The Four Components of Revolution: How Military Affairs Change
Post 3 of 12 — From Clausewitz to Orbit: Strategy, Revolution, and the Future of War
After every war, defense establishments face a powerful temptation: identify the weapon system that won, and build more of it. After 1918 it was the machine gun and barbed wire — the instruments of defensive dominance. After 1940 it was the tank. After 1991 it was the precision-guided munition. After Ukraine, it is the first-person-view drone. This logic is not entirely wrong, but it is radically incomplete, and the incomplete version of it has sent armies into the next war prepared for the previous one more times than any strategist should be comfortable acknowledging.
The reason is straightforward once stated: a weapon is never a revolution. The revolution happens when a weapon is combined with new systems for employing it, new concepts for integrating it into combined arms operations, and new organizational structures capable of exploiting what the concept demands. All four components are required. The absence of any one of them means the revolution stalls — and the side with the hardware but not the doctrine finds itself losing to an adversary that understood the concept even without the hardware.
This post establishes the four-component diagnostic framework that the rest of this series will apply to every military revolution it examines.
The Four-Component Framework
The framework comes directly from ONA research on the interwar period, crystallized by Mahnken and Marshall: major military revolutions integrate four main elements — new or advanced technologies, the application of those technologies to new military systems, innovative operational concepts, and organizational adaptations [1].
None of these four is sufficient alone. Technology without systems is a laboratory curiosity. Systems without concepts are expensive hardware waiting for a doctrine. Concepts without organizational adaptation are brilliant ideas that die inside institutions designed to resist them. And organizations without technology are eventually overwhelmed by adversaries who have it.
But the sequencing matters as much as the presence of all four. Marshall and his ONA associates were explicit: the most difficult and important components of the MTR were not new technologies or their applications, but how to develop appropriate operational concepts for new military systems and how best to organize forces to employ them [2]. This is why they deliberately replaced the term Military-Technical Revolution — which gave too much weight to the technical dimension — with Revolution in Military Affairs. The word choice was a corrective embedded in the terminology itself [3].
Marshall’s formulation, cited by Jones in The Pentagon’s Missing China Strategy, is the cleanest summary: “Technology makes possible the revolution, but the revolution itself takes place only when new concepts of operation develop” [4]. The implication is direct. A defense establishment that excels at acquisition but atrophies at concept development is, in the most important sense, falling behind — regardless of what it spends.
The Soviet Intellectual Surprise
One of the most counterintuitive facts in the history of military thought is that the term “Revolution in Military Affairs” — the phrase that would come to dominate American defense discourse for a generation — was coined by Soviet theorists, not American ones.
The Soviets became the first to grasp this phenomenon as a discontinuity. They coined the term and produced theoretical literature without developing new weaponry or technology. Beginning in the late 1970s, Soviet military theorists issued seminal writing on the military-technical revolution predating U.S. and NATO efforts by nearly a decade. The Soviet Union used the technological superiority of the West as the starting point for its own conceptualization of what that superiority meant — and where it was leading [5].
This is the same inversion encountered in Post 2: the U.S. built the tools, and an adversary theorized their implications first. The Soviets identified three twentieth-century MTRs in sequence: the first arising from aircraft, chemical weapons, and motorization in World War I; the second from nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, and early computers in World War II; and a third they anticipated beginning in the late 1970s from what would become precision guidance, advanced sensors, and information integration [6].
That periodization is more analytically useful than the American tendency — still common — to treat the 1991 Gulf War as the inaugural moment of modern high-tech warfare. The Gulf War was the demonstration of a revolution long underway in theory and technology. The Soviets had seen it coming for fifteen years before Desert Storm.
The most striking part of this story, noted by Jones in The American Edge, is what Marshall concluded from it. While the U.S. military was at the forefront of developing the technologies, Soviet military leaders were at the forefront of theorizing about the changing character of war — intellectualizing the longer-term consequences of the technical changes the Americans had initiated [7]. Marshall’s analysis of this gap was one of the founding insights of ONA’s RMA research program.
Krepinevich and the Attributes of Disruptive Innovation
Krepinevich, whose work grew directly out of ONA, extended the four-component framework into an analysis of what organizational characteristics allow militaries to execute disruptive innovation during periods of revolutionary change.
His synthesis in The Origins of Victory is worth quoting at length because its implications for the current moment are uncomfortable. Militaries that succeed in leading the way into a new and far more effective way of waging war during periods of military revolution gain an enormous advantage. Those that fail to keep pace find themselves operating at a severe disadvantage [8]. This is not a gentle claim. Military revolutions create steep, often irreversible, competitive discontinuities.
The organizations that succeed share identifiable attributes. They have a guiding vision — a clear answer to two questions: what are we trying to do, and how can we do it far more effectively than we can now? [9] They engage in what Krepinevich calls either “technological push” (exploiting new technologies as they emerge) or “technological pull” (actively seeking technologies that enable a concept already identified but not yet achievable) [10]. And they enjoy or develop advantages in time-based competition — the ability to shift to a new mode of warfare before rivals can react, or to catch up rapidly when a rival has moved first [11].
