Transforming Military Power Since the Cold War

The American, British and French armies have undertaken a number of innovations in attempting to transform themselves for the post-Cold War world. One innovation, in particular, stands out, namely, the development of networked forces. Another significant innovation is British and French doctrine on the effects-based approach to operations. Finally,

Military power is more than the accumulation of material resources. It is a product of how states mobilize, exploit and use resources to generate military force, and how forces are employed in the field.1 Viewed thus, the importance of military innovation becomes clear. Militaries that fail to innovate, and enter war with obsolete ways and means of

CENTCOM’s plan for a large-scale invasion of Afghanistan was rejected by US national command authorities in favor of an innovative plan proposed by the Director of the CIA. CIA field teams were inserted into Afghanistan in order to direct US money and air power to support a renewed offensive by the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. US Army special fo

The general spent much of his first year in office trying to convince the Army of the urgent need to transform itself and of his vision for the future information technology-based Army. His argument, as he admitted, “[d]idn’t get much traction.”164 A key problem, as Shinseki perceived it, was that soldiers were closely tied to their specialization

Four months later, in a speech to a luncheon given by the Association of the United States Army (AUSA), General Shinseki laid out his vision for the way forward. The Army would, he contended, explore and exploit the full range of emerging technologies, including command, control and communications technology, to find the best solutions to the probl

During the Cold War, expeditionary missions had been assigned to specialized units – the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions in the US Army, the Parachute Regiment in the British Army, and the Foreign Legion in the French Army.

Socio-technological change provided another macro-driver of Western military change. By the 1990s, it was becoming increasingly clear that new information and communication technologies (ICT), combined with precision strike technologies, had the potential to transform the conduct of warfare. Already a decade before Soviet military writers had begun

They also explore how programs of army transformation change over time, as new technologies moved from research to development, and as lessons from operations were absorbed.

The major Western states ended the Cold War with a surplus of military power. Armies, navies and air forces constructed to fight a global war against the Eastern bloc suddenly were left without peer competitors. Western policymakers and their publics soon found new things to worry about, including terrorism, nuclear proliferation, ethnic civil wars