The Revolution in Military Affairs, Transformation and the Defence Industry

Revolutions in Military Affairs (RMA) and transformations are uncommon phenomena. They entail fundamental and disruptive discontinuities. To date, the US transformation enterprise has fallen short of the RMA hype. It entails incremental advances with little evidence of generation-skipping technologies and has so far had only modest impact on US procurement programs. Hence US military transformation is unlikely to pose insurmountable challenges for the US defence industrial sector. In particular, the systems integration innovation required to realise network centric warfare is primarily sustaining rather than disruptive, requiring suppliers to build on existing, not develop new, capabilities. Close supplier-customer relationships in this sector, the emphasis on sustaining innovation, and the scale of the systems integration work required constitute formidable barriers to entry for new systems integrators, including commercial information technology (IT) firms. These barriers are being reinforced as Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon invest heavily in organic IT capabilities.