assessing ‘byte city’: an insightful or misleading vision?

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Assessing ‘byte city’: An insightful or misleading vision?Ryan Henry a , G. Edward Peartree a , Andrew J. Bacevich b , Michael J. Mazarr a & Col.Kenneth Allard USA (Ret.) ca Center for Strategic and International Studiesb Johns Hopkins University, Foreign Policy Institutec Cyber Strategies, Inc.Published online: 07 Jan 2010.

To cite this article: Ryan Henry , G. Edward Peartree , Andrew J. Bacevich , Michael J. Mazarr & Col. Kenneth AllardUSA (Ret.) (1997) Assessing ‘byte city’: An insightful or misleading vision?, The Washington Quarterly, 20:2, 73-93, DOI:10.1080/01636609709550242

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Assessing 'Byte City':An Insightful orMisleading Vision?

Ryan Henry and G. Edward Peartree

Center for Strategic and International Studies

Michael Vlahos preemptively deflects criticism of his use of historicalanalogy by himself suggesting that it is "imperfect" and "even manip-ulative." A shrewd move: it is imperfect and a bit manipulative. He iscorrect in his proposition, however, that despite the imperfection of theanalogy it is nonetheless valuable to compare late-twentieth-centuryAmerica to imperial France before the humiliating debacle of Sedan: Wecan never be reminded too often that a surfeit of military pride comethbefore a fall. His description of the pitfalls of past success and the risksfor U.S. national security as the Pentagon plans for wars it cannot yetimagine is a persuasive and sobering primer on the formidable chal-lenges ahead. The criticism here, however, is directed at the unremit-ting, certain pessimism of the picture he paints. Like Paul Kennedy inthe Rise and Fall of Gnat Powers, Vlahos offers historical analogies thatare both terrifically compelling and wildly overstated, casting doubt onthe conclusions that he draws from them.

Vlahos asserts that the United States (and, indeed, the world) isperched at the threshold of a global socioeconomic revolution that willsoon sweep away the remnants of industrial civilization. Ironically, theUnited States, the undisputed force behind this information revolution,is doomed to fall victim to its own revolution. Why? Because the UnitedStates is the world's premier status quo power. As such, it is bound toattempt to suppress true change from occurring in the world system thatit currently masters. Like the proud French Second Empire in the 1860s,he claims, the United States will succumb to comfortable illusions of

Copyright © 1997 by The Center for Strategic and International Studies and the MassachusettsInstitute of TechnologyThe Washington Quarterly • 20:2 pp. 73-93

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invincibility based on its superiority in military technologies. Misplacedfaith in military technology and a failure to understand the implicationsof a larger socioeconomic revolution—in this case, the Industrial Revo-lution—led, he tells us, directly to the French humiliation at the handsof the Prussians at S6dan.

There are a number of significant discrepancies between the twosituations. First, Louis Napoleon's France was not a peerless power: TheUnited States in 1996 is. It prevailed in the titanic struggle called theCold War and still possesses the world's premier military instrument,downsized though it may be. Second, nineteenth-century Prussia washardly a society riding on the wings of revolution; it was in fact one ofthe most conservative in Europe. Nor was it necessarily ahead of Francein comprehending the full thrust of the Industrial Revolution (both, ofcourse, were late industrializers). Prussia's victory in 1870 likely had lessto do with harnessing the energies of the industrial revolution, as Vlahoswould have us believe, than with Prussian general staff reforms madeby Gerhard von Scharnhorst and August Wilhelm von Gneisenau at thebeginning of that century—years before the first factory or railway wasbuilt. The Prussian army's flexibility of command, the organization andmobility of the landwehr, and a superior professional military educationalsystem easily overpowered the poorly organized, inflexible, doctrinallybackward, slow-moving French—points recognized by French marshalFerdinand Foch, who sought to correct these defects in his country'sarmy before World War I.

It is true that French military technological advantages were mean-ingless because they had not yet figured out how to employ themeffectively. In the parlance of Pentagon analysts, they had embraced themilitary-technical revolution (MTR) without embracing the larger revo-lution in military affairs (RMA). The mitrailleuse, potentially devastatingat close range, was a wasted asset used as artillery. Yet Prussia's break-through use of railroad mobilization may have had more to do withMoltke's peculiar genius (an early devotee of trains, he personally in-vested in the stock of rail companies) than with any revolutionarynational Zeitgeist. In sum, the success of the Prussians over the Frenchin 1870 could well be ascribed to a range of idiosyncratic human andcultural factors, rather than to technical or industrial revolutionaryones—an assessment that would have pleased Carl von Clausewitz, oneof Moltke's intellectual mentors.

Vlahos tells us that there can be no new war without revolution.Those who succeed in understanding the revolution, in allowing them-selves to become one with it, will prove victorious. At the time of the

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Assessing 'Byte City'

Franco-Prussian War, neither France nor Prussia was at the forefront ofthe industrial revolution. The United States in 1996, on the other hand,is the information revolution. It is the world's first postindustrial, infor-mation-age economy. Although the government of the United Statesmay behave somewhat like a traditional status quo power, resistant tochange (let's not forget encryption policy), the revolution is commerciallydriven. The U.S. commercial sector leads the world in the development,application, and integration of information technologies for business,finance, and home use. More than 30 million Americans are on-line andmore than 60 million own personal computers. However resistant tochange the Pentagon may sometimes appear, it currently spends in thevicinity of $20 billion annually on new information systems and has bothemployed them with remarkable success in Desert Storm, which somehave called the "first information war," and demonstrated, in the fiveshort years since then, orders-of-magnitude improvements in the vol-ume and speed of information flows in Bosnia. So whence comes ourPrussia to deal us our Sedan? Not from China or any traditional Euro-pean power; Vlahos describes their information backwardness in detail.And the traditional left-behinds, he agrees, will now fall only furtherbehind. So where?

