SOURCE: Arquilla, John, and David Ronfeldt. Review of War and Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century, by Alvin and Heidi Toffler. Comparative Strategy 14, no. 3 (July-September 1995): 331-41.

[In the following review, Arquilla and Ronfeldt compare War and Anti-War with two other books on the future of the American military—America's Military Revolution by William E. Odom and The Military Revolution by Geoffrey Parker.]

In national security policy circles and increasingly in academia, the notion of a revolution in military affairs (RMA) has caught on dramatically. Even the public has grown aware that a quantum shift is under way, given its repeated viewings of “smart weapons” performance during the Persian Gulf War and the startlingly low allied casualties in that conflict. A host of articles, monographs, military doctrinal publications, and books has emerged over the past few years, all of which tend to concur that “revolutionary change” is taking place, centered principally though not exclusively around the idea of the overarching importance of information across the spectrum of conflict. Continuing assessment of the state of knowledge in this area, of which we hope this essay provides a useful example, helps to guide the next steps for both purely theoretical and more policy relevant research.

With this in mind, we focus in this essay on three major points. First is the definition of the RMA, a task for which Geoffrey Parker's magisterial historical study [The Military Revolution] proves ideally suited, though Alvin and Heidi Toffler have interesting insights of their own to add in [War and Anti-War]. Next, an effort must be made to elucidate a general theory of the origins and development of the current RMA. In this regard the Tofflers come to the fore, advancing the simple theory that a society's style of war making mirrors the manner in which it makes its wealth. Finally, in terms of providing guidance for perplexed policymakers, William Odom delineates his blueprint for dealing with national security concerns in an era of great flux [in America's Military Revolution]. While Parker's work has less policy relevance, the Tofflers devote a fair amount of their energies to drawing out the practical implications of their insights.

The three books that provide the “lenses” through which we view these issues are written by a historian [Parker], two leading futurists [Alvin and Heidi Toffler], and a retired army general [Odom]—works quite different in many ways from what is ordinarily included in a traditional academic literature review. We hope that focusing on their unique approaches will prove both interesting and analytically beneficial. Finally, we note in a concluding section the broad areas of agreement emerging in a number of other insightful additions to the current literature, of which there are many, most often also coming from outside the mainstream academic sources. In particular it is interesting to note just how substantial, in both quantity and quality, are the contributions coming from within the government and the military. Surely these studies provide prima facie evidence for the case that many institutions, far from fostering staid approaches, have an enduring commitment to introspection, self-criticism, and innovation.

DEFINING A MILITARY REVOLUTION

Parker, whose book is dedicated to his fellow historian Michael Roberts, acknowledges the latter as the modern founder of the notion of the RMA. He employs Roberts's definition, which was first advanced in 1955 in his discussion of conflict in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and is composed of four major parts. First, an RMA entails a profound shift in battle tactics. Second, it will have an effect, up or down, on the size of armed forces. These first two changes will then lead to the third and fourth aspects of Roberts's definition, which key respectively on the development of sophisticated new strategies and changes in the impact of warfare on society. For Roberts these aspects of the RMA were reflected in the growth of massed fire volley tactics, a 1,000٪ increase in the size of armies during the period examined, complex large-scale operations, and shattering effects on societies at war¹.

Parker adopts Roberts's definition, but also expands the legitimate scope of enquiry. Thus where Roberts was principally fascinated with infantry tactics, particularly those of the Swedes who fielded the best infantry in Europe through the end of the Thirty Years' War, Parker considers a wide range of factors affecting war fighting on land and sea. He notes, for example, the enduring competition between offensive artillery and defensive fortifications, a primarily technological rivalry, though one enlivened by new strategic and organizational insights. In naval warfare, however, Parker acknowledges, with the shift from melee to line-ahead tactics, the crucial importance and often the primacy of doctrinal innovation to any RMA.

In his energetic pursuit of the antecedents of quantum shifts in military affairs, Parker usefully points out that, depending on the context, revolutionary change may flow from organization, technology, or doctrine².

