Watching these developments from the Soviet Union, military theorists came to believe that a "military-technical revolution" was under way. They saw AirLand Battle as a suite of technological capabilities that could place the United States on a different plateau from the Soviet Union and indeed from all other countries of the world. The Soviets did their best to keep pace with American developments, thereby spurring the Americans to even greater achievement. Soviet talk of a "military-technical revolution" sparked similar discussions in the United States. Originally confined to military circles, these discussions spread within the community of defense intellectuals in the 1980s and began to achieve some political visibility in the last stages of the Cold War.

The notion of a military-technical revolution did not, however, achieve real purchase in the United States until the Cold War was actually over. Then a convergence of events lent new urgency and credibility to the idea, sparking a debate that continues in Washington even as this paper is written. The debate has enormous consequences for the future of war and for the continued relevance of Quincy Wright's description of war in our times.

Four developments weighed heavily in the public debate over a military-technical revolution:

First, the phenomenon itself was renamed "the revolution in military affairs." This terminology appears to play better in the West, for reasons that will be discussed shortly.

Second, the Cold War ended. This might have taken the steam out of the debate, but instead it sparked a renewed interest in the future of warfare, in the military implications of a shift from a bi polar to a unipolar world, and in America's of policing a violent world.⁴⁰

Third, the Gulf War of 1991 demonstrated the ability of the latest technology to blind, silence, and disarm an enemy in advance of battle. For many observers, the Gulf War was the epitome of the revolution in military affairs.

Fourth and finally, Alvin and Heidi Toffler published War and Anti-war in 1993. This exercise in futurology argued that information technology would command the battlefield of the future, rendering obsolete the arsenals of the twentieth century. The thesis resonated with the Soviet perception of a military technical revolution, but it focused especially on computers and communication and employed the more fashionable terminology of a "revolution in military affairs."

The Tofflers' analysis echoed and updated that of Quincy Wright to the late twentieth century. Like Wright, the Tofflers embrace a technology-based period structure of human history. Wright's four great periods in human evolution were separated by advances in communication. The Tofflers' four periods are separated by broader technological disjunctures: the agricultural and industrial revolutions and finally the information revolution. In a previous book, The Third Wave , the authors had argued that these revolutions had led to three different levels of civilization--the agricultural, the industrial, and now the information age.⁴¹ In War and Anti-War , they argued that the same three revolutions had produced war of muscle power, war of machines, and now war of competing information technologies.

Like Wright before them, the Tofflers flirted with technological determinism.

Change, in their model and in Wright's, is precipitated by changes in technology. And the periods they identified are defined by technology, just as Wright's modern period is defined by technology. If anything, their model is even more deterministic than Wrights, suggesting that information war will dominate all other means of combat in the age that is dawning.

Their analysis also suggests that Wright's modern period is coming to an end. If they are correct, then the last 500 years are all of a piece. The post modern world to follow will be distinctly different.

Like others who believe that a "revolution in military affairs" is under way, the Tofflers mix all manner of high-tech military equipment under the rubric "information technology." They explored everything from anti-missile missiles to non-lethal weapons. Some of these instruments were employed in the Gulf War, but many existed only in the minds of inventors and their military clientele. Still, the wizardry of the Gulf War lent some credence to the argument.

High-technology seemed to have yielded easy victory and low coalition casualties. Did it follow, then, that the Tofflers were right about future war in the information age? If so, would it be dominated by computers and communications, or would other technologies also play a role?

Through the first half of the 1990s, American defense intellectuals and policy makers have been attempting to discern if a military revolution is really under way and if so what its policy implications are. The issue turns on discontinuity.

Are the changes in military technology now under way historically discontinuous?

Or do they represent a linear extension of the research and development begun after World War II?

A 1996 conference at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, posed just that question to a group of invited historians and political scientists. Many of the participants chose to address the question by comparing the "revolution in military affairs" with other military revolutions known or proposed to have happened in history. Eight such comparisons were presented or invoked at the conference, identifying twenty-five military revolutions in history. (See table below) Of these, nineteen were technological. Of the nineteen, sixteen had occurred in Wright's modern period, that is, since 1500. Only three, however, had occurred since World War II: the R&D revolution begun in that war, the revolution in microelectronics/genetic engineering, and the information revolution. One military revolution since World War II, Mao's People's War, was not technological.