The sobering finding is the assessment of the U.S. military’s current performance against these criteria. From the post-Cold War transformation effort, through the rise and fall of Joint Forces Command, through repeated attempts to develop operational concepts over the past decade, the United States’ armed forces exhibit few, if any, of the characteristics of military organizations that succeed at disruptive innovation [8]. This verdict, rendered by an analyst deeply embedded in the ONA tradition, is not a political argument. It is a diagnostic finding.
Large organizations are not simply slow to change — as Mahnken notes in Competitive Strategies, they are designed not to change [12]. Military bureaucracies optimize for continuity, predictability, and the reduction of variance. These are rational responses to the demands of peacetime administration. They become catastrophic liabilities when the competitive environment shifts discontinuously.
Domain Expansion as the Through-Line
Krepinevich’s most durable contribution to the framework may be the domain expansion thesis, which provides the structural explanation for why military revolutions recur with such regularity.
Since the Industrial Revolution, those military organizations leading the way to disruptive change have generally emphasized speed, range, and stealth relative to armor, and accurate ranged fires relative to volume fires [13]. This is not coincidence. It reflects a consistent competitive logic: militaries move into new domains because those domains offer speed, range, or stealth that is unavailable in existing domains.
The progression is traceable: land and sea have been contested for millennia. By World War I, the competition had expanded to the electromagnetic and undersea domains and, in nascent form, to air. Following World War II, military systems were positioned in space and on the seabed. More recently, cyber has become an area of intense competition. Four of the six new domains — electromagnetic, air, space, and cyberspace — are characterized by speed of action and extended range, while the undersea domain offers stealth. As militaries moved into these domains, they leveraged precisely those characteristics [13].
Space and cyber are the current frontier of this expansion — and the domain expansion thesis predicts that the first military to develop not just space-based capabilities but the concepts and organizational structures to exploit them will gain the kind of asymmetric advantage that armored warfare innovators gained in the 1930s. That prediction will be tested in Posts 5 through 7.
The Qiao Liang Counterpoint and McMaster’s Warning
Qiao Liang’s Unrestricted Warfare offers a counterpoint worth taking seriously: the weapons revolution invariably precedes the revolution in military affairs by one step [14]. Doctrine is always catching up to hardware. The implication is that conceptual leadership is inherently reactive, never fully ahead of the technology curve.
This is partially right, and the partial truth matters. There is always a lag between the arrival of a transformative weapon and the development of concepts mature enough to exploit it. The tank was introduced in 1916. The concept of armored exploitation — deep penetration, bypassing resistance, collapsing rear areas — was not operationalized effectively until 1940. That twenty-four-year gap is full of strategic danger for the side that has the weapon but not the concept.
But the counterpoint is also incomplete. What Krepinevich’s cases show is that the most dangerous actors in a military revolution are not those who move fastest to acquire the hardware, but those who develop the concept while the hardware is still maturing. Germany in the 1930s did not have tanks superior to French tanks in 1940 — it had a superior operational concept, rehearsed through exercises and doctrine, waiting for the moment the hardware was adequate to execute it.
McMaster’s warning connects here: flawed thinking about the impact of technology on future wars corrupted American strategic and operational thinking for the decades following the Gulf War [15]. The lesson drawn from 1991 — that American technology had made warfare nearly frictionless — was exactly the wrong lesson. It was a lesson about character, applied as if it were a lesson about nature. The result was a generation of doctrine built on a foundation that crumbled in Fallujah and Kandahar.
The Diagnostic Applied Forward
The four-component framework now becomes a diagnostic tool the rest of this series will deploy. For each military competition examined — the interwar period in Post 4, Ukraine in Post 8, the space domain in Posts 5 and 6, the AI-autonomous systems competition in Post 11 — the same four questions apply:
Which of the four components is clearly present? Which is lagging or absent? Who is building hardware? Who is building doctrine? Who is reorganizing their forces to exploit the concept? And — the question that matters most for the long-term competition — who is asking the right questions before the hardware arrives?
The Soviets asked those questions first about the precision-guided revolution, and they lacked the resources to exploit the answers. China is asking them now about the space and AI revolutions. The most striking foreign writings about the RMA were coming out of China. ONA analysts who began studying Chinese military writing in the 1990s discovered that Chinese officers were among the most thoughtful and attentive observers and commentators on the changing character of war [16]. That finding was rendered a generation ago. It has not become less relevant.
Referenced Highlights
[1] “Research on the interwar years suggested that major military revolutions integrated four main elements: new or advanced technologies, the application of these technologies to new military systems, innovative operational concepts, and organizational adaptations.”
Net Assessment and Military Strategy — Thomas G. Mahnken and Andrew W. Marshall. Open in Readwise
[2] “But as the assessment had stressed the most difficult and important components of the MTR were not new technologies or their applications, but how to develop appropriate operational concepts for new military systems and how best to organize forces to employ them.”