Vlahos handles this question in a slightly maddening fashion. Theadvantage of his loose, interpretive approach is that it allows him tocreate a non-falsifiable theory. Who will be our conqueror? This futurePrussia is, by definition, unknowable. The next enemy will be borne of"Byte City," the imagined new world created by the fulfillment of theinformation revolution. And, of course, we cannot counter such a threatbecause the military revolution that will afford that future enemy acertain advantage "simply cannot exist—at any level—until the largerrevolution spends itself sweeping our old way of life away." Therefore,we are left helpless to prepare ourselves for the coming humiliation andfuture mediocrity.

Disagreement with the antipositive nature of this assessment does notequal disagreement with his fundamental point. Vlahos is right in point-ing out that a tradition of past success, as well as the legacy of animmense, highly bureaucratized system and the tools of war it hasperfected, is indeed a serious burden to be bear. For all our advantagesin information age technologies, a deadly temptation exists to use themas mere appliques on outmoded industrial-age platforms—such as laptopcomputer with keyboard-user interfaces in M1A1 tanks—rather than tothink deeply about what comes beyond the horizon and what tools wewill need to combat it. Vlahos seems correct in his belief that something

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entirely new is coming and that we are as yet ill-prepared to meetit—technologically, organizationally, doctrinally, culturally. Whether wewill be prepared when the challenge comes is open to question.

The global economic information revolution of which he speaks isalready well underway; 95 percent of all wealth is digitally representedand electronic commerce is growing apace. The virtual corporation hasalready transformed the global economy, creating an entirely new, highlydispersed, knowledge-driven international division of labor. Our criticalinfrastructures are directed by software programs that have demon-strated tendencies to "bug out" with occasionally disastrous results.Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems currentlycontrol thousands of everyday functions from traffic lights to telecom-munications to water and power distribution. All are vulnerable to attackand disruption via global networks. Yet even the community of technicalexperts and security analysts disagrees considerably about the extent ofour society's vulnerability to digital attack. What is clear, and whatVlahos accurately points out, is that the "next wars, the wars of bits andbytes, may not be about bigness at all." Opportunities for small, smartadversaries will be abundant in cyberspace as global networks expand.Because we are the most networked, most digitized, most sophisticatedinformation-age society, we are also the most lucrative target. As the1994 hacker attack on the U.S. Air Force Rome, N.Y., laboratory evi-denced, a British 16-year-old with an off-the-shelf 14.4 kilobit-per-second modem can wreak havoc among supposedly secure U.S. militarycomputers and networks. The Pentagon is just beginning to deal withshock of this "prank" and the implications that it has for future conflict.

For all the self-reflective documents the Pentagon has produced sincethe Cold War ended, few—as Vlahos astutely points out—have chosentruly to break new ground and probe the possibilities of conflict in arevolutionary age with a new, postindustrial paradigm. The "cyberwar-rior" of Time magazine covers and current military battle labs is arifle-toting doughboy with a computer overlay: same old mainframe withsouped up accessories. Only a few visionaries dare break the mold andconsider the possibility that future conflict may not be about a conven-tional battlespace with computer- and sensor-assisted "information su-periority" (the epic quest of current military "reformers"), but a warfought without industrial tools, in the realm of databases, fiber optics,and networks, trading not bullets but bytes and fighting over public trustand information control rather than over territory or productive capacity.Is the warrior culture ready to trade in its self-image of the rough-and-ready rifleman with fixed bayonet for that of a computer geek hacking

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through enemy networks and spoofing enemy systems? Does the irontriangle of military bureaucratic, corporate, and political interests thatcontinues to drive defense acquisitions, and, therefore, defense plan-ning, appear willing to give up the world's greatest industrial war ma-chine-cum-corporate welfare program for an uncertain, brave new worldof cyberwar? Not yet, apparently.

The United States is just beginning—and has very, very far to go—toprepare to meet future threats and vulnerabilities. One could even levelthe criticism that Vlahos fails to go far enough in his vision of revolu-tionary change and the havoc that it could wreak for us. Too focused onthe information revolution and a "virtual" home in Byte City, he doesn'tconsider the implications of future sequential societal revolutions drivenby technology catalysts: biotechnology (what are the likely effects ofcommonplace genetic engineering?), nanotechnology (the negation ofsize and mass as we know it), and power (renewable energy extractedfrom the environment)—all of which have ramifications equal to, or, incombination, far greater than the nascent information revolution. Yet, itshould also be noted that we remain bigger, "badder," smarter, and moresophisticated in our development, integration, and application of con-ventional or emerging capabilities than anybody else on the block caneven dream of. We are light years ahead of the competition not onlytechnologically, but doctrinally. France met its Sedan because it was notequipped to fight a peer power on the European continent. But beingthe world's premier status quo power, as Vlahos puts it, we must beprepared not only to fight in Byte City but on the streets of Mogadishu.Plenty of ugly, low-tech, conventional fights remain to be fought aroundthe world before we meet the challenge of a true postrevolutionary war.Having militarily (if not politically) devastated its last adversary, the U.S.military has not rested on its laurels but has reflected on lessons learned,examined historical trends, and constantly sought to improve capabili-ties. In this regard, the United States may be more accurately comparedto Prussia before 1870—reviewing lessons learned from the success ofKoniggratz and preparing for the future—than to France, which side-stepped reform and smugly rested on its reputation.

