Warfare Transformed: A Braudelian Perspective on the `Revolution in Military Affairs'

Abstract

Despite the historical patina of much of the extant literature, most of the scholarship on the `Revolution in Military Affairs' (RMA) reflects a profoundly superficial and ahistorical understanding of the changing nature of warfare. To be sure, this literature is not lacking in historical detail and analogy — indeed, one of its defining characteristics is a selfconscious attempt to use history alternatively to `prove' the RMA thesis and to illuminate the transhistorical dynamics of radical change in the nature of war. But these historical references are almost exclusively to transformations in the nature of warfighting. The purpose of this article is to address the problem of ahistoricism by reconnecting changes in the nature of warfighting to both broader transformations in the social organization of warfare and deeper changes in the nature of war as an historically constructed social institution.