The Interwar Laboratory: Three Historical RMA Case Studies

Post 4 of 12 — From Clausewitz to Orbit: Strategy, Revolution, and the Future of War

Mar 22, 2026

A large blue ship in the middle of a body of water — Photo by Yeji Jun on Unsplash

The interwar period — roughly 1919 to 1939 — is the richest laboratory for the study of military revolution available to the modern strategist. Within two decades, three major revolutions in the character of warfare occurred simultaneously, under conditions of genuine resource constraint, intense institutional resistance, and real uncertainty about which direction war was heading. The armies and navies that got the revolutions right gained decisive advantages. Those that got them wrong were destroyed.

The cases examined here — armored warfare, carrier aviation, and signals intelligence — are not just history. They are templates. They demonstrate, across three different domains and three different kinds of capability, the same underlying pattern that Post 3 articulated as the framework: the side that develops the superior concept for exploiting a new capability wins, even when it does not have the superior hardware. France entered 1940 with tanks that were, by measurable parameters, better than Germany’s. It was defeated in six weeks. The lesson has not yet been fully absorbed.

Case Study 1: Armored Warfare — Concept Beats Hardware

The British invented the tank in 1916. The Germans took the concept and made it a revolution.

As Guderian himself recalled, “the current English handbook on armored fighting vehicles was translated into German and for many years served as the theoretical manual for our developing ideas” [1]. The weapon came from Britain. The doctrine came from the country that had absorbed the weapon’s implications most deeply and built an organizational structure capable of executing them.

The German approach was built on a single, unambiguous priority. Everything is therefore dependent on this: to be able to move faster than has hitherto been done, and to carry the attack deep into the enemy’s defenses [2]. Speed and range were the supreme values. Armor protection and firepower were deliberately subordinated to them. Early German tanks — Panzers I through IV — maxed out at twenty-five tons, with speeds of twenty-five miles per hour or greater. The tactical logic was explicit: when forced to choose between a “thick skin” and a “fast runner,” German panzer leaders would always choose the latter [3].

The French made the opposite choice. Their Somua S35 and Char B heavy tanks had twice the armor of German Panzers and superior anti-tank guns. They were designed for a conflict characterized by positional warfare and attrition — the war that had just ended. The French tanks were better than ours, and as numerous — but they were too slow. It was by speed, in exploiting surprise, that we beat the French [3]. This verdict from General von Thoma, delivered after the fall of France in 1940, is perhaps the most direct summary of what a failed military revolution looks like from the winning side.

Three enabling technologies made the German concept executable: radios in every tank and aircraft, enabling real-time coordination in a fluid battle that no map or telephone could track; the Luftwaffe’s specialized reconnaissance aircraft, functioning as aerial scouts that gave advancing panzer columns continuous situational awareness [4]; and mobile maintenance and fuel support units that extended effective operational range well beyond what tank fuel capacity alone allowed. Together these formed the organizational infrastructure without which the concept would have remained a brilliant idea on paper.

The four-component framework applied: Germany had all four. New technology (tanks, radios, aircraft). New systems (panzer divisions, motorized infantry, close air support). New operational concept (deep penetration, bypassing resistance, collapsing rear areas). New organization (combined arms formations structured around the concept, not around existing branch hierarchies). France had the first two but not the third or fourth. The result was catastrophic.

Murray’s assessment is pointed: it was not the further development of technology that drove major improvements but rather conceptual thinking. The Germans’ marriage of combined-arms exploitation tactics with armored fighting vehicles accounted for the Wehrmacht’s astonishing success [5]. The gunpowder revolution echoes through the centuries, and its lesson is the same: the conceptual innovator defeats the hardware accumulator.

Case Study 2: Carrier Aviation — The Eclipse of the Battleship

The second interwar revolution unfolded at sea and was, in some ways, even more total than the armored revolution on land. By the end of World War II, the Navy counted twenty-eight large fast carriers and seventy-one smaller carrier types in the fleet. It included fewer than a dozen battleships, and none were being built [6]. Two decades earlier, the battleship had been the unquestioned capital ship of every major navy on earth.

The carrier revolution followed the same conceptual logic as the armored revolution: it prioritized speed, range, and scouting over firepower and armor. Relative to the battleship, the carrier emphasized speed, range, and scouting, while sacrificing firepower and armor [7]. A battleship could destroy anything it could reach and survive anything it encountered. The carrier could reach far more, and survive by not being there when the enemy struck.

The critical insight that drove carrier doctrine was the offense-dominant logic of the new weapon. Technology had yet to yield solutions for mounting an effective defense — in the form of radar, long-range radio, and proximity fusing for anti-aircraft shells — which meant that carrier operations appeared relentlessly offense-dominant: the first carrier whose aircraft spotted their adversaries’ carriers and executed an attack seemed certain to reap an enormous advantage [8]. This observation drove interwar fleet problem exercises toward one overriding question: who scouts the enemy first?