Vlahos is to be applauded for focusing our attention on an uncertainand troubling future, where, to loosely paraphrase Pogo, we have metthe enemy and it may be us. The pitfalls and crimes of hubris hedescribes are real, as are the historical mistakes we risk repeating. But,given the countervailing forces of a fantastically dynamic informationage economy, an evolving society that leads the world in the integrationof information-age systems, and a government and military that show


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some distinct signs of dealing sensibly with the forces of revolutionarychange, his jeremiad may be taken as a cautionary fable, not as thegospel truth.

Andrew J. Bacevich

The Johns Hopkins University Foreign Policy Institute

With verve, imagination, and an admixture of pure cheekiness, MichaelVlahos depicts the bruising ride awaiting us as we hurtle toward the newworld that he has labeled Byte City. The result is a provocative exercisein futurism. Permeated with foreboding, it also provides a useful anti-dote to the smugness and complacency to which Americans, delightingin their present-day claim to global dominance, may be prone.

As described by Vlahos, however, that journey is also misleading. Allof the signposts that he has planted along the route point convenientlyin the same direction: toward dislocation, upheaval, the collapse of oldparadigms, the emergence of "a new human design"—in short, towardirresistible and traumatic "Big Change."

This is where Vlahos goes astray: He ignores evidence suggesting thatthe road ahead is likely to be convoluted and our destination far fromcertain. In the real world, the signs point every which way.

Viewed close-up, the economic, cultural, and technological transfor-mation now in progress seems revolutionary in its implications. Yet, ifold institutions and traditional ways of thinking find themselves underattack, they also show surprising resilience. In short, the old "humandesign" will not go quietly, if at all. As a result, the impact of Big Changeis not foreordained and the final outcome may differ dramatically fromthe fanciful vistas of Byte City.

Vlahos bases his argument on four propositions. All four are defective.They are not wrong; they are simply inadequate, caricatures bereft ofshading, texture, or ambiguity. But it is the complicating existence ofthese qualities that makes the task of the policy planner and decision-maker more difficult—and more problematic—than seers like Vlahoswould have us believe. Let us consider each of the four in turn.

Proposition One: Big Change—by which Vlahos means an economicrevolution driven by information technologies—will bring about a "sys-temic breakdown" of the world order. Perhaps so. On the other hand,commercial enterprise loathes disorder; it thrives on routine and predict-

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ability. To the extent that the forces of revolution are primarily economicin character, they will create strong incentives to avert disintegration. Ifonly to permit the economic transformation to run its course, those whowield power will seek to prop up the existing state system. That theyare doomed to fail is not self-evident. In this sense, economic revolutionmay be as conducive to stability as to chaos.

Proposition Two: The economic revolution, according to Vlahos, willsweep away old cultures, giving birth to "new religions." These will beideologies that respond to the popular hunger for "new meaning." Again,perhaps so. Yet the evidence thus far suggests that the effect of BigChange is not to demolish the principal expressions of traditional culturebut to revitalize them. Nowhere is this more clearly the case than withregard to religious orthodoxy. Far from dying the slow death forecast bychampions of the Enlightenment, religion is currently enjoying a resur-gence on something like a global scale, a development with large andas yet unappreciated implications for politics.

Moreover, this resurgence of religious conviction is occurring not justamong peoples whom Americans might view as primitive or exotic, butthroughout much of the developed world. The muscularity of the Re-ligious Right here at home suggests not only that the outcome of theculture war remains undecided, but that hand-wringing about the needfor "new meaning" is a preoccupation of elites: For most of us, the oldsources serve quite well.

Proposition Three: The world of Byte City, according to Vlahos, will bea world drenched in blood. But the source of violence will not be theexpansionistic "peer competitor" beloved of American contingencyplanners. Rather, the new ideologies rising from the ashes of the oldorder will devise new methods of warfare. Indeed, adherents to thesenew ideologies, according to Vlahos, will be compelled to wage war.They will do so not for rational political purposes but to establish andexpress their identity. War will become "a religious rite of passage."

But against precisely what sort of entity must Americans prepare todefend themselves? Vlahos cannot say. "The next enemy as a place doesnot exist yet," he writes. That the author's crystal ball should becomemurky on this particular point is convenient, to say the least. For, toidentify an adversary would be to create obstacles in the way of BigChange. To entertain the prospect of the United States actually con-cerning itself with a tangible threat—a hostile emerging Great Power? a"niche" competitor? organized crime consortia? terrorists?—is to permitthe case to be made for retaining existing organizations and methods tocounter that threat.

Proposition Four: Devoted to the status quo and mired in old ways of


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thinking about war, Vlahos tells us, the United States is ill-equipped torespond to these new ways of warfare. Hence, "we await our Sedan."Yet, by Vlahos's own admission, the United States is a status quo powerof a most peculiar sort. On the one hand, we are committed to theexisting order. On the other hand, Vlahos correctly observes, "We arethe system breaker. We are the makers of revolution."

To whatever extent that is true, why does it follow that the UnitedStates is condemned to "codifying war as the last victorious engage-ment?" That there are elements devoted to such a project—preservingunder glass the best tank, the best and biggest aircraft carrier, and thefastest fighter plane money can buy—is undoubtedly the case. Yet manyothers argue that a Revolution in Military Affairs will soon render obso-lete these familiar weapons and the military institutions devoted tothem. Who will get the better in this debate remains to be seen, butthe ferocity with which it has been joined would suggest that the UnitedStates, far from being a mindless custodian of archaic military practices,is likely to lead the way in transforming warfare. There too, in otherwords, the United States—whether for good or ill—may well prove tobe the "system breaker."

This essay should come with a warning label attached: Consume onlyin small bytes—and with a grain of salt.