Net Assessment and Military Strategy — Thomas G. Mahnken and Andrew W. Marshall. Open in Readwise
[3] “In contrast to the technology-driven mentality of the defense establishment, Marshall and his associates stressed concepts and doctrine rather than the purely technological aspects of the RMA. They openly stated that although superior technology is desirable, the real competition is not technical but intellectual. The central task was finding innovative concepts of operations and organizations and then exploiting current and emerging technology. Because the term MTR gave too much weight to technology, the alternative term Revolution in Military Affairs was adopted.”
Net Assessment and Military Strategy — Thomas G. Mahnken and Andrew W. Marshall. Open in Readwise
[4] “Technology is important, but it has never been sufficient to win wars. As Andrew Marshall argued, ‘Technology makes possible the revolution, but the revolution itself takes place only when new concepts of operation develop.’”
The Pentagon’s Missing China Strategy — Seth G. Jones. Open in Readwise
[5] “The Soviets became the first to grasp this phenomenon as a discontinuity; they also coined the term revolution in military affairs and produced theoretical literature without developing new weaponry or technology. Although the United States had laid the technological groundwork, it was Soviet rather than American theorists who considered the long-term consequences of the RMA.”
Net Assessment and Military Strategy — Thomas G. Mahnken and Andrew W. Marshall. Open in Readwise
[6] “Looking back over the 20th century, Soviet theoreticians had identified two prior periods of technology-driven revolutionary change in how wars were fought. The first MTR arose with the introduction of aircraft, chemical weapons, and motorization during World War I; the second was sparked by the advent of nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, and early computers during World War II. By the late 1970s, the Soviet military anticipated a third twentieth century MTR.”
Net Assessment and Military Strategy — Thomas G. Mahnken and Andrew W. Marshall. Open in Readwise
[7] “While the U.S. military was at the forefront of developing new technologies, including precision strike, Marshall assessed that Soviet military leaders were at the forefront of theorizing about the changing character of war. He believed ‘it was the Soviet military theorists, rather than our own, that were intellectualizing about it, and speculating on the longer-term consequences of the technical and other changes that the American military had initiated.’”
The American Edge — Seth Jones. Open in Readwise
[8] “First, the world is in a period of disruptive change in the character of warfare... Second, under these conditions of radical change in the competitive environment, the need to engage in disruptive innovation is both compelling and profound... Militaries that succeed in leading the way into a new and far more effective way of waging war during periods of military revolution can gain an enormous advantage over their rivals... the United States’ armed forces exhibit few, if any, of the characteristics of military organizations that succeed in this endeavor.”
The Origins of Victory — Andrew F. Krepinevich. Open in Readwise
[9] “Each of the four military organizations profiled in the histories had a guiding vision of the new warfare regime. This vision addressed two questions of fundamental importance: What are we trying to do? and How can we accomplish this in a far more effective way than we can at present?”
The Origins of Victory — Andrew F. Krepinevich. Open in Readwise
[10] “In each of the four cases, disruptive innovation was either driven or enabled by significant advances in military-related technologies. In some instances, it was a case of ‘technological push’ — new technologies emerged, leaving militaries to figure out how to best exploit them. There were examples of ‘technological pull,’ where militaries were actively seeking out technologies that would enable them to exploit big opportunities that they had identified but lacked the means to exploit.”
The Origins of Victory — Andrew F. Krepinevich. Open in Readwise
[11] “Military organizations enjoying a superior position in time-based competition are well placed to adopt strategies based on exploiting the first- and second-move advantage.”
The Origins of Victory — Andrew F. Krepinevich. Open in Readwise
[12] “Large organizations do not simply find it difficult to change, they are designed not to change. Innovation can occur but is not guaranteed.”
Competitive Strategies for the 21st Century — Thomas G. Mahnken. Open in Readwise
[13] “Since the Industrial Revolution, those military organizations leading the way to a disruptive change in war’s character have generally speaking emphasized speed, range, and stealth of military systems relative to armor... This era of military revolutions has also coincided with the Era of Domain Expansion... four of the six new domains — the electromagnetic, air, space, and cyberspace — are characterized by speed of action and extended range, while the undersea domain offers stealth.”
The Origins of Victory — Andrew F. Krepinevich. Open in Readwise
[14] “The weapons revolution invariably precedes the revolution in military affairs by one step, and following the arrival of a revolutionary weapon, the arrival of the revolution in military affairs is just a matter of time.”
Unrestricted Warfare — Qiao Liang. Open in Readwise
[15] “Flawed thinking about the impact of technology on future wars not only occurred at the stage of paradigmatic change. H. R. McMaster indicated how the military often failed to understand the implications of the RMA concept. As a result, superficial thinking has corrupted American strategic and operational thinking in the ensuing decades.”
Net Assessment and Military Strategy — Thomas G. Mahnken and Andrew W. Marshall. Open in Readwise
[16] “The most striking foreign writings about the RMA, however, were coming out of China. As SAIC analysts began digging into what Chinese officers were writing about military transformation, they quickly discovered that the Chinese were among the most thoughtful and attentive observers and commentators on the changing character of war.”
Net Assessment and Military Strategy — Thomas G. Mahnken and Andrew W. Marshall. Open in Readwise