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

to precision warfare or knowledge intensive warfare 100 , Boydian themes indeed. WhereasBraudillard focused on the media impact, military analysts asserted that the Gulf War‘established the superiority of this new mode of warfare by demonstrating convincingly thatinformation-based Western armies can quickly and decisively defeat the industrial armies ofrogue states, even when the latter has had ample time to prepare their defenses’ 101 . Capturingthe widely shared vision of future war employing RMA capabilities, one authors summarizedseveral studies as:The battlefield of the 21 st Century will be dominated, not by massed troops and armor, butby long-range smart munitions able to strike with precision over great distances, stealthy andunpiloted weapon platforms with stand-off capabilities; air and space-based sensors that caneffectively eliminate the ‘fog and friction’ of war and provide ‘dominant battlespaceawareness’; and advanced battle management and communication systems able to integrate,process and distribute information so that commanders can apply dominant forces in just theright place and at just the right time’.[Instead of] attrition and the conduct of set piece battles along a continuous front suchoperations will give way tot ‘non-linear operations’ […] involving high-tempo attacksconducted simultaneously against key tactical, operational and strategic targets throughoutthe length, depth and breadth of the battlespace. Fighting will take place in disconnectedencounters all across the battle zone and in the airspace above it, and in the ‘cyberspace’ ofelectronic warfare, high tech surveillance, and instantaneous communications 102 .Others went one step further in exploring the possible consequences of the informationrevolution. Somewhat predictably after the Gulf War the concept of “Information War” wascoined and developed in a flood of publications. “I-War” proponents asserted the shift from“Industrial Age Warfare” to “Information Age Warfare”. A short overview of some corearguments and assertions will illustrate the essence of this school of thought, and at the sametime demonstrate the close parallels between “I-War” and several Boydian ideas, such as anemphasis on tempo, situational awareness, network structures, and agility. Some quotes froma notable article by John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, two leading authors on informationwar, will suffice. Cyberwar is coming, sported their article they published in 1993. In it, likeothers, they argued how the information revolution would affect warfare. They asserted that:the information revolution reflects the advance of computerized information andcommunications technologies and related innovations in organization and managementtheory. Sea changes are occurring in how information is collected, stored, processed,communicated, and presented, and in how organizations are designed to take advantage ofincreased information 103 .100 Latham, pp.219.101 Ibid, p.223102 Andrew Latham, ‘Warfare Transformed: A Braudelian Perspective on the ‘Revolution in MilitaryAffairs’’, European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 8(2), 2002, p.239.103 John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, ‘Cyberwar is Coming’, Comparative Strategy, Vol 12, no.2, p.143.They elaborated on these ideas in an edited volume of studies on information war. See John Arquillaand David Ronfledt, (eds), In Athena’s Camp, Preparing for Conflict in the Information Age (RAND, SantaMonica, 1997). This volume includes the article ‘Cyberwar is Coming’.305