Ashton B. Carter

“The history of warfare has always been a struggle between measures and countermeasures, and so it will be with asymmetric warfare. During the 1970s and 1980s, the U.S. offset strategy incorporated modern information technology in its weapons to offset the numerical superiority of the military forces of the Soviet Union. The strategy has come to be known as the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). After the effectiveness of the new RMA weapons was convincingly demonstrated in DESERT STORM, nations potentially hostile to the United States began to seek "offsets to the offset strategy," i.e., countermeasures to America's RMA weapons. Since they are not able to copy U.S. weapons (indeed, even our technically advanced allies have been slow to do so), they are led to the development of asymmetric warfare techniques. More specifically, they seek to develop RMA weapons; their objective is to give the United States pause before it uses its superiority in conventional weapons. The Department of Defense must, therefore, take steps to reduce the vulnerability of its RMA systems to these asymmetric measures.”
― Ashton Carter