Since the 1991 Persian Gulf War, precision strike weapons systems have become ever more central to the American way of war.
Starting in the 1970s, the possibility of integrating precision-guided munitions (PGMs) and wide-area sensors with command-and-control networks was the seminal idea behind Soviet and American forecasts that precision strike would eventually change war’s future conduct as much as Blitzkrieg, strategic bombing, and carrier aviation had changed World War II’s conduct. In the early 1990s, when Andrew Marshall’s Office of Net Assessment (ONA) precipitated the American debate over this emerging revolution in military affairs (RMA), many observers presumed that precision strike would proliferate rapidly. After all, international relations theory has long argued that competition between nations creates “a powerful incentive for states to emulate the military practices of the more successful states.”
In this vein, Marshall’s speculation in 1993 was that long-range precision strike might become “the dominant operational approach.” Much of the RMA analysis and wargaming during this period presumed that future conflicts involving advanced militaries would be dominated by long-distance duels between opposing reconnaissance-strike complexes (or RUKs from the Russian разведывательно-yдарные комплексы).
This is not what has happened.