Parker's broadened approach allows him to introduce two other key themes that should help to inform current efforts to understand the RMA. First, he observes that revolutions play out over significant periods of time, generating myriad evolutionary effects as well. Second, he places analysis of an RMA in the context of global politics, examining in his work the manner in which the Western Europeans parlayed their advances to a position of dominance over the international system. Those who think about the current RMA would do well to consider the disparate strands of strategy, doctrine, and organization likely to evolve in the “information age,” and to analyze the system-wide effects of change. For the era that concerns Parker (1500-1800), this meant the triumph of “the West over the Rest.” Despite the widespread acknowledgment of U.S. primacy in the wake of the Persian Gulf War, it is not clear in theory that an RMA driven primarily by the advancement and diffusion of information will foster the same sort of incomparable advantages enjoyed by the great maritime states of 500 years ago.

In this regard, both the Tofflers and Odom sound cautionary notes. Indeed the former should be viewed as articulating profound skepticism regarding the prospects for enduring primacy, largely due to the rise of external constraints. Odom on the other hand, though less dark in his assessment of U.S. prospects, suggests that a set of internal constraints, not least the “feudal” structure of the Department of Defense, could vitiate U.S. power. Both serve the useful function of pointing out that the RMA will soon be seized upon by “the rest” and that this information-driven revolution may prove particularly easy to export to others. If they are correct, then the current RMA may do more to diffuse power than to concentrate it in a few hands.

One benefit of incorporating Parker's nuanced definition and analytic framework is that it gives greater clarity to the effort to understand the RMA and its effects. For example, as two keen observers of military affairs have noted, “[t]he Gulf War was widely seen as a foretaste of RMA warfare, offering quick victory with low casualties”³. How does this widespread belief hold up to scrutiny using the Parker framework? Not well. First, there is little evidence of radical tactical change, because the campaign was carried out in close accordance with the guidelines set down by the AirLand Battle Doctrine developed in the 1970s and 1980s. On the ground a textbook blitzkrieg campaign unfolded, aided by an aerial bombing plan that, “smart missiles” notwithstanding⁴, bore striking resemblance to the World War II air attacks designed to “write down” and isolate the German Seventh Army in and around Normandy in spring 1944.

As to other aspects of the Parker definition, the results of analysis are equally negative. With regard to the size of the forces employed, one sees a very standard sort of field army sent to the Persian Gulf, suggesting that at least in this respect the RMA implied no cause for change in size. As to the complexity of the strategy employed (the now famous “left hook” around the immobilized Iraqi forces), though masterful, is highly derivative of the operations of the panzer divisions that won the Battle of France in 1940, the amphibious and far riskier “left hook” at Inchon in 1950, and the Israeli maneuvers in the Six Day War of 1967. As to casualties, each of the foregoing campaigns succeeded at low human cost. There are even several examples of campaigns that have been waged on the scale of and with losses comparably low to the Persian Gulf War: the British reconquest of the Sudan in 1898 and the German invasion of Yugoslavia in spring 1941, both of which saw the victors suffer less than 1,000 fatal casualties.

Finally to round out Parker's criteria, one must ask whether the Persian Gulf War signified a new era for the projection of force in ways that profoundly alter power politics. Here again, the answer is negative. The United States enjoyed a host of allies and the blessings of a 5-month build-up period prior to going on the offensive in the gulf, making this a highly conditioned RMA. Indeed, the mixed results of prolonged confrontations with Serbs and Somalians since Desert Storm suggest that there still remain serious limitations on the exercise of U.S. power on the world stage.

The foregoing discussion serves to highlight the analytic value of employing a clear definition and implies skepticism that the Persian Gulf War ushered in revolutionary change, not a belief in the general disutility of the concept of the RMA. On the contrary we previously have argued at some length, in the pages of this journal, that an RMA of the sort that Parker defines is within reach, enabled by changes in information technology but guided principally by strategic, doctrinal, and organizational insights⁵. The nature and scope of these kinds of insights form the core of the theoretical issues discussed in the next section.