The answer to that question shaped doctrine. Fleet exercises convinced naval aviators that in carrier operations, it was better to “give” than “receive” — to locate and attack enemy carriers before they could return the favor [9]. This led to Vice Admiral Cole’s proposal for permanent carrier task forces — a carrier, cruisers, and destroyers structured around the principle of mobile offensive power projection — which became the fast carrier task forces that dominated the Pacific War [9].

Midway in June 1942 was the proof of concept. The U.S. fleet had prior knowledge of Japanese intentions and dispositions through code-breaking — the signals intelligence revolution discussed below. That foreknowledge enabled the concentration of American carriers at the decisive point. The Japanese carriers, caught with aircraft on deck being re-armed, were destroyed. Four Japanese fleet carriers sunk in a single day. The course of the Pacific War turned.

Case Study 3: Signals Intelligence — The Invisible Revolution

Running in parallel to the kinetic revolutions in armor and aviation was a third revolution that was less visible, operationally decisive, and, in many ways, the most durable of the three.

Signals intelligence and cryptography played a major role in the war, as belligerents worked to decipher their enemies’ codes. Successful code-breaking efforts like ULTRA provided the British with key information regarding German military capabilities and intentions. Similarly, American code-breakers provided the U.S. fleet with vital information on Japan’s fleet and intentions prior to the Battle of Midway [10].

ULTRA and the Midway code-breaking represent the scouting dimension of the interwar revolution in its most extreme form. The through-line in all three cases — armor, aviation, signals — is the competitive advantage of knowing where the enemy is before the enemy knows where you are. Guderian needed aerial reconnaissance. The carrier task force needed its aircraft to scout the enemy first. The code-breakers eliminated the scouting problem almost entirely for those with access to the intelligence.

This is the conceptual bridge to the space domain. Space-based ISR — the persistent, global, near-real-time surveillance capability provided by satellite constellations — is the modern equivalent of the ULTRA intercept, the carrier’s scout aircraft, and the Luftwaffe reconnaissance squadron simultaneously. It provides the scouting advantage that, as the interwar cases show, is frequently more decisive than any kinetic capability.

The Through-Line: Speed, Range, Scouting

Across all three cases, and across the broader pattern Krepinevich traces from the Industrial Revolution to the present, the winning formula is consistent. Since the Industrial Revolution, those military organizations leading the way to disruptive change in war’s character have generally emphasized speed, range, and stealth of military systems relative to armor, and accurate ranged fires relative to volume fires [11]. The trend is not absolute — there are always situations where mass and armor are decisive — but as a generalizable pattern it has held across two centuries of military competition.

The reason connects to the domain expansion argument from Post 3. Every new domain that militaries have entered — air, electromagnetic, undersea, space, cyber — has been entered because it offers one or more of these advantages: speed, range, or stealth. The battleship admiral who dismissed the aircraft carrier as a gadget was not wrong that battleships were powerful. He was wrong about which attributes would dominate future competition.

The current equivalents of that mistake are visible. The analyst who counts tanks in Ukraine without accounting for the ISR-drone-strike complex that has made armored vehicles near-suicidal on the open battlefield. The strategist who counts missile batteries without accounting for the satellite constellation that provides targeting. The policymaker who assesses Chinese military power by counting ships without accounting for the reconnaissance-strike complex — what the PLA calls “systems destruction warfare” — that those ships are designed to support [12].

Forward Linkage: The First Space War

Krepinevich makes a prediction that follows directly from the interwar cases and deserves to be stated plainly: given the extended ranges over which modern strike operations can be launched and the speed at which they can be prosecuted, scouting forces will be tasked with searching a far greater area than ever before. This may lead to heavy reliance on space-based scouting forces. Given the key role space-based systems play as part of a battle network, and advanced militaries’ ability to neutralize them, space control and denial operations are likely to be a key focus of belligerent activity at the onset of war. Simply put, the next great-power war will be the first “space war” [13].

This is not a prediction about futuristic weapons. It is the application of the interwar pattern to the current domain frontier. The side that controls the scouting advantage — that can see the adversary without being seen — holds a structural advantage that no amount of kinetic capability can fully offset. In 1940, that advantage was the aerial scout and the radio. In 1942, it was the code-breaker. In any great-power conflict in the near future, it will be the satellite constellation, and the ability to protect one’s own while denying the adversary’s.

That is the subject of Posts 5 and 6.

Referenced Highlights

[1] “Heinz Guderian, the self-proclaimed father of Germany’s panzer forces, recalled that during this early period, ‘the current English handbook on armored fighting vehicles was translated into German and for many years served as the theoretical manual for our developing ideas.’”