Ours is an age in which any untoward development becomes a crisis, the slightest departure from the ordinary is immediately tagged as historic, and the mere glimmer of novelty is heralded as revolutionary. Such semantic extravagance is not especially conducive to clear thinking about the real moral and ethical issues posed by change.

By common consent, we live in an era of rapid and momentous change in military affairs. Awareness of this phenomenon fairly burst upon the public consciousness during the Persian Gulf War. It manifested itself above all in the dazzling "systems" that figured
prominently--or at least appeared to figure prominently--in securing victory over Iraq: stealth aircraft, antiballistic missiles, an array
of "smart" munitions, and above all an integrated architecture of command and control. Embodied in hardware such as surveillance
satellites, the Global Positioning System, JSTARS and AWACS aircraft, and Aegis warships, American superiority in C4I2--the product of a concerted effort to tap the military potential of microelectronic information management--provided the key that not only exposed the vulnerabilities of Saddam Hussein's old-style arsenal but rendered it all but irrelevant.

To many observers, these technologies suggested that the United States had achieved a level of military superiority without precedent in modern history. To others, Desert Storm itself was less a demonstration of capabilities fully developed than a trial run that hinted tantalizingly at what was still to come. Extrapolating from the experience of the Persian Gulf, analysts identified four major
capabilities that comprise this remarkable advance in military prowess, none of them altogether in hand, but each within reach for a
wealthy and technologically advanced nation such as the United States. Those capabilities are:

* near perfect, real time intelligence available to commanders at all levels--"a transparent battlefield";

* extremely accurate means of target acquisition, independent of range and immune to countermeasures;

* technologically enhanced methods of command enabling U.S. forces to operate "inside the decision cycle" of their opponent, reacting more quickly than the enemy and rendering his actions meaningless--"information dominance";

* highly lethal munitions capable of hitting targets over extended distances in any conditions while producing minimal collateral damage--"long-range precision strike."

As interpreted by a cadre of imaginative defense experts in the United States and elsewhere, these capabilities suggest the dawn of a
radically different era in military history. Hardly had the Gulf War ended than these experts began competing with one another to identify that conflict's most salient "lessons." More vigorously still, they have labored to fit those lessons into a theoretical framework, one worthy of the larger phenomenon it presumes to describe. That these efforts have yet to yield a consensus is suggested by the variety of labels presently in use to describe that phenomenon, among them the Military-Technical Revolution, the Revolution in Military Affairs, and the Revolution in Security Affairs.

Whatever the label, non-expert opinion in the United States has been virtually unanimous in endorsing this "revolution" as a welcome
development. Whether viewed as a rightful dividend for the national treasure invested throughout the Cold War, attributed to innate
American ingenuity, or interpreted as one more affirmation of divine favor, the spectacular new military dominance enjoyed by the United States has been applauded across the domestic political spectrum and endorsed by confirmed doves no less than by enthusiastic hawks.

A Moral Subtext

Why the universally positive response? There are at least three related reasons.

First, we own the patent to this revolution and there is no one to gainsay our claim. With the Soviet Union now reduced to a bad memory, the United States is without rivals capable in the near term of challenging its monopoly in this new way of war. Seldom doubting our own benevolence, we find it easy to conclude that American possession of that monopoly serves the interests of the world at large.

Second, we have persuaded ourselves that the high-tech combat displayed in the Persian Gulf has restored to force the political utility that it lost in the aftermath of Hiroshima. When it comes to policing the world--restoring order, stemming catastrophe,
disciplining rogues and evildoers, rescuing the victims of oppression--the Left no less than the Right now considers the possession of military superiority to be eminently useful.

Third--and least noted though arguably the most significant reason--we see in the military revolution heralded by Desert Storm a
means to escape from a moral quandary that has dogged the nation since the onset of the Cold War. Aspiring to be both global hegemon and righteous democracy, the United States has struggled with the dilemma of using the vast power at its disposal while still
satisfying self-imposed requirements that it act in a morally defensible manner. In the Persian Gulf, Americans seemed to glimpse a solution to this conundrum.

