This article provides an alternative view for examining Revolutions in Military Affairs (RMAs), perceiving them both as sociopolitical institutions and as war-fighting models. The weaknesses in the ways in which the RMA theory has been approached are analyzed, resulting in the formation of three different, but parallel, paradigms of the RMA phenomenon (the Social Wave, the Radical Transformation, and the Continuity and Evolution). Two historical case studies, the Napoleonic RMA and the First World War RMA, are used in order to draw out the lessons learned regarding past revolutions and to examine the validity of the paradigms.