EXPLAINING A REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS

In terms of simplicity, breadth, and elegance, nothing can compare with the Tofflers' winning formulation that a society's way of war will flow from its “way of wealth.” While developed in detail in War and Anti-War, this theoretical theme is a logical outgrowth of their earlier endeavors, notably The Third Wave. Briefly, the first wave saw wealth generated principally from labor-intensive agriculture. War in this era keyed around control of arable land and was waged in a labor-intensive fashion. In the second wave, apotheosized by the industrial revolution, economic growth came from the products of capital-intensive machines and war tended to focus in this period on control of resources. Success in war fighting came to hinge on the ability to employ capital in sufficient amounts as to field the greatest number of machines (tanks, artillery, and planes). The emerging third wave, the Tofflers note, will see knowledge as the key to achieving wealth and winning wars.

The “anti-war” of the Tofflers includes a range of political, economic, and military activities. They weave throughout the threads of what they call a “knowledge strategy” designed, in the best traditions of Sun Tzu, to win with as little use of force as possible. They theorize that, in the information age, war can sometimes be prevented by manipulating a social group's very image of itself or by attacking financial assets rather than territory or troops. On the other hand, they also note the wide latitude granted by virtue of the RMA for the measured use of force early on to prevent the onset of larger conflicts. For the Tofflers, the bottom line appears to be that the United States enjoys unique advantages that will enable it to mold the world in constructive ways, a notion quite consistent with Parker's view that an RMA must entail an increase in the ability to exert influence on the international system.

The Tofflers devote a great deal of attention to the technological antecedents of the RMA, but like Parker also key on the organizational, doctrinal, and strategic dimensions. Indeed, their call for a “knowledge strategy” gives implicit recognition to the notion that the real gains will come from incorporating technological advances into the appropriate new paradigm for conflict. On this point, a profound cautionary note is sounded by Odom, who keys on the crucial importance of the organizational dimension. Unless a way is found to mitigate the effects of bureaucratic “pulling and hauling,” he feels that prospects for progress are quite limited⁶.

The Tofflers' vision of future wars and anti-wars makes the compelling case that radical shifts in tactics, strategy, and in the structuring and sizing of armed forces are necessary for the successful exercise of power. Coming as it does on the heels of signal U.S. victories in the Persian Gulf and in the cold war, their admonitions stand out quite starkly, for it is not often that winners are exhorted to adopt immediate and radical change.

Given their richly diverse description of the spectrum of conflict in the information age, how can one begin to knit together a “knowledge strategy”? In our opinion the Tofflers have pointed to an emerging problem, identifying and classifying it with clarity and verve. They have not, however, yet elaborated the requisite response (nor has Odom).

Both the Tofflers and Odom key on the unpredictability of the future security environment, the likelihood that serious threats may emerge unexpectedly from unusual sources. They also clearly capture the sense of the increasing “irregularization” of war and the problems this is likely to pose for militaries⁷. Perhaps these notions of the diversity of threat and the lack of geographic focus may serve to inform thinking about a “knowledge strategy.” In our view, their thoughts suggest forms of conflict that leave behind older notions of war as sequential or linear and, instead, imply a realm of conflict whose complexity requires a new illustrative paradigm.

Briefly we suggest that traditional warfare looks rather like chess: There are recognizable fronts, massing is important, and aims and movements are clearly linear (promoting pawns or checkmating the opposing king). Warfare in the information age may resemble this less and less, and come more to reflect the oriental game of Go, in which there are no fronts, tightly massed forces tend to be vulnerable to implosive attacks, and movement takes place anywhere on the board at any time in a completely multilinear fashion.

Compared to chess, Go is revolutionary in Parker's sense. Tactics and strategy are radically altered, the size of fighting formations depends entirely on positional features rather than on the need to counterconcentrate against adversary formations, and influence can be exerted to the far reaches of the board with lightning rapidity. This seems well-suited to the current RMA, for it is a paradigm seemingly custom-built to deal with the complexities delineated by the Tofflers and Odom.