In other words, underlying America's delight with the outcome of the Gulf War, and punctuating the widespread certainty that the war
marked a decisive turning point in history, was a moral subtext. Desert Storm was satisfying not only because it was a decisive victory won at surprisingly low cost, but also because the enterprise was unbesmirched by ethical ambiguity. "We went halfway around the world", President George Bush assured a joint session of Congress on March 6, 1991, "to do what is moral, just, and right." That assurance was precisely what Americans longed to hear.

In the terms of the just-war tradition that enjoyed a revival in the debates preceding the actual liberation of Kuwait--and despite the
contrary predictions of various ethicists and moral theologians--Desert Storm neatly fulfilled the criteria of jus ad
bellum and of jus in bello. That is, in the common sense judgment of most Americans, the decision to use force against Iraq was morally justified and the manner in which American forces fought was morally appropriate.

This latter point is especially important. With military briefers and television analysts celebrating the surgical accuracy and carefully
calibrated effects of American weapons, U.S. operations in the Persian Gulf seemed to exceed all previous standards in adhering to
the requirements of proportionality and discrimination, the classic jus in bello criteria. As a result, Desert Storm proceeded to its
happy conclusion with few of the moral controversies that had marred virtually every other large scale use of American force since 1945: collateral damage was kept to a minimum; civilian casualties were few; operations were promptly terminated as soon as military objectives appeared to be within reach.

Thus, besides demonstrating a stunning capacity to project power, the revolutionary new style of warfare heralded by Desert Storm also suggested that the United States had discovered a military-technical solution to the dichotomy implicit in its identity as democratic
superpower. This new military revolution--one might call this sanitary war--would enable Americans henceforth to satisfy their yearning to believe themselves virtuous even as they exercised commanding influence across the globe.

Yet this is a dual illusion. Events since the Gulf War have already outlined the limits of U.S. military superiority as an instrument of
policy: The promised new world order will come only at enormous cost, if at all. At the moment, the American people show little sustained willingness to pay that cost.

In the moral realm, too, the legacy of the military revolution is problematic. The expectation that Desert Storm has endowed the United States with the capacity to dominate world events without soiling itself in the process only sets Americans up for bewildering and painful disappointments. Given the extent to which policy in a post-Cold War world will be beholden to public opinion, those
disappointments will haveimportant political ramifications. For in truth, even a high-tech military offers no easy escape from the moral
ambiguities that remain the lot of an imperial democracy.

Sea Changes

As the lack of consensus regarding a preferred label suggests, little agreement exists on how revolutionary the military revolution of our day really is. Despite all the expert commentary, it remains ill-defined. How deep does change reach? How far does it extend? Has Desert Storm established the paradigm to which warfare in the twenty-first century will adhere? Or was that brief, visually gaudy conflict simply the final triumphant turn of a superannuated mode of warfare that is giving way to something radically different, the
precursor of a future not yet fully perceived? In other words, do the wondrous technologies displayed in the Gulf War signify a change in the tools of war--a change of means, but not of essence--or, as some contend, are they transforming the very nature of human conflict? Or, a third possibility, is change in the realm of military affairs proceeding as a subset of broader and ultimately more decisive social, political, and scientific developments?

These are preliminary questions that must be considered before drawing any conclusions about the moral implications of the latest
advances in military technologies. A brief discussion of what happened in the realm of sea power in the twentieth century--a story
of multiple, interrelated revolutions--may help to make the point.

The first of this century's upheavals in naval affairs occurred in 1906. In that year, Great Britain launched the first in a new class
of very fast, heavily armored, all big-gun battleships. In the eyes of naval experts then and since, the Dreadnought transformed naval
warfare. In a single stroke, every other capital ship afloat--including every other battleship in the Royal Navy--was rendered obsolete, consigned to the lowly status of "pre-dreadnought."

