Seeking the knowledge edge; Australia and the revolution in military affairs. (Defence).

Prediction is fine, providing you steer clear of the future

--Mark Twain

IN THE DECADE since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Australian defence planners have confronted the painful reality that, while strategic environments can change quickly, military force structures cannot. At the beginning of the 1990s, in the immediate post-Cold War era, most of the foundations of Australian defence planning were assailed and eroded by the fierce winds of international political change.

Since the late 1990s, Australian strategic planners have been confronted by what former Defence Minister John Moore has described as a "sea of instability" stemming mainly from an unanticipated upsurge of insecurity in the Asia-Pacific. This "sea of instability" includes a fragile post-Suharto Indonesia, a mercenary outbreak in Papua New Guinea, the deployment of Australian forces to assist in the pacification of East Timor, and the "Africanisation" of local politics in South Pacific islands such as Bougainville, Fiji and the Solomons. To complicate matters further, in 2001 Australia inherited an added strategic burden arising from New Zealand's decision to abandon maintaining even a niche high-technology war fighting capability.

In addition to this growth in regional uncertainty, the demands of global technological modernisation and the impact of a long decline in Australian defence spending have presented Canberra with the complex task of crafting a new, more flexible and, above all, more multi-dimensional strategic policy. As a consequence, Australian defence planners have given considerable attention to the notion that there are practical benefits to be gained from acquiring selected information technologies arising out of the American-led Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). For many official Australian strategists, an unfolding RMA offers developments in information technology that may represent one of the most important means to redesign Australia's approach to defence planning in the twenty-first century. Critical issues of military capability, force structure organisation and joint doctrine are seen as having at least partial solutions in the realm of RMA research and development.

It is important from the outset to try to qualify what is implied by the use of the term RMA in this article. Taken literally, the term suggests a sudden, dramatic phenomenon when, in fact, the phrase more accurately describes a continuum of advances in the advent of information-age technologies and their potential impact on advanced armed forces. Stripped of its obscure jargon--which is reminiscent of the sixteenth-century Reformation theology debate over transubstantiation and consubstantiation--the RMA is about the consequences of accelerating the integration of computer-age technologies into weapons systems and military command and control networks. These technologies are of three general kinds: C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence and surveillance); long-range precision strike; and stealth or low-observable platforms.

Furthermore, like most previous military revolutions, the RMA is emblematic of strategic concerns in Western circles about the likely contours for the use of armed force in a new age. If Napoleonic warfare signified the coming of the age of revolutionary nationalism, if the rise of mechanised warfare is indelibly associated with the age of European fascism, and if the rise of nuclear deterrence theory is associated with the Cold War, then the RMA clearly reflects ideas about the shape of warfare--both present and future--in the new global information age.