Strategic Appraisal: The Changing Role of Information in Warfare
The editors shrewdly chose the title of this work to be information in warfare, not information warfare. This volume in RAND's annual Strategic Appraisal series is one of the better efforts. Some of the essays are forgettable, but others are well worth reading. Francis Fukuyama and Abram Shulsky, for example, offer a trenchant and skeptical analysis of the lessons the military can and should learn from business organizations wrestling with the information revolution. Some of the other pieces fall into predictable traps of mindless techno-enthusiasm (or paranoia) or attempt to impose irrelevant or superannuated intellectual constructs on the study of information, like Lynn Davis' piece on arms control. Taken together, the articles remind us -- some by insight, others by their very lack of it -- of just how hard it is to figure out what the information revolution does to international security.
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