Michael J. Mazarr

Center for Strategic and International Studies

Michael Vlahos has done all of us who think about defense policy andnational security an important service: He has kicked us directly in theteeth. Today, the U.S. military is busily engaged in perpetuating a forcedecisively able to fight the kind of war it knows and loves, the proverbial"last war"—the "major regional contingency" modeled after the PersianGulf War and presumed to be relevant to future conflicts. Vlahos asks adangerous question: What if, 10 years from now, we face an entirely newkind of war? Or rather, he urges us to accept the fact that the UnitedStates and its allies will most definitely face a new kind of war, createdand energized by the socioeconomic revolution now sweeping the globe.This revolution, Vlahos asserts—correctly, in my view—will bring aboutboth new reasons for war (alienation in a world of rapid change andindefinite personal identity) and new forms o/war.


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Critical readers will pounce on one lacuna in Vlahos's argument. Hedoes not define very well, some will say, just what these new forms ofwar will be. Granted, globalization and other hallmarks of the knowledgeera create alienation and anger and possibly conflict; this is, after all, theengine of Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations." But how will thisanger manifest itself in ways different from the kind of war we knowtoday? If an alienated, anti-Western Iran unfurls the banners of a newholy war against the West, will the U.S. response not be to park a tankdivision (or eight) in Saudi Arabia and prepare to fight a traditionalregional war? No doubt, Vlahos would agree, that would be America'sresponse now, largely because it is the only response of which we canconceive.

But is it really that difficult to imagine the kinds of threats—and toattach specific names and examples to them—that Vlahos is talkingabout? For example:

• China is the threat dujour, but what if it pursues "violence" againstthe West with computer chips, public relations campaigns, and check-book diplomacy rather than with missiles and submarines? Chinesemilitary analysts are fascinated with the emerging concept of "infor-mation warfare." What if a U.S. president circa 2005, intent on a toughresponse to Chinese saber-rattling over Taiwan, is deterred by reportsfrom the FBI, Transportation Department and state governors thatU.S. computer-controlled infrastructure systems—streetlights, freighttrains, airline reservations and air traffic control, and so on—havestarted going haywire for six hours or so every morning after the WhiteHouse issues a belligerent statement on China?

• What if a state like Iraq acquired the ability electronically to desta-bilize world currency and stock markets for days or weeks at a time?

• What if three dozen disaffected anti-knowledge era movementsaround the world—including some in America—gained access to bio-logical or nuclear weapons technology?

• What if Iran menaces Persian Gulf oil supplies—after buying enoughSwedish RBS-15 anti-ship cruise missiles to wipe the Gulf free ofU.S. warships and enough stealth-tracking radars and Russian SA-10anti-aircraft missiles to shoot down any U.S. aircraft in the vicinity?

• What if Japan, Taiwan, or other technological tigers in Asia slingshotahead of the United States in areas like lasers, particle-beam technol-ogy, or other directed-energy weapons?

National security specialists might react with a yawn and a wave ofthe hand to such scenarios. "Sure, we've considered them," some willsay. "We're taking them into account in our regional contingency plan-ning; we have seven working groups on these issues; we are getting ahandle on cyberwar . . ." All of which would make a good deal of sense,if these new and varied forms of war comprised an adjunct, a peripheral


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addition, to the major "threat" of a "resurgent Russia" or the well-wornmajor regional contingency. But Vlahos is asking us to consider some-thing much more radical: What if these new ways of waging war consti-tute the dominant menaces to the United States over the next 20 years?

One can get a sense of the kind of revolution in defense thinkingneeded today by reviewing some recent literature on business manage-ment. As one of the few avenues of productive strategic thinking in aknowledge-era environment, its advice is directly relevant to militaryplanners trying to come to grips with the same currents of social change.

Dartmouth Business School professor Richard D'Aveni has written aguide to the new rules for business in his 1994 book Hypercompetition(New York: The Free Press). Hypercompetition, D'Aveni contends, is"a condition of rapidly escalating competition based on price-qualitypositioning, competition to create new know-how and establish first-mover advantage, competition to protect or invade established productor geographic markets." In this world, the "frequency, boldness, andaggressiveness of dynamic movement by the players accelerates to cre-ate a condition of constant disequilibrium and change." So "instead ofseeking sustainable advantage, strategy . . . now focuses on developinga series of temporary advantages. Instead of trying to create stability andequilibrium, the goal of strategy is to disrupt the status quo." D'Aveni'sinsightful approach leads him to conclude that a "logical approach is tobe unpredictable and irrational," so as to throw competitors off theirrhythm and distract them from your real intentions.

Another recent model of business strategy—London Business Schoolprofessor Gary Hamel's notion of "strategy as revolution" (about whichhe writes in Harvard Business Review, July/August 1996)—makes a verysimilar case. Hamel argues that true business strategy "is revolution;everything else is tactics." Pursuing "incremental improvements whilerivals reinvent the industry is like fiddling while Rome burns." Compa-nies like IKEA, the Body Shop, Dell Computer, and Swatch are "shack-led neither by convention nor by respect for precedent" and are "intenton overturning the industrial order." Never before, Hamel writes, "hasthe world been more hospitable to industry revolutionaries and morehostile to industry incumbents. The fortifications that protected theindustrial oligarchy are crumbling under the weight of deregulation,technological upheaval, globalization, and social change." One implica-tion is that ideas that seem unusual should get perhaps the best hearingof all. "Senior managers should be less worried about getting off-the-wallsuggestions," Hamel advises, "and more concerned about failing tounearth the ideas that will allow their company to escape the curse of


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incrementalism." Another lesson of HamePs perspective: "An industry'sboundaries today are about as meaningful as borders in the Balkans."