COMPARATIVE TREATMENT of REVOLUTIONS
Authors

Revolutions Tofflers Deudeny Roland Sullivan Cohen Krepen-
ivich Vickers Goldman
& Andres
"weapons revolution" of the 7th to 10th millennium BCE¹ x

agricultural revolution x

professionalization of armed forces x

mounted warfare/chariots x x

naval warfare x

Mongol army of 13th century CE x

infantry of early modern Europe x x

gunpowder x x x x x

trace italienne x x

side-gunned sailing ship x x

early modern "military revolution"² x

Napoleonic revolution/levée en masse x x x

industrial revolution x x x

railroad/telegraph/rifles x x x

steam navies x x x

submarines x

"quantity-of-stuff"/total war x x

air warfare x

Blitzkrieg x x x x

aircraft carriers x
nuclear war x x x x x x

Mao Tse-tung's "people's war" x x

microelectronics/genetics engineering x

information war x x x x x

Tofflers Deudeny Roland Sullivan Cohen Krepen-
ivich Vickers Goldman
& Andres³

This list of revolutions has no more authority than the various scholars who contributed. Their disagreement about what constitutes a military revolution cautions against placing too much faith in the concept. Nevertheless, some consensus does emerge:

The preponderance of technological phenomena in the list attests to the importance of technology as the dominant factor shaping the nature and character of war.
Furthermore, the timing of these technological revolutions--most have occurred since 1500--substantiates Wright's claims about the nature of modern war.
And finally, the small number of revolutions since World War II, and the lack of consensus about them, calls into question the existence of an information revolution at the end of the Cold War.

Though five of the scholars believed such a revolution to be under way, they were unable to convince MIT political scientist Barry Posen, who was invited to summarize and comment on the proceedings. He concluded, as I do, that the nuclear revolution (to be discussed below) has masked a continuing, rapid transformation in conventional war that had its roots in the R&D revolution following World War II.

It appears that the term "revolution in military affairs" has more rhetorical and political force than explanatory power. If information warfare, or some other combination of high-tech weaponry, has in fact forced a disjuncture between previous war and contemporary war, it is difficult to see exactly when that break took place or what distinguishes war in 1997 from warfare in, say, 1987.

Nor is it clear exactly what class of weapons makes the difference. When the Pentagon compiled a list of critical military technologies in 1992, it identified twenty-two.⁴² More than half were microelectronics technologies, but not all were information technologies. Some, such as air-breathing propulsion, composite materials, and biotechnology, are not directly related to the rapidly evolving developments in solid-state electronics that underlay military technologies such as smart bombs, global positioning satellites, and computers. The ultimate weapon of the Gulf War may have been the stealth aircraft that attacked Saddam Hussein's command and control network, but of course this had less to do with microelectronics than with composite materials and geometric design. It is not even clear if the Tofflers' "information revolution" is based on revolutionary developments in solid-state physics, microelectronics, computers, communication, or all of the above.⁴³

If this conventional weaponry has not produced a "revolution in military affairs," it has nonetheless transformed both conventional war and civilian society. Conventional weapons of tremendous power and reliability can now be delivered with unprecedented accuracy to an enemy's weakest points. Even if these weapons have not reached the point where they can defeat determined and resourceful People's warriors, they can nonetheless exact an even higher toll than the United States inflicted in Vietnam. Against an enemy that chooses to fight conventionally, as Saddam Hussein did in the Gulf War, the consequences can be overwhelming.

As the twentieth century draws to a close, it grows ever more difficult to imagine the circumstances in which great powers will risk this kind of punishment in conventional wars with other states similarly armed. In short, the spread of high-tech weapons increases the lethality of war while also lowering the incidence of conventional war among advanced states.

Meanwhile, the same technology that enhances the destructiveness of these weapons also spreads into civil society. As the passions of the Cold War cool and the incidence of conventional war abates, future generations may look back on the late twentieth century as a period in which the armed forces were the primary patrons of technological development.

Throughout history, science and technology, like art, have relied on patronage to supplement the incentive of the marketplace. War and preparation for war have been the great patrons of the mid and late twentieth century. Computers, airplanes, the space program, microelectronics in general, lasers, nuclear power (for better of for worse) have all relied upon military research and development for their rapid evolution.

Beginning in the 1980s, the United States has consciously pursued "dual-use" technologies, areas of development with applications in both war and civil society. Just as warriors have found themselves transformed into managers of violence, so too has the line blurred between military and civilian technologies.

The global positioning satellite that guided coalition forces across the middle eastern desert in the Gulf war also guides weekend sailors back to port.
The autonomous land vehicle developed by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for the U.S. Army drives down the highway under the control of a Sun SPARC laptop computer placed on the passenger seat. As new technology shapes war, it shapes society as well.

Continue to next section, "The Nuclear Revolution"

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END NOTES

19. R. Ernest Dupuy and Trevor N. Dupuy, Encyclopedia of Military History from 3500 B.C. to the Present (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 1198.

