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

This will affect war and warfare: ‘the information revolution will cause shifts, both in howsocieties may come into conflict and how their armed forces may wage war’ 104 . And theshape of future war was also explored, showing many features favored by Boyd:warfare is no longer primarily a function of who puts the most capital, labor, and technologyon the battlefield, but of who has the best information about the battlefield. Whatdistinguishes the victors is their grasp of information, not only from the mundane standpointof knowing to find the enemy while keeping it in the dark, but also in doctrinal andorganizational terms’[…] ‘information is becoming a strategic resource that may prove asvaluable and influential in the post-industrial era as capital and labor have been in theindustrial age. 105They posit that in the future war must be waged according to ‘information related principles’.And those principles not only apply to large scale high intensity conflict, but also in ‘lowintensity conflict, in conventional and non-conventional environments and for defensive oroffensive purposes’ 106 . Additionally conflict may have to be interpreted in a different light,away from the industrial age conception of armed conflict. They distinguish Netwar andCyberwar, where Netwar surpasses the military dimension and includes economic, political,and virtual dimensions. It refers to ideational conflicts, waged in part through internettedmodes of communication. Cyberwar refers to conducting and preparing to conduct militaryoperations according to information related principles. Although information andcommunication matters, what the authors consider the real significance is that these areforms of war about “knowledge” – about who knows what, when, where and why, and abouthow secure a society or military is regarding its knowledge of itself and its adversaries.It is exactly this knowledge that they suggest should be shaped. Pregnant withBoydian notions, postmodern - reflexivist – references and Braudillard’s fears, they suggestthat conflict in the information age means:trying to disrupt, damage, or modify what a target population knows or thinks it knowsabout itself and the world around it. A Netwar may focus on public or elite opinion, or both.It may involve public diplomacy measures, propaganda and psychological campaigns,political and cultural subversion, deception of or interference with local media, infiltration ofcomputer networks and databases, and efforts to promote dissident or opposition movementacross computer networks 107 .With information the key weapons and target of the information age, strategy in Cyberwarsare equally in tune with Boydian and postmodern concepts – uncertainty and ambiguity ofinformation and knowledge - for the focus during a conflict must lie on disrupting, if notdestroying information and communication systems on which the adversary relies in order toknow itself: who it is, where it is, what it can do when, why it is fighting, which threats tocounter first, etc. It means trying to know everything about an adversary while keeping theadversary from knowing much about oneself. It means turning the balance of informationand knowledge in one’s favor. It means using knowledge so that less capital and labor mayhave to be expended .108 .104 Ibid.105 Ibid, p. 141.106 Ibid, p.146.107 Ibid, p.144.108 Ibid.306