What advice does this new line of business thinking have for othersocial institutions in a complex, fast-moving era? Strategies of the futurewill seek to disrupt the status quo and will thrive in the resulting chaos.They will emphasize unpredictable moves. Incrementalism is a recipefor disaster. New, aggressive players will be able to leapfrog into com-petition with current industry leaders. Boundaries between disciplineswill collapse. Managers must value the new and the unusual.

To get a sense of how far the U.S. military is from a truly revolutionaryresponse to the knowledge and information era, one need only holdD'Aveni and Hamel's advice up against the reality of military planningas we know it today. No doubt there is much fast-paced, over-the-hori-zon, anti-traditional thinking underway in the U.S. military, but thatmindset is not guiding U.S. force structure planning today. In our quaintnotion of a "hedge" against a Soviet Union that does not exist and ourunreal (though undeniably comfortable) planning guide of "two (nearly)simultaneous regional contingencies," we are about as far away fromout-of-the-box thinking as could be imagined.

Take, for example, the current U.S. approach to the Revolution inMilitary Affairs (RMA). In its true form, this concept represents theintroduction of knowledge-era concepts and structures into warfare. Andyet the existing U.S. plan, at least in the medium-term, is not to achievean RMA at all, but to graft elements of that revolution onto a militaryforce still representative of industrial-era, attrition-style warfare.

Examples of this practice are easy to find. A modern tank equippedwith the global positioning system (GPS) and advanced cellular commu-nications systems is not revolutionary, any more than an unstealthyattack aircraft with laser-guided bombs. Even a stealthy bomber rainingcluster bombs on an advancing tank division is not revolutionary. Nor isan aircraft carrier equipped with fancy electronic countermeasures andradar detection systems. All of these capabilities—the capabilities ondisplay in the Gulf war—represent evolutionary advances within thesame mode of fighting that has prevailed, in some senses, since about1940, and in others for hundreds of years.

This incrementalist notion of the RMA is ultimately self-defeating. Itviolates the common strategic principle that a period of rapid change isthe time to think comprehensively rather than narrowly. It indefinitelypostpones the day when the U.S. military will depart from deeplyentrenched evolutionary doctrines and routines and embrace the trulyrevolutionary elements of the new era in warfare. It guarantees that the


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lion's share of procurement and research and development funds willbe devoted to slightly modified versions of weapons in regular use foralmost a century. The United States plans to spend, for example, wellover a trillion dollars on "advanced" versions of tactical aircraft over thenext 20 years—while it will spend just a few billion on researching andprocuring innovative technologies for the new era in warfare.

The trick is not to throw away all the systems we have and assumethat "regional contingencies" such as Iraq and North Korea will nolonger be threats. They will, and we need some capability to respondto them. But the relative balance between incrementalism and revolution-ary capabilities is today biased almost entirely in favor of the former—which, as Michael Vlahos has reminded us, is a dangerous prescriptionin an era of revolutionary change.

Col. Kenneth Allard, USA (Ret.)

Cyber Strategies, Inc.

Were he alive today, nineteenth century French satirist Hilaire Bellocmight well be tempted to view the cheerleading for the new revolutionin military affairs (RMA) in much the same way as he poked fun at hisown century's celebration of the Maxim gun:

Whatever happensWe have gotThe RMAAnd they have not.

Military revolutions can be almost as partisan as their political andscientific counterparts, and two major schools have formed around thisone. Martin Van Creveld is the best known of those who emphasize theprevalence and perversity of violence at the lower end of the conflictspectrum, arguing that technology means little in these small, dirty,often ethnic wars. But in a technology-obsessed era, the maximalist isto the minimalist as three is to one. No less a figure than Paul Nitze hassuggested that the next generation of precision-guided munitions maysupplant nuclear arms as a new class of strategic weaponry. In a similarvein, Harvard's Joseph Nye and retired Admiral William Owens haveargued that the America's clear advantage in information-based weap-onry is a twenty-first-century form of what they call "soft power."

Such maximalist arguments are normally accompanied by urgent calls


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that stress the need to explore wholly new patterns of warfare by"thinking outside the box." At first glance, Michael Vlahos would appearto be a part of this school, but his epic leaps of faith and sweepinghistorical generalizations suggest an approach to the future that somemight criticize as more "off-the-wall" than "outside-the-box." Happily,he is on much stronger ground in his implicit suggestions about thedangers of unintended consequences and early assumptions about mili-tary advantage. In fact, a strong case can be made that the informationrevolution is far more likely to equalize power between the have andhave-not countries than to concentrate it still further in the developedworld. But whether one inclines towards minimalist, maximalist, oroff-the-wall arguments, little doubt exists that the information revolu-tion is transforming warfare as profoundly as it is altering most otheraspects of modern civilization—with the end of this process nowhere insight.

The real question is how that transformation should affect U.S. de-fense policy, recognizing that it is infinitely easier to debate the RMAthan to set the hard agenda for the next wave of Pentagon reform.Theories have their place, but the reality is that barely a decade afterthe landmark changes of the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, our militaryinstitutions again confront the painful necessity of upsetting familiarways of doing business. In particular, the teamwork required by thetightly networked "information operations" of twenty-first century war-fare—possibly the hard edge of "soft power"—will require an exponen-tial increase in the functional integration of the nation's military forces.

