Science, Strategy and War The Strategic Theory of ... - Boekje Pienter

central sign of post-modernity. In war information has always been important. Now it is thesingle most significant military factor 83 , not only for controlling the battlespace, controllinginformation at home is just as important 84 . Information is the organizing principle of warand post-modernity, hence postmodern war 85 .For nihilist or subversive postmodernists such as Braudillard, the essence ofpostmodern war lies in the new methods of representation and experience of reality offeredby new tools of information and communication. In a series of articles on the Gulf War hequestions not the legitimacy of the conflict in the Gulf, but the very reality of the event itself.Our understanding of that war was constructed and mediated by a continuous series ofsymbolic images and ‘virtual media events – simulacra that are not real, but instead ‘stand infor the real’. In Boydian terms, our perception of reality was thoroughly shaped by theseimages. By asserting that the Gulf War did not take place Braudillard prompts us to questionwhether modern conceptions of military conflict and the central role warfare has played ingeopolitics during the modern era have any credibility in a security environmentcharacterized by deterrence, culturally imposed restraint, instantaneous media transmission,and adversaries with profound disparities in their military capabilities 86 . It was a virtual eventwhich is less a representation of real war than a spectacle, a theme picked up by MichaelIgnatieff and Colin McInnes to comment on Nato’s war in Kosovo - a virtual war - and theway such ‘humanitarian’ wars have been experienced by the western publics – spectator sportwarfare 87 .For Booth et al, several (and Boydian) developments arise from this postmodernphenomenon. The first is that ‘the transmission of real-time media from the battlefieldcreates a continuous feedback loop in post-Cold War military operations in which the public canbe directly influenced in a more or less predictable fashion depending on the contentselected for transmission […] the role of the soldier-statesman will become crucial incourting the media for the purpose of retaining some element of that control’. Additionallythey note that ‘it becomes possible to employ the media directly as a conduit fordisinformation’ and a ‘marriage of military strategy with the real time transmissioncapabilities of an ostensibly independent global mass media that invites comparison with thepostmodern’ 88 .These theme’s are present also in other widely read and influential works debatingthe impact of the information age on war and warfare. Alvin and Heidi Toffler for instance,in their widely circulated and cited book, War and Anti-War, Survival at the Dawn of theInformation Age, noted that you make war the way you make wealth, and the way the Westmakes wealth is through the information age - or ‘third wave’ - economy. This would spawn‘third wave warfare’ in which information would be the critical component:Today the world is moving from a two-level to a three-level power system, with agriculturaleconomies at the bottom, smokestack economies in the middle, and the knowledge based, or83 Ibid, p.22.84 Ibid, pp.38-4085 Ibid, p.81.86 Booth, Kesntbaum and Segal, pp.333-334.87 Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond, (London, 2000); Colin McInnes, Spectator Sport War,the West and Contemporary Conflict, (Boulder, Co.,2002).88 Booth, et al, p.335. Emphasis is mine.302