stages of a major revolution than is generally assumed. It is
understandable that despite major strategic reassessments, current
doctrine is still highly influenced by Cold War tactics and strategy
and perhaps by the iron grip of the history of conflict since the
early 19th century.

Since Napoleon, the conduct of war between major states has been
largely dominated by combining industrial might with vast amounts of
manpower over time and space. The United States advanced Napoleon's
use of industry and mass armies in the Civil War and our planning up
to the Cold War tended to follow this same pattern. World War II, of
course, exemplified the triumph of this industrial, mobilization, and
massive use of force approach.

In the evolution of U.S. military theory, it can be argued that this
model combining massive industrial might and manpower finally ended in
1989. Although, by then, technological advances to conventional
military capabilities seemed to be approaching the destructive power,
or more precisely, the system lethality of nuclear weapons. In other
words, modern non-nuclear precision weapons perhaps could produce
effects against enemy targets roughly comparable to the military
lethality of theater-level nuclear weapons. If this condition proves
true, could this new lethality fundamentally change the construct for
designing American doctrine and strategy? This question is at the
heart of the "precision and battlefield awareness" school of decisive
force thinking that believes that this fundamental change is in place.

Since the end of the Cold War and, with it, the end of the need to
prepare our forces to fight a more or less equally powerful adversary,
the United States military has conducted two post-Cold War crises