In a bow to tradition, the Goldwater-Nichols reforms left intact thelegislative authority permitting the military services to procure separatecommand, control, and information systems. Although this separatisttradition worked reasonably well prior to the electronic era, it has pro-duced a continuing series of modern information pathologies: sectarian"military specifications," single-service data "stovepipes," and familiesof redundant systems whose lack of interoperability is proverbial. Theresult has been a uniquely self-induced form of friction every time U.S.forces take the field. Prior to Operation Desert Storm, for example, theUnited States needed six months to transport, assemble, and fine-tunethe information infrastructure needed to prosecute the war on U.S.terms. Saddam Hussein not only gave the U.S. military this pricelessgift of time, but he also failed to exploit or sabotage the fragile "work-arounds" and "band-aid solutions" that this jerry-rigged system neededto function at all. More recently, the 28,000 U.S. troops deployed toSomalia in 1992 brought with them 10 different service-specific datasystems to handle a host of common administrative functions. And, in


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one celebrated example reminiscent of the Grenada invasion a decadeearlier, the Army hospital in Mogadishu could not initially "talk" toNavy hospital ships operating offshore, nor were Army helicopterscleared to land on them.1

Given the persistence of these problems, it is not clear whether thePentagon is capable of dealing with the organizational implications ofthe high-tech investments for which it has such a prodigious appetite.The civilian leadership will need to make wise choices in this arena notonly to conserve increasingly hard-pressed defense dollars but also toavoid building a new generation of twenty-first century information"stovepipes" that any future opponent is certain to use against us. So,what are the key policy choices that the next secretary of defense shouldmake in building an agenda for cyberwar?

Historical Perspectives

The first step in answering that question is to distinguish between thecurrent military-technical revolution (MTR), largely centered on theapplication of the microchip to existing ways of doing business, and thefuture RMA. As impressive as today's military technologies often appear,they really represent only marginal improvements in existing patternsof warfare that do not challenge favored service weapons. A real RMA,however, occurs when institutions undergo a change in gestalt and breakthe organizational crockery—especially the current set of ricebowls.Naval aviation during the interwar years, for example, was an ongoingMTR, but the real mother of invention was the sudden loss of U.S.battleships at Pearl Harbor. Like many others in military history, thecarrier revolution was produced by a combination of shock, serendipity,and sheer desperation. Similarly, its larger implications became apparentonly in hindsight—reason enough to avoid over-statement in predictingthe ultimate effects of any RMA.

The question of technological innovation in highly traditional organi-zations is as old as it is interesting—despite the admitted dangers ofincautious historical comparisons. The relevant example here may notbe Vlahos's rendition of the French experience at S6dan, but rather theunlikely process that, in the American and English navies of the latenineteenth century, brought about a revolution in gunfire technology atsea. As recounted by the eminent historian Elting Morison, this revolu-tion led to an order-of-magnitude improvement of 3,000 percent in thesix years between 1899 and 1905, but one marked at every step bydetermined institutional resistance. The real innovation was combiningthe new technologies of rifled guns, sighting telescopes, and elevating


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mechanisms into a system that incorporated the new principle of con-tinuous aim firing. The three communities whose cooperation was re-quired in order to bring about this development were handicapped bythe narrowness of their own perspectives. Innovators such as AdmiralWilliam Sims displayed an attitude of "permanent insurgency" thatmade acceptance of their ideas more difficult, while the talented inven-tors who had originally conceived of the new tools were fixated on theirparticular instrument or their status in an unimproved process. Finally,the naval establishment played a critical role in that era of great tech-nological advance by winnowing from the many good ideas the few thatwould actually work in combat. But like its latter-day counterparts, theNavy of that era was built around a dominant weapon system—thebattleship—and followed an instinctive form of behavior that gave greatweight to the perpetuation of the status quo.

Morison's summation of this case is classic:

The men involved in this process were victims of severely limitedidentification. They were presumably all part of a society devotedto the process of national defense, yet they persisted in aligning them-selves with existing parts of that process.... So these limited identifica-tions brought these men into conflict with each other . . . 2

This comment—originally delivered in 1950, long before the advent ofsuch process-centered disciplines as "total quality management" and"corporate reengineering"—is an eloquent warning that those who con-tribute to a process (political, academic, industrial, or military) cross theline from benefit to cost when they become fixated with narrow con-cepts, attitudes, conventions, or, for that matter, dominant weaponssystems.

Current Perspectives

Because command, control, and information systems inevitably reflectthe culture of the dominant weapons systems, few U.S. military tradi-tions are more deeply rooted than the specific legislative authoritygranted the services to "organize, train, and equip" their forces. Thishistorical pattern naturally recurred in the aftermath of the Persian GulfWar, with each of the military services announcing its own modern-ization plans featuring information technology as the centerpiece ofimproved "situational awareness" for commanders on the land, at sea,and in the air. Although "jointness" is a key buzzword in any discussionof future systems, Morison would have been the first to understand thatthese ambitious plans have all taken place within the cultures of thedominant weapon systems wielded by each service: armor and artillery

THE WASHINGTON QUARTERLY • SPRING 1997 87

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for the army, carriers for the navy, and piloted aircraft for the air force.Given their histories, this situation could hardly be otherwise, despitethe usual rhetoric about "thinking outside the box."

