Why don't technology revolutions happen? Ask the interbellum British Army
From October 2025
Why don’t technological revolutions happen? Do resources matter as much as culture. Interesting article on “Revolutions in Military Affairs that Did Not Occur : A Framework for Analysis” by Ofir Friedman in “Comparative Strategy.”
- A Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) requires changes as the technological, organizational and doctrinal level. Sometimes when we talk about GenAI, I worry that we index too much on the technological and organizational levels — and forget to talk about the doctrinal level, which describes how you put technology to use
- An RMA is smaller than a Military Revolution (MR). An RMA is mostly military in nature, while a MR shapes (and is shaped by) the broader society. A MR may involved a sequence of RMAs. Armored warfare is an RMA and a part of a much longer lasting MR of industrial warefare the extended from the US Civil War and had profound social impacts (expansion of suffrage, transition from regional to national identities, accelerated adoption of mass production, pulling of more women into the paid workforce).
- By these lights GenAI is an “RMA” that sits inside a broader MR of digitization or computerization. This would contradict Jeffrey Ding’s distinction between a third Industrial Revolution in the 1990s-2000s and a fourth Industrial Revolution starting today. You would also observe that the digital MR both was spurred by cultural changes (increased cultural dynamism in the US, increased immigration) and has created (and will create) profound social changes.
- Fridman points out the British invented the tank and British theorists helped conceptualize armored warfare — but the British army fumbled this lead and paid the price in 1940s. He argues that cultural conservativism in the British officer corps bears only part of the blame. The British state, he argues, starved the army in the 1930s, making modernization impossible. We read about the massive sums tech companies are spending on AI data centers — are enterprises spending enough on AI-enabled technologies and applications? Or are they starving their future?