Historians routinely cite Dreadnought as a prime example of military revolution. But what did this revolution accomplish? Britain's
technological innovation added fuel to an existing arms race, with each of the industrialized powers--the United States not least among them--hurrying to acquire dreadnought-type warships for its own navy. Yet Dreadnought's impact on reigning concepts of sea power was negligible. If anything, the powerful new class of warship reinforced the naval orthodoxy of the day: Dreadnought seemed the ideal instrument for applying the precepts of sea power developed by the influential American naval officer and publicist Alfred Thayer Mahan, precepts derived from Mahan's study of naval history in the days of sail. In that sense, and although marking an impressive advance in naval technology, Dreadnought served primarily to affirm rather than to subvert the accepted rules of the game. Since it posed no threat to the recognized conventions of naval warfare, the revolution inspired by Dreadnought also had little impact on the definition of what constituted moral or immoral conduct when fighting at sea. From a moral perspective, it was immaterial.

In fact, however, certain of the assumptions underlying those conventions--specifically the Mahanian notion that a dominant battle
line of heavily armed surface ships offered the key to both command of the sea and world power--were shaky at best. This became apparent in 1914 when a war of epic proportions engulfed Europe.

In determining that war's outcome, the squadrons of massive dreadnoughts, built at such enormous expense, figured only marginally. In a brutal conflict that lasted over four years, the main British and German fleets met only once in battle, the inconclusive action off Jutland in 1916. For the most part, they sat out the war, warily eyeing each other from anchorages on opposite sides of the North Sea. According to Winston Churchill, the admiral commanding Britain's Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow "was the only man on
either side who could lose the war in an afternoon." Yet such a back-handed testimonial amounted to tacit acknowledgment of an
embarrassing fact that Churchill was loath to admit outright: In the vast and desperate struggle of the First World War, the military
instrument into which Britain had poured such treasure, and that epitomized the power of the Empire, remained for all practical
purposes on the sidelines. Perhaps through recklessness or miscalculation the commander of the Grand Fleet could lose the war,
but all of his mighty dreadnoughts made precious little contribution to winning it.

Having said that, to conclude from the relative inactivity of the main British and German battle fleets that maritime matters as such
were unimportant to the conduct of the war would be a great error. On the contrary, both sides understood that the ability of the Allies to sustain their armies in France hinged on the Royal Navy's control of the world's sea lanes. As has so often been the case in the history of warfare, comparative disadvantage served as spur to innovation. Overmatched in the race to build battleships, Germany was compelled to explore unorthodox ways of turning the Allies' maritime flank. This imperative gave birth to a second revolution in naval affairs: undersea warfare.

With the aim of severing the enemy's strategic lines of communications--especially Allied trade with the Americas--Germany revived and radically transformed the tradition of commerce raiding. Both Allies and neutrals such as the United States denounced the
U-boat campaign as barbaric. Certainly, in its "unrestricted" form it was ruthless. It was also highly effective--until the Royal Navy
(supported from early 1917 onward by the Americans) suspended the further construction of battlewagons and poured resources into the fledgling science of anti-submarine warfare (ASW).

Although undertaken reluctantly by the naval establishments involved, this shift in emphasis signified a transformation of naval warfare
that cut far deeper than the revolution wrought by Dreadnought. Operationally, the U-boat redefined the concept of "battle" at sea.
Strategically, it suggested ways of bringing sea power to bear more decisively than through the classic fleet actions envisioned by the
disciples of Mahan. Both of these developments also had profound moral implications. In the context of the just-war tradition,
submarine warfare posed a particular challenge to the principle of discrimination, in the narrow sense of declaring merchant ships
(often carrying non-combatants) to be fair game for unwarned attack, and in the broader sense of enticing military planners to consider the feasibility of campaigns designed to bring the enemy civilian populace slowly "to its knees."

Yet even if farther reaching than Dreadnought, the U-boat revolution was itself transitional, superseded in short order by a third even more fundamental transformation in naval affairs. This was the revolution in naval air power.