Although interoperability has been a continuing problem, it is lesswell understood that these "severely limited identifications" also pro-duce C3I (Command, Control, Communication, and Intelligence) sys-tems that are as redundant as they are expensive. Assistant Secretary ofDefense (C3I) Emmett Paige Jr. has estimated that the Department ofDefense (DoD) currently operates between 5,000 and 9,000 command-and-control systems, many of them "legacy systems" left over from theCold War.3 Although the military has made concerted efforts to identifyand retire these "legacy" systems, each one is deeply intertwined withexisting service infrastructures—those extended families of administra-tors, experts, contractors, subsystems, and logistical support networks.Not surprisingly, as Secretary Paige candidly noted, "our progress (hasbeen) far less than anticipated."4

This Tower of Babel is also becoming increasingly difficult to defendfrom the newest generation of information age threats. In a 1996 studythat drew headlines, the General Accounting Office (GAO) reported toCongress that as many as 250,000 hacker attacks were being launchedannually against DoD computer systems. But even this astounding totalmight well have been an understatement; only about 1 in every 150attacks tends to be detected and reported. In the words of the GAOreport,

. . . attackers have obtained and corrupted sensitive information—they have stolen, modified, and destroyed both data and software.They have installed unwanted files and "back doors" [to] allowhackers unauthorized access.... They have shut down and crashedentire systems and networks. . . . Numerous Defense functionshave been adversely affected, including weapons and supercom-puter research, logistics, finance, procurement, personnel man-agement, military health and payroll.5

Although the numbers are similarly difficult to pin down, another aspectof this problem could be seen in the experience of the U.S. peacekeep-ing contingent sent to Bosnia: Conventional wisdom among the U.S.units serving in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)-led,35-nation coalition was that up to 50 percent of their personal computershad suffered from viruses of some sort. Incredibly enough, some see inthis characteristically U.S. diffusion a de facto defense against informa-tion warfare (IW): "We're so mixed up that no single IW attack couldever wipe us out," the argument runs. Nevertheless, there is a growingsense that inadvertent, self-inflicted IW must give way to a more coher-


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ent approach characterized by mandatory standards and defensivemeasures.

The latest effort to reconcile service differences (but without alteringtheir present responsibilities) is a program called the "Global Command-and-Control System" (or GGCS, and not coincidentally pronounced"Geeks"). But instead of a top-down architecture requiring unambigu-ous choices between winning and losing systems, GCCS is little morethan a building code. In itself, the gradual evolution of the "commonoperating environment" envisioned by GCCS is a step forward, but itis far less than what will certainly be required. A compelling exampleof this business-as-usual approach could be seen during a September1995 field exercise at Hanscom Air Force Base supposedly devoted tosolving interoperability issues. Instead, technological duplication of theworst sort could be seen in the separate Army and Air Force operationscenters set up for theater missile defense—two separate systems withnearly identical functions but united only by their respective targets.6

Such practices are usually defended as internal competition, but theyare really little more than thinly disguised fights over future roles,missions, and the preservation of existing operational cultures withineach service. The astounding idea that other services may have encoun-tered similar technological challenges is seldom considered. Far frominstinctively asking, "Who else has this problem?" hard-charging pro-gram managers normally view the "joint" part of the procurement proc-ess as a contest to obtain ratification of established service preferencesby the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). Add the constant downward pressureson the defense budget and the overall result is a supreme irony: At thevery moment when technology holds the brightest promise, the likeli-hood of its fielding has seldom been more in question.

Agenda For Cyberwar

Lord Rutherford is supposed to have said, "We have run out of money,so we need to think more clearly." With that idea in mind, how mightthe next secretary of defense adjust the existing terms of reference inorder to prepare the Department for the advent of cyberwar? Five basicpolicy choices are critical:

1. Embed IW as a standard element of U.S. national military strategy. TheDoD under William Perry took important steps toward focusing greatergovernmental attention on the problems of information warfare, includ-ing an initial investment in the fiscal year 1996 defense budget of almost$2 billion. Ever since some of these issues surfaced—during the GAO'sSenate testimony referred to above—it has become increasingly impor-


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tant to recognize IW as an important new element of our nationalmilitary strategy. At the very least, this directive would convey a clearmessage that IW is more than just the latest Pentagon fad in the raceto preserve budget numbers. By centralizing authority for the militaryaspects of IW in the Joint Staff, two other important gains would bemade: strategic plans would be integrated at the national and unifiedcommand level, and an institutional counter-weight to the already well-advanced incorporation of service perspectives in the IW arena wouldbe created. Most important of all, the focus on IW as an element ofnational military strategy would serve as an intellectual linchpin for theother initiatives (listed below) needed to rationalize the defense infor-mation infrastructure. Those reforms will be critical in preparing the wayfor the real RMA that the information revolution will certainly bringabout.

2. Rationalize and reduce the DoD's institutional overhead in outdated C3Isystems. It is clear that the DoD simply has too many command-and-control systems, many of them redundant or technically obsolete. It isalso clear that sheer bureaucratic inertia will keep these systems func-tioning in the absence of a draconian determination by the DoD'scivilian leadership. To halt the present practice of mortgaging the futureby indefinitely postponing the day of reckoning, the overriding policyobjective should be prompt and large-scale reductions in the numbersof these systems. The appropriate model for such an effort might wellbe the Base Realignment and Closure Commissions, which demon-strated that the equitable distribution of pain was best accomplishedthrough clarity of mandates, schedules, and expectations. In similarfashion, the next secretary of defense might reasonably impanel anoutside group of experts and announce that their objective is to recom-mend to him a "hit list" of redundant systems. His charge to them mightalso be: "Do not tell me 'How much is enough?' but rather 'How manyis demonstrably too fewV"

3. First by directive, and then by the required legislative changes, remove fromthe military services their current authority to procure separate command-and-control systems; then convey this authority to the Chairman of the JointChiefs of Staff with budget execution by the Joint Staff. Within theconfines of existing missions, the services are great engines of innovativethought and development: They must continue this vital function inevery other function except in building their own command-and-controlsystems. There simply must be a reversal in the priority of puttingservice concerns first and joint teamwork second—that is, if the DoD isever to measure up to the challenge of warfare in the Information Age.The most logical choice for this redirected budgetary authority is the


