Colin S. Gray on Future Warfare Trends

Some selections from the Gray Parameters article, at the end (p. 11-12). Gray, is synthesizing a lot of the debate on RMAs, information warfare, modular forces, airpower, and non-state actors together into one convenient package. I think this is about right. The last bullet (about PGMs targeting at standoff distances) has been a problem since the late 70s for operational art but it has not really been thought about too much after the end of the Airland Battle/Assault Breaker/FOFA era:

• "The development of cyber power that is becoming ever more necessary for the creation of wealth and the functioning of armed forces already is resulting in cyber warfare. With only trivial exceptions, all future wars will harbor integral cyber warfare."

• "The maturing of orbital space capabilities for science, commerce, and military power guarantees that space warfare, in common with cyber warfare, will be in our future. "

• "An information-led revolution in military affairs (RMA) is well under way and is unstoppable. The strategic ramifications of this RMA include the dissemination of relatively high-technology weaponry and support equipment to nonstate and weak-state belligerents. The computer-based, information technology-led RMA does not mean enduring US military hegemony for strategic and political challenges, as some people naively believed in the 1990s."

• "War between great powers is possible, given the political fuel lurking in the twenty-first century in the deadly and familiar classical Thucydidesan categories of “fear, honor, and interest.” But new technologies very likely will retire, indeed have retired, the tactical relevance of much modern military experience. For a leading example, contemporary kinetic air (and missile) power is now so deadly in the precision with which it can be targeted that just about any enemy assets that can be located can be violently removed from the opponent’s order of battle. Regular, heavy ground forces will not clash in mighty battle, because rival air power(s) will pre-empt such an engagement. Nonetheless, future large-scale and usually “conventional” regu- lar and irregular styles in warfare will still be possible. They will be waged by information technology-led and -enabled military forces, in cyber space as well as to, in, and from orbital space, and in styles notably irregular when compared with most interstate strategic practices in modern times."

Comments

[YNSN]

What I don't see him mention is electronic (Electromagnetic, really) warfare. The dominance of a AGMs can be blunted by proper application of both active and passive jamming.

[A.E.]

He does in "Modern Strategy," which was ten years ago, I think....