POLICY QUESTIONS

In this section, we briefly consider the implications of these three seminal studies of the RMA for five broad issue areas, ranging from political considerations of the role of allies and the future balance of power to military concerns over the use of force and the potential for new forms of arms racing and finally to questions about the need for institutional redesign.

For Odom, there is no question but that the RMA will assist in diffusing power across the regions of the globe, making multilateralism a strategic necessity for U.S. policymakers. In this regard, he counters Parker's notion that RMAs tend to foster the concentration of power that allows one power or a few to dominate the international system⁸. The Tofflers, on the other hand, depict a world in which the United States will have the capability to act on its own, where traditional considerations of power may have to be jettisoned in favor of a new calculus more sensitive to the capabilities of what they call “soft-edged states.”

With regard to the use of force and the potential for arms racing, Parker convincingly makes the point that RMAs tend to lessen inhibitions about going to war or at least about employing forceful means in pursuit of national aims. The Tofflers exposit a concurring view, in which some forms of their “anti-war” may be quite hard to distinguish from aggressive uses of force. Odom, however, sees that the need to establish multilateral foundations of support for action serves as a profound constraint on political will, a factor which may in his view override even the quite remarkable military capabilities recently demonstrated. Further, he notes that this RMA may spur a new, heavily R&D-oriented qualitative arms race. On this point, the Tofflers counter that encouraging the diffusion of innovations may prevent destabilizing advances. Parker, however, notes that equivalence in capabilities may encourage, instead of amity, a willingness to challenge those who formerly held the leadership position.

As to the last key policy issue, the need for organizational or institutional redesign, Odom puts the matter most starkly, contending that the current defense bureaucracy will fatally inhibit efforts to assimilate the gains implicit in this RMA. Basically he views the secretary of defense as “a weak monarch” and argues for strengthening the position through a process of centralization. This streamlined but still hierarchical approach could extend in his view, even so far as to do away with the various service secretaries themselves, lessening the intrusiveness of executive politics. A differing view is afforded by Parker, who implies that in the key area of naval advances the least centralized national political systems (the British and Dutch) appeared far more adept than their more authoritarian competitors (principally France and Spain) at introducing and benefiting from innovations.

Our own reflections on these policy-relevant concerns have been greatly stimulated by these studies. First, we tend to agree more with the Tofflers' notion that this RMA creates a greater capability for unilateral action than has hitherto existed. To Odom's sensitivity to the political need for allies, we counter that in the future alliances are more and more likely to grow situation-dependent, lessening their intrinsic value. Indeed, the NATO wrangling over the proper course of action in the Balkans during the past few years has pitted allies against each other on such key issues as whether to allow the Bosnian government to arm itself. In a world where friends may lack permanence or even a commonality of interests, it may be prudent to decrease dependence on multilateral support. The side benefit of such a shift is a reduced risk of spreading new, power-enhancing knowledge to those who may actually, depending on the issue, be or become rivals.

A more proprietary attitude about the RMA, growing out of wariness toward even one's allies, may also slow the pace of Odom's qualitative arms race. Here contrary to the Tofflers' injunction to “open the skies,” we urge the strategic management of RMA-related knowledge. It may well serve U.S. interests to make further advances only when it grows clear that others have figured a particular concept out. In this way, the “American advantage” may be stretched out as long as possible. This notion has a precedent in British naval policy in the nineteenth century, during which research was constantly under way but strategic decisions were often made to delay the introduction of innovations until it was clear that others had made breakthroughs⁹.

Finally with regard to institutional redesign, we concur with Odom about the need for change but prefer a more networked, rather than a hierarchical, solution. This does not mean supplanting all hierarchies with networks. There will be an enduring need for hierarchies at the center of many institutions, but taking advantage of the information revolution will mean entering a period of hybridization in which the forms mix optimally and in which some hierarchies are eventually supplanted by network forms.

