Colin Gray, the RMA, and the Rise of Drone Warfare

Thirty years ago, strategists were buzzing about a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), which was largely created by the integration of emergent information age technologies into military establishments. For proof of the revolution, one had to look no further than the Coalition victory in the 1991 Gulf War. Precision targeting and precision-guided weapons disabled Iraqi command and control, while a satellite-based Global Positioning System enabled American armored divisions to navigate across a trackless desert to catch the Republican Guard by surprise. Ground combat in that war lasted about 100 hours. In 1993, John Arquilla and David Rondfelt announced that “Cyber war is coming,” that is, conflict and competition were about to fill a new “virtual domain” of human reality created by the software, hardware, and wetware (people) that were communicating exploding amounts of data across an increasingly global Internet.[1] Much like radio communications led to a war for and in the “ether,” the growing reliance on information age technology would lead to a war for and within the Internet. By 1996, William Owens had advanced the idea of a “system of systems,” or the emergence of a reconnaissance-strike complex that could identify, track, and destroy targets in a tactical, theater, or even global setting.[2] The elements of today’s techno-strategic environment were coming into place.

The RMA was about more than technology: it posited that a fundamental change in warfare was underway, produced by the convergence of three developments: new organizations, new weapons/technologies, and new doctrines governing the use of force.[3] Or, as Michael Vickers and Robert Martinage noted, RMAs “are periods of discontinuous change that render obsolete or subordinate existing means of conducting war.”[4] Scholarly discussions about the nature and impact of the RMA continue, although after thirty years, what once appeared to be revolutionary is now increasingly viewed as rather mundane.[5] Ever more exotic technologies – artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, hypersonic vehicles, space systems, stealth – now seem poised to produce another “discontinuous change” in the conduct of war.

Not everyone, however, was completely swept away by the RMA. In a 1996 article published in the Naval War College Review, Colin Gray offered several reservations about the scope and impact of the RMA.[6] In typical fashion, Gray, one of the leading strategists of our age who dealt with nuclear weapons, arms control, sea power, cyber power, space, special operations, technology, defense planning and planners and the theoretical and practical facets of strategy writ large, offered a nuanced and sometimes even equivocal assessment of the claims made by RMA enthusiasts.[7] Nevertheless, it is informative to consider how these observations have stood the test of time and what they have to say about the burst of disruptive military innovation currently underway over the Ukraine Steppe, drone warfare.

Calculating the Scope and Nature of Change

Gray dealt with the elephant in the room first. He noted that the RMA would not change the nature of war (“War is an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.”). Nevertheless, he ventured that it might lead to a change in the character of war, that is, an “information-based” RMA might alter how wars would be conducted.[8] Those who are familiar with Gray’s work would not be surprised by his assessment, but our disciple of Clausewitz went one step further by suggesting that the RMA’s emphasis on information warfare was not particularly novel — Sun Tzu in The Art of War had a similar perspective. He did pay RMA advocates a backhanded compliment by noting their discovery of the importance of information in war was akin to Alfred Thayer Mahan’s “discovery” of “sea power.” Both codified a reality that was recognized intuitively. Ironically, contemporary critics of Mahan sometimes noted that his notion of sea power also captured the obvious, while admitting that things became especially obvious after reading his work.[9]

Gray also complained that the discussion of the RMA focused too heavily on technology, which ignored war as both a “political phenomenon and a social institution.” As a result, he suggested that the way the RMA would play out would be influenced by ideas about the changing character of war, the strategic culture of the American polity, and the dynamic challenges posed by international relations. This would be highly prescient in at least three ways. First, scholars have observed that strategic culture influenced how the RMA unfolded in various national settings; different militaries viewed its importance and impact differently.[10]

Second, Americans might have had a special penchant for the RMA because it addressed developments set in motion for them following the end of the Cold War. It promised to minimize the personal and material costs of using force at a time when threats to U.S. national security barely appeared to merit a response.[11] Or, as Edward Luttwak suggested, no more than limited force and minimal risks could be justified in responding to small wars and other minor disturbances facing the United States during the “unipolar moment.”[12] It also held out the promise of “more bang for the buck,” as several administrations cut Cold War force structure and military expenditures in search of a “peace dividend.” The RMA did not produce a smaller, less-expensive military, but a smaller military increased the appeal of the RMA.[13] Politicians, defense officials, and defense intellectuals find it hard to resist the siren song of cost efficiency.

