A Paradigm Shift

The “paradigm shift” is as much a recurring slogan in strategic literature on RMA and Transformation as it is a way to overcome questions on the temporality of military revolutions, conjoncture versus longue duree. This chapter notes that this "paradigm shift" that covers different realities, and presents the risk of only developing the art of warfare under the influence of technologies, independently from strategic knowledge. In a more general way, the “paradigm shift” has an impact on the majority of scopes of the art of war, of international relations and of military sociology. The viewpoint developed by Braillard and Maspoli meets several authors who consider that RMA is a “new operational art”. As they note the weakness of the epistemological rooting of RMA, they also lead the way to a paradigmatic conceptualization of evolutions, on an operative and a tactic level.