The liberal world order, a euphemism for American global hegemony, is
crumbling at an accelerating pace. While its collapse is tangible, the
outcome of such a collapse remains a matter of speculation and public
debate. The US is desperately seeking to preserve the status quo, which
rests primarily upon recognition of its military supremacy.
For millennia, warfare has been a driving force behind changes in the
geopolitical status of power configurations (whether of peoples, states
or empires), and it remains so, today. Accordingly, short of actual
warfare, the assessment (modeling) of relative military power plays an
inordinate role in the determination of national status.
Models of emerging changes in military capability range from relatively
simple to extremely complex ones. Viewing the evolution of the current
system of international relations outside the framework of actual,
rather than propaganda-driven, military capabilities is not only
useless, it is dangerous since states' mistaken assessment of their own
and other states' military power can lead to misadventures and
catastrophic mistakes.
The United States' efforts to preserve not just its dominance but the
perception of its dominance are bound to fail for many important
reasons, none more important than what is often misidentified in past
American military-theoretical hypotheses about the future of warfare,
known generically as the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). This book
explains why those hypotheses are failing and will continue to fail, and
addresses the real RMA.
In the end, technological development in weaponry as a response to
tactical, operational and strategic requirements defines not only a
nation's geopolitical status but determines the global order.
Assessments of military capacity, if reality-based, serve as good
predictors of the level of volatility in international relations and the
level of violence globally.
This book gives an insight into the evolution of weapons and the way
they influenced international relations in the 20th and 21st centuries.
It also defines Revolution in Military Affairs as manifested via policy,
politics, and technology. It reviews some models which are useful in
assessing the current geopolitical situation. This book also tries to
give a forecast of the future development of warfare and the ways in
which it is going to change the whole system of international relations,
hopefully towards a new geopolitical equilibrium.