No sooner had the First World War ended than the Mahanians attempted to put the undersea genie back in the bottle. The Allies stripped the German navy of its U-boats and by treaty prohibited Germany from acquiring new ones. Old-line officers in the victorious navies scrapped their ASW fleets and directed their energies once again to perfecting the dreadnought, designing a new generation with even larger caliber guns and heavier armor. But most of this was retrograde nonsense, naval nostalgia swathed in armor plate, teak, and gunpowder.

Within the navies of the advanced nations--but especially in the navies of the United States and Imperial Japan--reform-minded officers pursued a new vision that would shatter that nostalgia, ending once and for all the battleship's reign as the standard for
measuring maritime power. Their goal was as bold as it was straightforward: to harness air power to naval power in ways that would create a sea-based weapon of unprecedented flexibility and effectiveness.

The immediate product of this vision was the aircraft carrier, wielded with spectacular success by the United States Navy in the next world war. Yet to conceive of this revolution as simply one of developing the techniques of carrier aviation is to understate its true significance. Not content with the Mahanian goal of securing "command of the sea", the architects of this revolution sought to
project naval power well beyond the confines of the sea itself. Naval air pioneers aimed to eradicate the boundary between war on land and war at sea, between the traditional role of armies on the one hand and of navies on the other. Thus, for example, having broken the back of the Imperial Navy, American naval officers at the end of the Second World War were quick to claim a share in the climactic air campaigns that pummeled the Japanese home islands and the Japanese government into submission--a mission to which U.S. Navy carrier task forces would return in subsequent conflicts in Korea and Vietnam.

Yet technological opportunity alone does not suffice to explain the resourcefulness that the United States demonstrated in seizing upon
the potential of naval air power. This was a military revolution that had economic, cultural, intellectual, and even psychological roots.
In the decades leading up to the Second World War, American society as a whole had evolved a deep-seated predisposition favoring the reliance upon air power. Moreover, the remarkable American capacity for large-scale research and production, for the diffusion of technology on a grand scale, and for what would later be called systems integration all made the United States ideally suited to
transform the airplane from newfangled contraption to pre-eminent instrument for waging war.

The moral implications of this expanded application of naval power were large. Even if not explicitly intended to terrorize civilians,
carrier-based attacks against the enemy's "vital centers" inflicted some--at times extensive--injury to civilians and damage to
non-military facilities. Whatever the intentions of planners or air crews, such collateral damage was an all but inevitable byproduct of
the large-scale use of air power from the 1940s through the 1960s. Perhaps the efforts to exploit the potential of carrier aviation to
the fullest did not foster a deliberate disregard for the claims of jus in bello. At a minimum, however, they encouraged an insensitivity
or indifference to the moral issues implicit in the freewheeling use of the air weapon. One result was the mutilation of the principle of
non-combatant immunity to the point that it became nearly unrecognizable.

Yet for all the glamor of carrier operations, the ultimate expression of the naval air revolution--and the initiative posing the largest
challenge to the just-war tradition--lay not in manned aircraft but in nuclear-tipped guided missiles. By the late 1950s, U.S.
development of the submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) carried the revolution in naval air to its Cold War-driven
conclusion: holding Russian cities hostage to guarantee that the United States retained a retaliatory capability that the Soviet Union
was powerless to disarm. Beginning with Polaris--and followed later by Poseidon and Trident--the SLBM transformed the meaning of capital ship. The Polaris submarine was the first major naval combatant whose weapons were designed exclusively to attack land targets rather than ships. More importantly, it was an instrument of war explicitly intended to obliterate non-combatants on a massive scale--to go the U-boat one better and bring a nation to its knees virtually in an instant. In the logic of deterrence, the SLBM's indiscriminate destructive power was its primary military virtue. In the context of the just-war tradition, that virtue was a moral nightmare.

Caveat Raptor

Considered in retrospect, what do these three interlocking naval revolutions suggest concerning the ethical implications of today's
ongoing transformation in military affairs? Above all, the naval experience of the century now drawing to a close alerts us to the
prospect that the century to come will experience not one military revolution but several. Just as with naval warfare in this century,
the product of multiple revolutions will not be moral clarity. It will be deepening moral complexity.

