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Dima Adamsky, The Culture of Military Innovation: The Impact of Cultural Factors on the Revolution in Military Affairs in Russia, the US, and Israel. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010, 248 pp. $US 25.95 paper (978-0-8047- 6952-5), $US 65 hardcover (978-0-8047-6951-8).
Dima Adamsky's The Culture of Military Innovation is an account of how one intellectual paradigm, called the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), rose and fell in the militaries of the USSR, USA and Israel. Adamsky characterizes it as an empirical and theoretical contribution to the third, constructivist wave of strategic culture scholarship. This subdiscipline has made various attempts to identify culture, instead of rationality, as "the pivotal intervening variable" in military development. The study distinguishes itself within its subdiscipline for its excellent sources (archival material from all three countries and interviews in Israel), skillful argumentation, and very intelligent case selection.
Adamsky's cases connect logically and make for compelling reading. Theorists working in the USSR coined RMA to refer to a series of insights derived from analyzing new NATO (mainly American) threats. The Soviets realized that American long-range weapons and sensors seriously undermined conventional Soviet field placement. This prompted a wild futurology among a powerful cadre within the general staff. They thought they had discovered an entirely new force paradigm, the key principles of which were low density, high velocity troop deployment and an absolute need to maintain technological parity or advantage.
Happily for the Soviets, the Americans were slow to catch on. They had developed the technology in order to strike deep into the Soviet rear echelons, but did not perceive other uses for it until they translated the Soviets' professional journals in the late 1980s. Not until Desert Storm (1990-1) did they implement their version of RMA. Its perceived success in that conflict initiated Donald Rumsfeld's controversial "Transformation,"...