AREAS OF EMERGING CONSENSUS

In addition to the books by Odom, Parker, the Tofflers, and other books we cite by Col. Kenneth Allard, Carl H. Builder, and Martin Van Creveld, numerous monographs and articles—notably by Jeffrey Cooper, Martin Libicki, Steven Metz and James Kievit, Tom Rona, John Rothrock, George Stein, and Colonel Richard Szafranski¹⁰—contribute in valuable ways to the reading list. In addition thinking about an RMA has been insightfully fostered by several high-ranking military officers, notably General Frederick Franks, Major General Robert Linhard, and Admiral William Owens, of the army, air force, and navy respectively¹¹. Finally the reporting of journalist Peter Grier has helped diffuse awareness of leading ideas and concepts¹². A consensus may be emerging around some key points that they variously make, setting the stage for next steps in public dialogue and policy analysis about creating an RMA.

An organizational and technological revolution. All concur that the current RMA is largely a product of the information revolution, its effects and implications. They also concur that the information revolution is not primarily about technology. Whether the information revolution is mainly about technology or about organization and other factors continues to bedevil the debate; it is time to accept, as these writers do, that technology takes second place at best. Moreover in favoring broad definitions of “information warfare” (IW), they properly resist the tendencies still found in some circles to reduce IW to meaning little more than computer warfare and cyberspace security.

Elsewhere, information has been hailed as a force multiplier. But these writers (especially Stein) argue that it is ultimately a force modifier, a force reformer. They agree that Desert Storm, though impressive, is not the paradigm for an information age RMA. Achieving it will require military organizations, doctrines, operational concepts, and strategies to be modified far beyond the Desert Storm model. At this time, there is convergence around the observation that enhanced interagency coordination and jointness are increasingly necessary and feasible, and that traditional bureaucratic designs will prove resistant to such innovation.

Debates about the information revolution continue to engender both optimism and skepticism. Both are natural, useful concomitants to thinking about an RMA¹³. Optimists have generally dominated the debate, but of late some notes of sensible skepticism have been sounded (e.g., by Cooper, Metz and Kievit, and Rothrock). Among the concerns they raise is that U.S. values are at stake in how an RMA may be designed and implemented. We agree that it has a potential dark side, especially if IW is treated more as an intelligence rather than a military activity and if surveillance is allowed to take precedence over privacy and individual freedom. How to balance this against the concerns Americans should have about facing new types of terrorists and predators remains an open question, however, especially since the latter may not abide by the constraints on human behavior that we feel are valuable.

The evolving spectrum of conflict. These writers concur that the conflict spectrum, from military war through conflict short of war, is being changed from end to end. Questions hang in the air regarding how different parts of the spectrum may change and which end may change the most and why. Yet there is strong consensus that “the Cold War notion of conflict short of war is obsolete” (Metz and Kievit). All writers warn that new threats (such as information terrorism and strategic crime) may arise in small, stealthy, unconventional packages, often involving nonstate actors. Indeed, a potential adversary's awareness of the U.S. success in Desert Storm may motivate it to move in surprisingly innovative directions.

The technological versus organizational dimensions of the RMA resonate in discussions about the spectrum. Metz and Kievit argue that remote sensing systems, stand-off weapons, and related types of “emerging technology will have less impact on conflict short of war than on conventional, combined arms warfare.” But even if true, why should we agree that there is “no imminent RMA in this area”¹⁴? Those are not the key technologies at that end of the spectrum, and they see this when they propose that psychological technologies may become more important than strike technologies¹⁵.

Besides, it is not technology per se but new forms of organization (networked, decentralized, hydra-headed, and transnational) that may enhance the capabilities of short-of-war actors to exploit U.S. vulnerabilities and harm U.S. interests. The Tofflers sensibly warn about a new generation of conflicts between first, second, and third wave elements both between and within societies that may be short of war. All the writers point out that nonstate actors may prove more troublesome and volatile than state actors. In sum the most important and problematic RMA may occur at the short-of-war end of the spectrum¹⁶.

Threats amount to combinations of intentions and capabilities. During the cold war and earlier, the capabilities side of the equation got the most attention, both as an indicator of intentions and as a source of targets. Now information warfare opens up new vistas for targeting enemy capabilities, for example, by feeding a computer virus or logic bomb into its cyberspace systems. More importantly, however, information warfare makes it increasingly feasible to target the intentions side of the equation.

