Network operations

By the end of the 1980s, an operational renaissance was apparent in Europe. Twentieth-century mass, lineal combined arms warfare had, at the intellectual level at least, been displaced by a ‘manoeuvrist’ approach, prioritising operations which sought to fight deep, simultaneous battle in the enemy's rear. In the 1990s, the American forces, already oriented to a manoeuvrist approach, underwent a so-called ‘revolution in military affairs’ (RMA) promoted primarily by Admiral William Owens and Andrew Marshall, director of the Department of Defense, Office of Net Assessment (Metz 1997: 185; Owens 2002). The term RMA was enshrined in the 1997 Quadrennial Defence Review. Despite the very significant criticisms of the concept of the RMA (Biddle 2002; Farrell and Terriff 2002; Freedman 1998; Gray 1997), scholars have broadly accepted that in the 1990s fundamental military reformation was evident in the United States. This transformation is generally conceived to consist of three elements: intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance technology (ISR): command, control, communication, computers and interoperability (C4I); and precision-guided munitions (PGMs) (Gray 1997: 14; Latham 2002). Through new ISR technology, the US armed forces aspired to gathering near perfect and immediate situational awareness of the battle space throughout its depth. The development of C4I capabilities then allowed commanders to co-ordinate their forces across time and space. Above all, the new C4I capabilities allowed US forces to disperse across wide areas, converging on designated points. Finally, by the 1990s, America had developed PGMs to a high degree.