Like Great Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, the United States at the end of the twentieth is a dominant rule-setting world
power with a strong interest in perpetuating that dominance. The existing order--the distribution of wealth and influence, the basic
norms governing the conduct of world politics--suits us well and we are committed to its preservation. Like the British a century ago, as an integral part of our strategy to maintain that order, we have invested heavily to create a defense establishment that assures our
success in a certain kind of war. Indeed, in our efforts to acquire a decisive military edge, we have spared virtually no expense. Having done so, many Americans--including most serving officers--are loath to entertain any suggestion that the model of warfare forming the conceptual basis of those investments might be of limited utility.

Like Great Britain in 1906, eager to define the naval revolution as beginning and ending with Dreadnought, the United States today is
thus highly susceptible to self-deception. With a compelling interest in suppressing developments that might undermine the global status
quo, Americans are predisposed to define military revolution in terms best suited to sustaining the paradigm of warfare with which we are most comfortable and within which the American lead appears to be least assailable. Indeed, as was the case with Dreadnought, the very purpose of a Military Technical Revolution is to fend off more radical change likely to subvert the existing order. The Royal Navy conceived of Dreadnought with an eye toward ensuring that Britain's next naval war would be fought like Trafalgar--and with an identical outcome. Similarly, for many Americans today, the allure of a military revolution is that it will guarantee that future conflicts
are fought like Desert Storm: brief, decisive, successful, and, in terms of American lives lost, relatively cheap.

To be sure, such a narrowly conceived revolution is especially conducive to the application of traditional just-war criteria. Indeed, if the transformation presently underway is merely technical--a change in the means of waging war but not of war's nature--then it may revitalize conventions that have provided the traditional basis for regulating conflict: that wars are properly fought between opposing armies rather than by insurgents, irregulars, or terrorists; that the nation-state retains a monopoly over the means of violence and that the use of force remains illegitimate except when directed by responsible political authority; and that the principle of non-combatant immunity is sacrosanct rather than being waiverable at the convenience of belligerents. Surely, a defense establishment that has mastered the capabilities to which the American military presently aspires--the ability to "see" everything throughout the battlefield, to target with precision, to strike with unprecedented accuracy, great lethality, and minimal collateral damage--is especially well-positioned to adhere to just-war principles such as proportionality and discrimination.

Thus, bringing to maturity the style of warfare presaged by Desert Storm holds the promise of permitting the United States both to
sustain its status as reigning superpower and to congratulate itself on wielding its power in a manner consistent with traditional moral
teachings. Yet enhanced technological capability may well generate its own headaches. As precision increases, so do expectations,
constantly "raising the bar" of acceptable performance. As a result, tolerance for inaccuracy or even human error diminishes. Soldiers in the field may find themselves hard-pressed to satisfy demands for virtually no-fault performance--especially in a media-saturated
theater of operations. In such circumstances, the act that in former days was dismissed as "fortunes of war" becomes "immoral." Consider, for example, the brouhaha following the U.S. destruction of the al-Firdos bunker in Baghdad during the Gulf War. Considerin particular the sensitivity of the U.S. military to the criticism it received as a result of the incident: Embarrassed by this ugly
exception to what they had portrayed as a virtuoso performance, U.S. commanders of their own volition restricted further attacks on downtown Baghdad.

Yet however much the United States might seek to define the military revolution in terms to suit itself, future adversaries are unlikely
to cooperate. Like the German navy of the First World War--stymied by British superiority in dreadnoughts--those disadvantaged by the existing rules will devise new rules more amenable to their interests. Thus, while Americans dazzle themselves with the latest
military application of advanced technologies, America's challengers will seek ways of rendering that technology superfluous. Toward that end, they will have a powerful incentive to undertake a genuine Revolution in Military Affairs, recasting the terms of conflict in
ways that play to their strengths and exploit our vulnerabilities. Alas, as the Vietnam War would suggest, those vulnerabilities are all too apparent.