Almost all the writers reviewed here have something to say about this. The Tofflers introduce the concept of a “knowledge strategy” and recommend putting it at the core of U.S. security strategy. Szafranski's tantalizing concept of “neo-cortical warfare” further illuminates the point that information age conflict may be less about fighting to dominate an enemy's “hard” military and economic assets (such as his armed forces and economic infrastructure) than about “soft” targets such as the knowledge and belief systems of leaders and decision makers¹⁷. A new generation of information policy instruments, to match our long established political and commercial policy instruments, must be developed to accomplish this for both war and anti-war purposes.

Since planning for information age warfare has “epistemological” dimensions (cf., Stein and Szafranski); concepts of time and space are getting new attention as strategic concerns. Cooper emphasizes the potential for making war terribly high-tempo in order to overwhelm an enemy's capacity for command and control. In contrast, Szafranski notes that neocortical warfare against a society's culture and psychology may be so slow as to be almost undetectable.

Revisiting the meaning of “information.” Writers about the RMA continue to use (and overuse) the term “information” in its conventional senses, as in referring to the nature of a message and/or its medium (i.e., system) of transmission and storage. The writers reviewed here are no exception. Elsewhere radical ideas are emerging that the structure of all things consists not only of matter and energy but also “information,” that it is a fundamentally physical property¹⁸.

If “information physics” lives up to its palpably weird promise, it will make sense to think of all military instruments and systems, from individual weapons through C4I architectures, as embodiments of information. Then measurable “information quotients” may be definable for assessing weapon systems. For example, the visually aimed smooth-bore cannon of the age of sail fired a low-mass munition whose effectiveness derived principally from the energy it released on impact. The cannon ball did not embody much information. By comparison, a modern sea-launched cruise missile relies more on information than on energy for its effectiveness.

Past wars have revolved around an ability to hurl mass and energy at an enemy; future wars may depend also on being able to hurl information, be that a message or a munition. This could alter how doctrine and strategy are developed and how targets are selected. It could alter what is meant by “measure of effectiveness,” “order of battle,” and “net assessment.” It will take years for this view of information to take shape, but meanwhile it is a strand of reasoning that bears watching and serious efforts to develop¹⁹.

CODA: IN ATHENA'S CAMP

Warfare has been associated with information since at least the time of the Greek gods. One normally thinks of Ares, or the Roman refinement Mars, as the god of war. Where warfare relates to information, however, the superior deity is Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom who sprang fully armed from Zeus's head and went on to become the benevolent, ethical, patriotic protectress and occasional wrathful huntress who exemplified reverence for the state. According to Virgil, Troy could withstand its enemies as long as it honored and retained possession of the Palladium, a sacred statue of Athena. Knowing this, the Greeks arranged its theft. Thus Athena sided with the Greeks in the Trojan War, where she bested Ares on the battlefield and conceived the idea of the wooden “gift horse” secretly loaded with Greek soldiers. In a classic case of failing to respond to warning, the Trojans made the fatal mistake of hauling it inside their fortress walls, despite strong objections from the priest Laocöon and the seer Cassandra.

The rest is history and legend. Today more than ever, it behooves us to see Athena, not Mars, as the paradigm for dealing with a world that is darkening and fractionating around our nation. All the authors we have reviewed here belong in Athena's camp and our understanding is the better for it.

Notes

1. For greater detail, see Michael Roberts, “The Military Revolution, 1560-1660.” It is reprinted in his Essays in Swedish History (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 3-31.

2. In this regard, Parker establishes a framework that should help to avoid the pitfalls of focusing on technology as the root of all military revolutions, a problem that bedeviled Soviet strategic thought and clearly can be seen in such works as Colonel General N. A. Lomov, ed., Scientific-Technical Progress and the Revolution in Military Affairs (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1973), translated under the auspices of the United States Air Force.