20. Jacques S. Ganlser, Affording Defense (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), p. 215.

21. Paul Forman, "Behind Quantum Electronics: National Security as Basis for Physical Research in the United States, 1940 1960," Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 18 (1987): 149 229. See also Arthur P. Molina, The Social Basis of the Microelectronics Revolution (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989); and Stuart W. Leslie, The Cold War and American Science: The Military Industrial Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford (Columbia University Press, 1993).

22. Dwight Eisenhower, farewell address, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1960 1961 (Washington: GPO, 1961), pp. 1038 39.

23. Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins (New York: Pantheon, 1969).

24. Seymour Melman, Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War (New York: McGraw Hill, 1970).

25. Alex Roland, Underwater Warfare in the Age of Sail (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), p. 145.

26. Edmund Beard, Developing the ICBM: A Study in Bureaucratic Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976).

27. All these cases, except the C 5A, are covered in Fen Osler Hampson, Unguided Missiles: How America Buys its Weapons (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989).

28. The British call this "operational research." For an account of these developments centered on British experience, see Guy Hartcut, The Silent Revolution: Development of conventional Weapons, 1945-1985 (London: Brassey's, 1993).

29. Thomas Parke Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880 1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).

30. Peter L. Jakab, Visions of a Flying Machine: The Wright Brothers and the Process of Invention (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990).

31. Nick Kotz, Wild Blue Yonder: Money, Politics, and the B 1 Bomber (New York: Pantheon, 1988).

32. John Lonnquest, "The Face of Atlas: General Bernard Schriever and the Development of the Atlas Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, 1953 1960," PhD Dissertation, Duke University, 1996; Harvey N. Sapolsky, The Polaris System Development: Bureaucratic and Programmatic Success in Government (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972).

33. Bruce Palmer, Jr., The Twenty five Year War: America's Military Role in Vietnam (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984).

34. Paul Dixon, The Electronic Battlefield (London: Morian Brothers, 1976); Frank Barnaby, The Automated Battlefield (New York: Free Press, 1986).

35. Mark Clodfelter, The Limits of Air Power: The American Bombing of North Vietnam (New York, 1989).

36. Mao Tse tung, "On the Protracted War," in Selected Works (5 vols.; New York: International Publishers, 1954), II, pp. 157 243.

37. The victory of People's War in Vietnam had enormous implications for the future of war. The increasing disparity in wealth between the industrialized states and the less developed countries may forebode future war between the haves and have nots. In such a conflict, Mao's strategy may loom large.

38. Theodore Ropp has said that the U.S. Army knew that it had lost the Vietnam War. The Air Force thought it had won the war. And the Navy did not know it had been in a war. Personal communication to the author.

39. Laurence Martin, The Changing Face of Nuclear War (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), p. 61.

40. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).

41. Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: Bantam, 1980).

42. Board on Army Science and Technology, Commission on Engineering and Technical Systems, National Research Council, Star 21: Strategic Technologies for the Army of the Twenty first Century (Washington: National Academy Press, 1992), pp. 277 80.

43. For yet a different interpretation of what is at work, see James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986).

TABLE NOTES

1. Arthur Ferrill, The Origins of War: From the Stone Age to Alexander the Great, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985), pp. 18-19.

2. The military revolution has experienced a revival of interest in recent years. See Michael Roberts, The Military Revolution, 1560-1660 (Belfast: M. Boyd, [1956] 1988); Geoffrey Parker, "The 'Military Revolution, 1560-1660'--A Myth?," Journal of Modern History 48 (1976):195-214; and The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800 (London: Macmillan, 1991); Brian M. Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democracy and Autocracy in Early Modern Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); and Clifford J. Rogers, ed., The Military Revolution Debate: Readings on the Transformation of Early Modern Europe, (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995).

3. Alvin and Heidi Toffler, War and Anti-war; Daniel Deudeny, "Binding Power, Bound States: Geopolitics, Statist Realism, and Republicanism," pp. I9-I11; Alex Roland, "Comparing Military Revolutions," Brian R. Sullivan, "What Distinguishes a Revolution in Military Affairs from a Military Technical Revolution?"; Eliot Cohen, "A Revolution in Warfare," Foreign Affairs, 75 (March/April 1996): 37-54; Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., "The Revolution in Military Affairs and Military Capabilities: Broadening the Planning Parameters of Future Conflict"; and Emily O. Goldman and Richard B. Andres, "The Geopolitical Effects of Revolutions in Military Affairs." All papers cited without provenance were presented at the conference on "The Revolution in Military Affairs," Monterey, CA, 27-28 August 1996.

Alex Roland, professor of history at Duke University since 1987, has held the departmental chair for the past year. He has been a visiting professor of military history at the U. S. Army War College and a resident fellow in the history of science and technology at MIT. His publications include Men in Arms: A History of Warfare and Its Interrelationships with Western Society (1991).
~Ed.

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