The Whispering Prussian: Clausewitz and Modern Wars

Furthermore, since the 1990s technological armaments have surpassed nuclear warfare, and the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) has reached new heights. Aiming at achieving effectiveness, the RMA has deployed new innovations of information technology (IT) to serve military goals. The RMA has led to rapid and dramatic improvements in the American ways of war in the Gulf (1991), Kosovo (1999), Afghanistan (2001-present) and Iraq (2003-2011) (see O'Hanlon, 2020) ; yet without strategic implications (Gray, 2011).

Along with this, the rapid advancement in artificial intelligence that has invigorated companies such as Google and Amazon is poised to bring an unprecedented surge in military innovation, as a 2015-Harvard-Study has shown (Simonite, 2017).

Moreover, these aspects add to the complexity of world affairs, and accordingly to the warfare that has become characterized by chaos and non-linearity.

As strategists began to draw their analysis on chaos theory in the 1990s, the US Department of Defense coined a new term in which to discuss contemporary conflict: VUCA - standing for Volatile, Uncertain, Chaotic and Ambiguous (Gidley, 2017).