Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION, REFLEXIVITY AND SURVEILLANCE
• Information war requires meticulous planning, but this is planning for flexibility
of response, in contrast to comparatively cumbersome plans of the industrial
warfare period. Today enormous volumes of information flows, along with
the incorporation of software into weapons themselves, feed into complex
planning for war which prioritises ‘mobility, flexibility, and rapid reaction’
(Secretary of State for Defence, 1996, para. 171). Game theory, simulations
(frequently using sophisticated video facilities) and the production of systems
are an integral element of information war, as is the necessity to plan on the
basis of the ‘certainty of uncertainty’ (Oettinger, 1990).
• Such is the complexity of this planning for flexibility that many aspects of information
war are pre-programmed, thereby taken out of the hands of the
combatant. As a director of the United States National Defense University puts
it, now and in the future, ‘many decisions will be fully automated’ (Alberts,
1996). In part this is in response to the premium placed upon speed of action
in warfare now – for instance, once a missile has been launched, the countermissile
that has been designed to intercept and destroy it must be released in
the shortest-possible decision time, something that computers may manage
quicker than human beings (Rochlin, 1997, pp. 188–209). In such ways are
judgement and responsibility of military personnel taken out of their hands
and placed in technologies.
The First Gulf War, lasting but five weeks of January and February 1991, has
been called ‘the first information war’ (Campen, 1992). ‘Desert Storm’ manifested
most of the traits identified above, from little or no threat to the civilian population
of the major protagonist (the United States), to careful organisation which
enabled the burdensome movement of 500,000 allied forces several thousand
miles into the arena of battle while maintaining a flexibility of response that
was expressed in an astonishingly swift advance across desert on Kuwait, to
management of ‘media-friendly’ coverage in what has been described as the ‘most
“communicated” event so far in human history’ (Zolo, 1997, pp. 25–6). The allied
forces were insuperably better equipped and prepared than were the Iraqis, and
the consequences were evident in the respective losses: 300 or so on the
American and British side, between 30,000 and 60,000 on the enemy’s, many of
these on the ‘Turkey Shoot’ as they fled, under fire, back to Iraq on the Basra
road, their country having endured forty-two days of war in which, it has been
estimated, more explosive power was delivered than during the whole of the
Second World War.
The Balkans War of 1999, the Afghanistan invasion of 2001 and the Second
Gulf War of 2003 each lasted no longer than eleven weeks. Despite media apprehensions
at the outset and in the opening clashes, resistance quickly crumbled in
face of insuperable and unanswerable rocket and air assaults. The NATO-led
assault on Serbia during 1999 followed the pattern for information war. NATO
waged the campaign entirely from the air, and no casualties were recorded on
its side. The bombardment meant NATO triumphed and Serbia, after intensive
bombing that left several thousand dead, capitulated. Afghanistan was attacked
late in 2001 following the terrorist assaults on New York and Washington in
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