Want to Beat the Enemy? Win the Information War

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/23/books/23OHAN.html

By MICHAEL O'HANLON
April 23, 2003

Bruce Berkowitz, a noted analyst at the RAND Corporation and the 
Hoover Institution at Stanford, has produced a readable and 
well-informed study of information technology and its implications for 
future warfare. Even though he wrote his book just before the conflict 
in Iraq, his observations about technology and its role in future 
warfare have not been radically altered by the outcome of the war to 
overthrow Saddam Hussein.

Mr. Berkowitz was prepared to conduct such a study, given his good 
grasp of several critical fields related to the broader subject: 
military technology, Pentagon bureaucratic politics and the recent 
history of American defense policymaking. His book has ample vignettes 
of interesting people and ideas in modern United States military 
history, and it displays a comprehension of the science behind much of 
the electronics and computer revolutions. It is a perfectly fine read 
for anyone looking for such an overview. 

But the book also disappoints on multiple fronts. As technology 
analysis, it is too thin and falls flat by comparison with many other 
popular science books about the computer and Internet era written by 
even more expert individuals. As a history of important figures in 
modern American defense policy, it provides brief sketches of many 
remarkable people but without the depth and zest needed to make such a 
human-interest story come alive. 

As defense prognostication, it is a bit chatty and anecdotal, offering 
bold statements about how modern information technologies promise the 
greatest change in warfare, not just in decades but in millennia, 
without a serious defense of such a grandiose thesis.

Nor does Mr. Berkowitz offer any particularly original thought about 
what future warfare will be like, or even do a good job of summarizing 
the prognostications of scholars like Alvin Toffler or a number of his 
own colleagues at RAND. Because he tries to do a bit of all of these 
things in such a short volume, he does none of them as well as he 
could or should.

Mr. Berkowitz's book does display a considerable depth of knowledge. 
His various topics and anecdotes, each typically two or three pages 
long, range from the invention of the airplane to the invention of the 
Internet to the tactics of Al Qaeda to the pioneers of modern American 
dogfighting to the new cyberwarriors of American defense policy. 

He briefly examines the 1991 Persian Gulf war, NATO's 1999 war over 
Kosovo, the Afghanistan war, the Vietnam War, the two world wars and 
the cold war through the prism of information technology. All of these 
cases are used in one way or another to bolster his thesis that 
astronomical changes in information processing are producing radical 
changes in warfare today. All the dots are well connected in this 
narrative.

For the reader wishing a little bit of everything, this book therefore 
succeeds. But it is less impressive at informing in detail about 
anything in particular, or about proving its main point. Mr. Berkowitz 
does not do enough to explain the individual dots in his argument. And 
the connections between them may sometimes be the wrong ones.

Part of the problem with his thesis is that he uses the term 
information to encompass too much. He claims that information is the 
crucial element in warfare, especially modern warfare, and hence he 
seems to place great stock in the modern computer and the Internet. In 
effect, however, Mr. Berkowitz places almost everything in warfare 
except main combat vehicles under the term information. For him the 
word includes the sensors that acquire battlefield data, the 
communications systems that move it around, the individuals who assess 
it, the military leaders who devise tactics based upon it and even the 
broader national strategies used to guide countries in their basic 
decisions about when and how to use force.

But by granting the term information such an expansive scope, Mr. 
Berkowitz makes his argument fuzzy. What are the implications of his 
thesis, if the role of information in modern warfare includes 
everything from spy satellites to the education of commanders to the 
global communications systems carrying data around the world to the 
computers processing the raw bits and bytes? 

If his chief point is simply to claim that all of these things matter 
even more than in the past, and that the sexy performance parameters 
of traditional weapons like tanks and aircraft matter at least 
somewhat less, he is probably right. And that conclusion is important. 
But it is neither particularly original nor quite as radical a thesis 
as he seems to want to claim for his book.

Take one specific example: the performance of coalition forces in 
Desert Storm in 1991. Mr. Berkowitz heralds this conflict as the 
dawning of the age of information in warfare, writing that 
"information technology has become so important in defining military 
power that it overwhelms almost everything else." Among the major 
manifestations of this new reality were the United States-led 
coalition's ability to use precision weapons, its possession of 
satellite guidance systems for many troops on the ground (if not yet 
for bombs themselves), and its ability to carry out the famous "left 
hook" maneuver so decisively against Saddam Hussein's forces because 
Iraq did not enjoy similar information capabilities.

There are two big problems with this claim, however. First, despite 
another 12 years of improvements in our information warfare 
capabilities that Mr. Berkowitz chronicles and raves about, and 
despite the relative dearth of modern information systems within Iraqi 
society and armed forces, the recent war highlighted other aspects of 
American military excellence just as much as information systems and 
high technology.

Specifically, the performance of special operations forces in the 
war's early hours and days, as well as the skill of American and 
British ground forces in the urban battles of the war's latter phases, 
were perhaps the most exceptional aspects of an impressive campaign. 
Airpower played an important role, as did modern information and 
communications systems, but they were perhaps less dominant than in 
the country's previous wars. 

That is not to knock technology or the personnel flying our airplanes 
and operating our command and control networks; it is a reflection 
that every war is different from its predecessors, and that 
traditional combat skills still matter a great deal. But Mr. 
Berkowitz's thesis does not allow much room for such nuance. In the 
end he strays uncomfortably close to technophilia and technological 
determinism rather than balanced strategic analysis.

Michael O'Hanlon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.



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