given its historical underpinnings, we should not be surprised that the revolution in warfare that has been brought about both by the confluence of the aerospace and the electronic revolutions, and by the offshoot of both—the precision guided munition—is one that has been a long time coming, back to the second world war, back, even, to the experimenters of the first world war who attempted, however crudely, to develop "smart" weapons to launch from airships and other craft. used almost experimentally until the latter stages of the vietnam war, the precision weapon since that time has increasingly come to first influence, then dominate, and now perhaps to render superfluous, the traditional notion of a linear battlefield.