Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION, REFLEXIVITY AND SURVEILLANCE
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war in which their own civilian population will be unscathed; Shaw, 2005).
Conduct of war will rely on relatively small numbers of professional soldiers,
pilots and support teams. This represents a shift in the military towards what
has been called ‘knowledge warriors’ (Toffler and Toffler, 1993), a term which
underscores the centrality of personnel adept, not in unarmed combat or even
in riflemanship, but in handling complex and highly computerised tools such
as advanced fighter aircraft, surveillance systems and guidance technologies.
• Great attention is devoted to perception management of the population at home
and, indeed, round the world. This is especially pressing in democratic nations
where public opinion is an important factor in the war effort and where a fear
for military leaders is a concerted reaction against the war domestically, since
this may impinge on the fighting capability of their forces. Further, there is
widespread apprehension that the public will react to vivid pictures of the
wrong sort (say, bloodied bodies rather than ‘precision strikes on legitimate
targets’). Inevitably, this impels military leaders into careful planning for and
management of information from and about the war, though at the same time
assiduous efforts must be made to avoid the charge of censorship, since this
flies in the face of democratic states having a ‘free media’ and undermines the
persuasiveness of what does get reported. Perception management must
therefore combine ways of ensuring a continuous stream of media coverage
that is positive and yet ostensibly freely gathered by independent news agencies.
Coverage of the Gulf War in 1991 may be seen as evidence of first-rate
‘perception management’, since it achieved massive media attention yet was
antiseptic in substance. However, the Second Gulf War of 2003 was much
more of a problem for the perception managers, with recurrent instances of
non-desirable images – suspects being electrocuted and sexually abused,
hostages begging for their lives while being filmed by the enemy – appearing
on the screens of televisions back home and a steady stream of oppositional
interpretation being aired (Tumber and Webster, 2006).
• Information war is conducted using exceptionally sophisticated technologies.
Obviously this is most evident among the forces of the United States that have
massive resources (the US defence budget alone accounts for 40 per cent of
world military expenditure and is bigger than that of every prospective enemy
and neutral country combined). Just one indication of this is that about onethird
of the British Ministry of Defence’s equipment procurement budget, currently
about $15 billion per year, is accounted for by ‘Command and Information
Systems’ alone. When added to expenditure on ‘Weapons and Electronic
Systems’ and ‘Aircraft Systems’, over half the budget is accounted for.
• The technologies of cyberwar are information saturated. We may speak now of
the digitalisation of the battlefield, though computerisation reaches much
further to the entire range of command and control facilities (Barnaby, 1986;
Munro, 1991; Berkowitz, 2003).
• Information war no longer requires the mobilisation either of the citizenry or
of industry for the war effort. It relies instead on capturing only the leading
edges of industrial innovation for military purposes – for instance, electronic
engineering, computing, telecommunications and aerospace.
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