Gates Credits Russian Military Ideas - The Diigo Meta page

• 05 Nov 07
  

  TransTracker

  military_reform ncw transformation

  • Defense Secretary Robert Gates told students at an elite Russian military academy Saturday that much of the inspiration for the U.S. military's modernization in the 1980s came from Moscow.

  • He said the seeds of U.S. combat successes in the 1991 Gulf war were sown a decade earlier with an infusion of new ideas on using modern technologies to fundamentally change the nature of warfighting.

    "What is less well known _especially in America — is that much of the original thinking on these matters was done by the Soviet military as far back as the 1970s when officers wrote about what was then called a `military technical revolution,'" he said.

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  • • In his prepared remarks, Gates cited the Soviet military's work in the 1970s on how to use sensors, reconnaissance and command-and-control systems to gain a battlefield edge. In the next decade, he said, top Soviet generals envisioned a scenario in which conventional weapons could be as effective as nuclear weapons — "owing to the gains made in precision, information technology and communications."

      That became the standard for U.S. military innovation, which first bore fruit in the successful campaign to oust the Iraqi army from Kuwait after it invaded in August 1990 and triggered a U.S.-led invasion.

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