3. Steven Metz and James Kievit, The Revolution in Military Affairs and Conflict Short of War (Carlisle Barracks, Penn.: U.S. Army War College, 1994), p. 1. While Metz and Kievit note the general acceptance of notions of the revolutionary nature of the Persian Gulf War, they also exposit a thoughtful critique of this view.

4. As to the prevalence of smart aerial munitions, David P. Hallion, Storm Over Iraq: Air Power and the Gulf War (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), p. 188, notes that only “9 percent—7,400 tons—of the total tonnage expended by American forces was precision munitions.”

5. See John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, “Cyberwar is Coming!” Comparative Strategy, vol. 12 (1993): 141-65.

6. With regard to the importance of organizational constraints on innovation and military effectiveness, see C. Kenneth Allard, Command, Control, and the Common Defense (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990); and Carl H. Builder, The Masks of War (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).

7. For a full development of this theme, see Martin Van Creveld, The Transformation of War (New York: Free Press, 1991).

8. On this point, see Jeremy Black, European Warfare, 1660-1815 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994) for a subtle argument that RMAs initially grant enormous advantages to the innovators, which then erode due to imitation and increased leadership competition.

9. This is a recurrent theme running throughout Bernard Brodie, Sea Power in the Machine Age (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1944).

10. C. Kenneth Allard, “The Future of Command and Control: Toward a Paradigm of Information Warfare,” in L. Benjamin Ederington and Michale J. Mazarr (eds.), Turning Point: The Gulf War and U.S. Military Strategy (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995), pp. 161-92; Brian Nichiporuk and Carl H. Builder, Information Technologies and the Future of Land Warfare (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, 1995), MR-560-A; Jeffrey R. Cooper, Another View of the Revolution in Military Affairs, (Carlisle Barracks, Penn.: Strategic Studies Institute, 1994); Matin Libicki, “What Is Information Warfare?” (forthcoming); Thomas Rona, “Information Warfare: A Brief Overview,” draft paper, 1994; John Rothrock, “Information Warfare: Time for Some Constructive Skepticism,” American Intelligence Journal (Spring-Summer 1994): 71-76; George J. Stein, “Information Warfare,” Airpower Journal (Spring 1995): 30-39; Colonel Richard Szafranski, “Neo-Cortical Warfare? The Acme of Skill,” Military Review (November 1994): 41-55, and also his “A Theory of Information Warfare: Preparing for 2020,” Airpower Journal (Spring 1995): 56-65.

11. General Frederick M. Franks, Jr., “Winning the Information War: Evolution and Revolution,” Speech delivered at the Association of the U.S. Army Symposium, Orlando, Florida, February 8, 1994 (reprinted in Vital Speeches of the Day); Major General Robert E. Linhard, “Getting the Future Right,” Strategic Review (Winter 1995): 56-58; Admiral William Owens, High Seas (Annapolis, Md.: United States Naval Institute Press, 1995).

12. Peter Grier, “Information Warfare,” Air Force Magazine (March 1995): 34-37.

13. Paul Strassman sees through the dynamics of optimism versus skepticism when he observes that, “The history of information technology can be characterized as the overestimation of what can be accomplished immediately and the underestimation of long-term consequences.” From Paul Strassman, Information Payoff: The Transformation of Work in the Electronic Age (New York: The Free Press, 1992), p. 199. His new book on Information Terrorism is due for publication soon.

14. Metz and Kievit, The Revolution, 1994, p. v.

15. Ibid., p. 31. An example from another author who has been doing some interesting writing about psychological operations and information warfare from a special forces perspective is Colonel Jeffrey B. Jones, “Psychological Operations in Desert Shield, Desert Storm and Urban Freedom,” Special Warfare (July 1994): 22-29.

16. Our own effort to contribute here is the concept of “netwar,” introduced in Arquila and Ronfeldt, “Cyberwar Is Coming!”, pp. 144-46.

17. See also John Arquilla, “The Strategic Implications of Information Dominance,” Strategic Review (Summer 1994): 24-30.

18. See Robert Wright, Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information (New York: Harper & Row, 1989).

19. We will elaborate on the foregoing set of points in a forthcoming article entitled “Information and Power: New Views, New Implications.”