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Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who has already assumed increasingleadership in these issues. A case in point: the publication late last yearof the Chairman's Joint Vision 2010, a kind of technology master-planreflecting the growing importance of joint versus service perspectives inthe post-Cold War era. But, like many similar initiatives, this vision ofthe future will quickly fade unless accompanied by the kind of directiveauthority over money that is the ultimate test of authority in the Pen-tagon and elsewhere. Although it currently lacks budgetary authority,the Joint Staff does perform the day-to-day integration of the command-and-control systems actually used by the combatant forces. Far morethan any civilian agency or secretariat, the Joint Staff is consequently inthe best position to make the budgetary tradeoffs in choosing the com-mand-and-control systems actually needed to achieve the most effectiveintegration of joint combat power. And by administering the new author-ity vested in the nation's top military officer, the Joint Staff is in thebest position to perform the critical winnowing function: picking the "bestof breed" from competing service systems and justifying these decisionsto the civilian leadership.

4. Make commercial-military integration not only the sine qua non of defenseprocurement but also the basis for reducing and rationalizing DoD institutionaloverhead. To reduce costs and provide more up-to-date technology, re-cent changes in federal procurement law now mandate a preference forcommercial products, especially those that can be purchased "off theshelf" for military use. It will be considerably more difficult but equallyimportant to use these emerging commercial capabilities to reduce re-dundant support structures in each of the services. The advent of secure,reliable global satellite communications—such as Motorola's Iridium—has the clear potential to replace some communications channels thatthe military was previously forced to provide for itself. At the height ofU.S. involvement in Bosnia, for example, the Army needed a U.S. signalbrigade of more than a thousand soldiers to support its outmoded tacticalcommunications system. In contrast, AT&T needed no more than twodozen employees to maintain a network of satellite ground stations thatprovided the bulk of morale calls for more than 20,000 soldiers. Thebottom line: If unneeded military systems can be quickly removed fromservice, the existing signal establishments in each of the military serviceswill be hard put to justify their current force structures, much less theirbudgetary and administrative clout.

5. Accelerate the development and advancement of the next generation of theDoD acquisition corps. It is an article of faith among those who have donebusiness with the government that the recent progress in procurementreform will be at best incomplete until accompanied by wholesale


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purges of the acquisition workforce ancien regime. Although a number ofstandard policy instruments are available to accomplish a more rapidgenerational transformation, considerably more attention needs to bepaid to the problem of selecting, training, and advancing the nextgeneration of acquisition professionals. In addition to having ingrainedthe bedrock principles of jointness, this new workforce must be skilledin the opportunistic, entrepreneurial exploitation of commercial technol-ogy that will be the basis of future military power. The best way toaccomplish that objective: career progression based on innovation andpersonal responsibility, repeated first-hand exposure to the hard realitiesof military operations in the field, and direct experience with cutting-edge commercial technology practice.

The agenda outlined here is at best an outline of the major tasksconfronting a Defense Department that must never assume that theinformation revolution necessarily conveys U.S. superiority over anyadversary. If that superiority should ever be realized, it will come aboutonly to the extent that technological advances are accompanied bysubstantial organizational reforms. It is here that the next secretary ofdefense has the greatest opportunity to leave his mark on the Depart-ment. Precisely because of the need for careful choices in the shapingof a personal agenda, he should focus on the task of overcoming the"severely limited identifications" brought about by the Pentagon'sreigning set of weapons cultures. Rationalizing the way that the DoD'scommand-and-control systems are conceived, procured and deployed isclearly the best way to overcome a fundamental institutional problemthat has been tolerated for far too long. In this process of reform, thenext secretary of defense is likely to find that some budgetary andorganizational payoffs are too compelling to be ignored—to say nothingof the need for a more effective integration of the nation's joint combatpower.

As shown by the pages of this journal, a timely and lively debate isnow taking place about whether high tech or low tech is the likelierform of future wars. My argument is not so much with one side or theother in the RMA debate but rather to emphasize that the real issue isU.S. readiness for future conflict at any point on the spectrum of vio-lence—and on this point there may be some common ground withMichael Vlahos after all. Because in both sports and military strategy, itis well understood that an uncorrected weakness is a vulnerability thatany respectable opponent is certain to exploit. And as the outcomes ofrevolutions in military affairs are notoriously hard to predict, it is thebeginning of wisdom to bestir ourselves while making the only reliable


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assumption offered by history: that the presently benign geopoliticalcircumstances the United States enjoys will not endure forever.

Notes

1. See Kenneth Allard, Somalia Operations: Lessons Learned (Washington, D.C.: NationalDefense University Press, 1995).

2. Elting E. Morison, "Gunfire At Sea: A Case Study in Innovation," in Men, Machinesand Modern Times (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1966), p. 18.

3. The exact number of C3I systems currently operated by the Department of De-fense (DoD) seems very much in the eye of the beholder. Assistant Secretary ofDefense (C3I) Emmett Paige Jr. cited the figure of 9,000 system in an address,"Re-engineering DoD's Operations: Information Management Impact," (Vienna,Va., September 14, 1993). Other estimates have placed the number as low as 5,000.The more troubling question, of course, is why no one seems to know for sure.

4. Emmett Paige to Secretaries of Departments, et. al., Memorandum on "Selection ofMigration Systems/Applications" (Washington, D.C., July 10, 1995).

5. Testimony by U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO), "Computer Attacks onDefense Computer Systems," before the Committee on Governmental Affairs, U.S.Senate (Washington, D.C.: GAO, May 22, 1996), p. 3.

6. The cited exercise took place at the Joint Warrior Interoperability Demonstrationat Hanscom AFB, Mass., September, 1995.


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assessing ‘byte city’: an insightful or misleading vision?

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