This prospect of a true Revolution in Military Affairs, driven by those who would challenge U.S. primacy, is not without its moral complications. By jettisoning the established conventions governing armed conflict, such a revolution is likely to move into murky
terrain: people's war, subversion, terror, and banditry. In truth, the past is rich with examples that testify to the efficacy of such
methods. The brief military history of the post-Cold War era, featuring the likes of General Mohammed Farah Aidid, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the masked commandantes of Chiapas, and the suicide bombers of Hamas and the Irish Republican Army, suggests that the continuing relevance of those examples has not been lost on those who reject America's view of how the world should work. Unhampered by the squeamishness or scruples of our own post-Clausewitzian elites, these neo-Clausewitzians are eager to revive old ways of employing force to subvert the status quo, adopting selected new technologies that make it possible for ever smaller groups of perpetrators to inflict ever more mayhem. In the future, such unconventional methods could become more effective still if combined with means drawn from the opposite end of the "spectrum" of warfare: weapons of mass destruction such as portable nuclear devices or highly virulent bacterial agents.

For those who would adhere to the justwar tradition, unconventional warfare--and the countermeasures it invites--has always posed
enormous difficulties. Inevitably in such conflicts the distinction between combatants and noncombatants becomes blurred. Force is
employed not to achieve standard military objectives such as the destruction of the enemy's army or the capture of key terrain but to
intimidate political authorities, capture media attention, or foster an environment of insecurity. As a result, considerations such as discrimination and proportionality quickly go by the board. Often, this is the case not only with those who instigate war using unconventional methods but among the forces defending against such methods.

Unfortunately, when Americans employ the language of morality to disparage unconventional war, their critique does not come across as entirely disinterested. Indeed, it can readily be perceived as self-serving--much as did British criticism of the U-boat campaign
while Britain was engaged in a more traditional (and therefore permissible) blockade of German ports. To the world beyond our
borders, it may appear that Americans are asserting a double standard, denouncing as reprehensible the bomb placed in a parking
garage (to which the United States may be particularly vulnerable), while deeming the disabling of an urban electrical grid by remote
missile attack (which the United States is uniquely equipped to launch) to be altogether acceptable. In an era of great upheaval in
military affairs, U.S. efforts to assert such moral distinctions are unlikely to be persuasive. Indeed, nothing is more likely todiscredit
just-war teachings in the eyes of others than the perception that its principles are being employed not to ameliorate the effects of war
itself, but as a prop for American hegemony and a salve for the American conscience.

The Fundamental Transformation

Of course, all of this presumes that the military revolution can be "captured", that either the United States or some other state or
group of states can determine its shape or direction. It also implicitly assumes that the overall political and social context in which conflict occurs will remain static.

Such assumptions are probably mistaken. To postulate that the military revolution will manifest itself either in terms of the Desert Storm paradigm or as "dirty wars" that arise in reaction to U.S. superiority in high-tech conventional warfare is to disregard
evidence of an even more fundamental transformation afoot--much as the attention claimed first by Dreadnought and then by the U-boat impeded recognition of the air revolution that would subsume them both. That more fundamental transformation--an incipient Revolution in Security Affairs--could well emerge as a result of developments in several quarters: political, economic, and social. Although not strictly military in its origins or content, it would impinge broadly on the conduct of national security affairs.

To hazard a description of this broad-based Revolution in Security Affairs is inevitably to engage in considerable speculation. There are no "cases" to use for illustrative purposes. Nonetheless, certain political, economic, and social trends already in evidence suggest a rough outline.

Political developments pointing toward radical change in security affairs include the following:

* increasing constraints on sovereignty and on the freedom of action enjoyed by the individual nation-state;

* the eclipse of nationalism (crucial as the basis for rallying popular support for war in modern societies) by ethnic, religious, or regional loyalties; among intellectuals, a growing penchant