Third, the RMA vectored attention towards high-intensity conventional operations, the type of operation that the denizens of the Pentagon liked to contemplate. Gray noted that this focus on “making a better job of waging Desert Storm,” was odd given that many observers at the time believed that “low-intensity conflict” was the wave of the future: “the ‘reconnaissance-strike’ centerpiece of ‘I-war’ thinking may have only a distinctly adjunct role to play in most contexts of deeply political, low-intensity conflict.”[14] One of my students put the idea somewhat differently: “Precision strikes are not effective when the opponent’s ideology is the target.”[15]

These observations suggest that strategic assessments of emergent technology and novel weapons are shaped by several cognitive biases: (1) a tendency to assume the future techno-strategic setting will resemble the present; (2) the belief that strategic assessments are universal and are not driven by the somewhat idiosyncratic influence of strategic culture and the pressing political and bureaucratic imperatives of the moment; and (3) a tendency to embrace a “one-size fits all” attitude that fails to consider how black swan events could upset the applecart. Indeed, that black swan took flight on September 11, 2001, a few short years after Gray tapped into another strategic theme of the day — that low-intensity conflict was on the strategic horizon.

Factors that Temper the RMA

In hindsight, Gray seems to have believed that advocates of the RMA depicted it as a “silver bullet”: an information-based weapon, in the form of a system of systems, that would dominate the battlefield for the foreseeable future.[16] It offered a techno-strategic theory of victory, or in the words of Hilarie Belloc, “Whatever happens, we have got the Maxim and they have not.”[17] Gray believed that the reconnaissance-strike complex envisioned by the RMA would be impactful, even at times strategically determinative; nevertheless, he suggested that the dominant advantage offered by the RMA would not last long for the reasons listed below.

1. Nothing Fails Like Success. Gray suggested that it was unlikely that opponents would take the RMA lying down, so to speak. According to Gray, “War, in common with sport, has the characteristic that what worked yesterday might not work tomorrow, precisely because it worked yesterday.”[18]
2. The Diffusion of Technology/Weaponry. The diffusion of technology and innovative weapons is a constant in history; no one has yet devised a way to prevent the opponent from copying the technological innovations of others. Gray even noted that because the RMA was largely dependent on technologies pioneered by the commercial sector, techno-diffusion would be especially rapid in the case of the I-war-enabled RMA.
3. New Capabilities Bring New Vulnerabilities. The more dependent one becomes on information superiority, the more vulnerable one becomes to data interruption.
4. Persistence of the Tried and True. Although he acknowledged that the impact of information dominance in war is highly ubiquitous, Gray saw the resulting systems of systems not as a “stand-alone” capability, but also as an enabler of existing (traditional?) weapons and operations. Gray quoted J.C. Wylie to communicate this point: “The ultimate determinant in war is the man on the scene with the gun.”[19]
5. Change is Nonlinear. Gray stated, “you cannot predict reliably some significant characteristic of the world ten years hence from today through a ‘surprise-free’ future. 2006 may not be ‘like’ 1996 only more so.”[20] This observation should be qualified to reflect the fact that some trends, for example, demographics or urbanization, are more resilient than others.[21]
6. Beware of Dubious Historical Analogy. Gray included in this admonition his use of analogies to understand the RMA, although his article offered no systemic or deliberate comparison of the present to past moments of technological churn. Instead, he seemed to be suggesting that explaining war’s outcome was complex and that care had to be taken in using analogies to highlight some factors (e.g., information dominance, technological innovation) over others.

Gray had an uncanny ability to describe how just about everything is related to everything else when it comes to strategy, and he used this talent to critique the RMA project. This list of caveats responded to the techno-enthusiasm voiced by RMA proponents by suggesting that claims about the effectiveness of the RMA focused on its technological novelties, not the permanent embodiment of techno-military superiority. Novelty, almost by definition, is short-lived, especially when placed in the innovation accelerator created by wartime.

The Rise of Drone Warfare

“Elbit Systems 900 takeoff” (Israel)
Attribution: Ronite, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Today’s reader might be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss was about back in 1996. In many ways, Gray was prescient, but his reservations about the RMA reflected well-known observations drawn from military history. The Global War on Terror vectored the U.S. reconnaissance-strike complex towards the use of long-range, remote-controlled drones to target individual miscreants and small bands of terrorists. Although no one predicted this technological turn of events in the mid-1990s, there was an inkling of low-intensity hostilities on the horizon, which was reflected in Gray’s musings about the future. The RMA also played out unevenly among militaries around the planet as the weaponization of new technologies was shaped by individual strategic cultures and security challenges. For Americans, a tactical, theater, and even a limited global reconnaissance-strike complex became a reality, but as it matured, it seems to have lost some of its luster as a stand-alone “war-winning” capability. Increasing costs, technological diffusion, and vexing target sets, that is, opponents motivated by religion or ideology, all serve to limit its availability and effectiveness. The RMA could not prevent the demise of the unipolar moment.

