ability to strike out - a lesson Jomini and Napeoleon expensively re-learned at the end of their gasping supply lines in Russia in the winter of 1807.75 In our own day, jet-meshed networks, commercial webs, satellite links and finance platforms span the omnipresent routes of America’s global reach. So as we consider the information networks evolving now: the growing connected world that is the largest, fastest, most comprehensive network in history, we should ask ourselves the question Jomini might have raised: Will an even greater empire be based on control of information-powered networks?
This new world of connectivity won’t immediately devour the old. In fact, the classic and the revolutionary will contend for some time, side by side. Cyberweapons and nuclear ones in a strange dance, for instance: Imagine that you're ruling a country with no hope of building your own platforms for medicine, finance, information or security.’® You will be, as a result, uneasily and permanently dependent on the nations or groups that do control these elemental, algorithmic and efficient tools. If you're running a medium-sized country there’s no chance your own IT industry can develop a search engine with the reach and fluency of Google; or a cybersecurity system with the omnipresence of some Chinese database. Might this make you more eager for nuclear weapons? For an atomic hedge against the day you find yourself threatened with national unplugging? Networks, we'll discover, don’t lift us above the old conflicts so much as they complicate them. They fill the old hatreds with new fidelity; sharpen the old grudges and make it easier than ever to slap at the world when you're angry. While it is tempting to say that we’ve moved from a world of “cold weapons” like planes and tanks to a world of “hot weapons” where digital light pulses and biological infections will prevail, really it is the strange blending of these cold and hot systems that is so interesting, so dangerous. Ever more precise exploding iron bombs, made from a fusion of GPS data and TNT, will be a part of our future, as will pathogens tuned by computer and delivered according to network intelligence about where a contagion might best be started.
Orwell’s well-worn line - “The history of civilization is largely the history of weapons’ - settles uneasily onto a networked world.’” The networks are, so clearly already, becoming weaponized. And a great strategist should know and use the materials of his day. Napoleon had a gunpowder-burn familiarity with his artillery; Mao possessed a wizened guerilla sensibility. The electric, shifting and shocking materials of our global networks are going to be used in pursuit of power anyhow, so we had best consider how to become fluent with their real nature, how turn them to our advantage - and ideally find a way to use them to so profoundly change the rules of conflict that hurried, unconsidered and useless reaction will be all our enemies can manage. Over the centuries shifts in power and wealth were achieved
75 The skeins: John Arquilla and Ryan Nomura “Three Wars of Ideas about the Idea of War,” Comparative Strategy, 34:2 (2015), 186
76 Cyberweapons: Mary Kaldor, “In Defence of New Wars,” Stability, 2(1) 2013: 4, pp. 1-16,
77 Orwell’s well-worn line: George Orwell, “You and the Atom Bomb” in George Orwell: In Front of Your Nose, 1946-1950. (Nonpareil Books 2000) 7
55
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018287