Description
The Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) brought forward a focus on how information technologies would change the shape of war through networks, meshes and instant decision-making. While contemporary Western martial thought has moved on from the RMA as unachievable technologically, too expensive, and fundamentally Clausewitzian problematic, Western militaries remain committed to expediency as they did prior to the RMA. This notion of expediency through understanding time as segmented and processing faster per segment is a characteristic of the modern system of battle. However, much of the application of time oriented frameworks from the OODA loop to chaos theory have arisen in air doctrine and moved into maritime and then army doctrine. This paper takes a theoretical look at the way in which time has been understood in relation to the transformation of martial doctrine and seeks to understand how it interacts with the characteristics of land warfare as a unique form of martial behaviour.
