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. - ISN is currently hosted by Attrition.org To unsubscribe email majordomoat_private with 'unsubscribe isn' in the BODY of the mail.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Thu Apr 24 2003 - 05:00:30 PDT