Nevertheless, I-War has recently been vectored along a new path – ongoing miniaturization of various electrical components and growing computational power have led to the rise of drones, semi-autonomous systems that are creating a new domain of warfare in the Russia-Ukraine War. A kinetic expression of cyberspace that operates at low altitude to hunt personnel and vehicles, drones were the stuff of science fiction back in the last century. To the best of my knowledge, the RMA debates of the 1990s did not touch upon the possibility of a weaponized singularity, that is, the subject of the 1984 movie The Terminator and a current issue of plausible concern.[22]

Today’s drones are a far cry from the Terminator (one hopes), but they are wreaking havoc, especially on the conventional battlefield. In the most spectacular demonstration of the drone’s potential, Ukraine recently smuggled aerial drones deep inside Russia to destroy irreplaceable long-range bombers that were used to launch cruise missiles against urban targets.[23] With only slightly less fanfare, Israeli special forces launched drones from inside Iran to degrade air defenses at the outset of its June 2025 counterproliferation campaign against Tehran.[24] While the success of these operations was based more on ingenuity and daring than the drones themselves, there is no doubt that semi-autonomous weapons are now a fixture of the contemporary battlefield.

Observers are sounding the tocsin as they offer competing characterizations of what is on full display in the Russia-Ukraine war. Michael Horowitz, a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense, suggests that an era of “precise mass” has arrived: “War will be defined in large part by the deployment of huge numbers of uncrewed systems, whether fully autonomous and powered by artificial intelligence or remote-controlled, from outer space to under the sea. The pioneering breakthroughs evident in today’s conflicts merely foreshadow how wars will be waged in the years and decades to come . . ..[25] Former Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs Mark Milley and former CEO of Google Eric Schmidt take a somewhat broader perspective: artificial intelligence not only powers the drones, it is increasingly being used to exploit a deluge of multi-source data to identify and track targets with precision in real-time. They also note that drones are cheap, or at least cheaper than the weapons they target. For example, they note that “a simple first-person-view drone can cost just $500. A team of ten of them can immobilize a $10 million Russian tank in Ukraine.”[26] They cite the fact that two-thirds of the Russian tanks destroyed in the war were destroyed by drones to make the point that artificial intelligence, especially its kinetic manifestation in drone warfare, “is rapidly changing the character of war.”

“Ukrainian FPV drone with fiber-optic communication channel”
Attribution: АрміяІнформ, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.

It is probably too early to judge the general effectiveness of drone warfare across a full range of tactical or operational scenarios. Against a fully functional combined-arms operation benefiting from a superior reconnaissance-strike complex, electronic or physical countermeasures, or even drone killing drones, it is possible to envision a force blowing through the drone opposition before it can have much effect. Dispatches from the front already report that drones are more effective when accompanied by artillery barrages to disrupt electronic warfare, cripple air defenses, and send infantry to ground.[27] The strategic and political impact of drone use is also an open question, that is, how will drones interact with war as a “political phenomenon and a social institution.” Nevertheless, there is no doubt that drones are both a multifaceted opportunity and a dynamic problem that manifests at the blistering pace of wartime innovation.

Conclusion

It is not surprising if all of this sounds familiar. While keeping in mind Gray’s admonition to use analogies cautiously, the rise of drones does appear to be the next phase of the information-based RMA that was first identified by Soviet theorists in the 1970s. As the impact of Moore’s Law spreads across science, industry, and militaries globally, new domains opened by new technologies will be filled by war and information-enabled weapons. The fact that drones are relatively inexpensive and, for the time effective against conventional weapons and conventionally equipped infantry makes them even more attractive, reducing the opportunity costs involved in fielding thousands or even tens of thousands of autonomous weapons as quickly as possible. As Colin warns us, it is hard to say what strategic problem or technology will come down the road next – hypersonic weapons armed with extremely lightweight, low-yield nuclear warheads made possible by computational advances in modeling and simulation would be my guess. Nevertheless, just as battlefield necessity led to the rapid eruption and dynamism of drone warfare, the interaction of the demands of some future battlefield and emergent technology will push drones into the background.

What about the elephant in the room? Milley and Schmidt reassure us that it is “an illusion to think that technology will change the underlying human nature of conflict.”[28] To this, one can add that technology is also unlikely to change the nature of war itself. What remains to be determined is how autonomous weapons – and rest assured, they will possess increasing autonomy as computational power grows, and programming improves – will transform the character of war.[29] Will drones act as a mobile minefield on land, at sea, or in the air, attracted to some type of signature with a lethal payload? Or will drones battle to seize “command of the drone domain” so they can exploit it for their purposes while denying the domain to the opponent’s drones? Or will the drone bring us something completely different? To paraphrase Wylie, will the ultimate determinant in war be the drone on the scene with the gun?