The Next World War: Computers Are the Weapons and the Front Line Is Everywhere

Mr. Hillen, an NR contributing editor, is the Olin Fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

The Next World War: Computers Are the Weapons and the Front Line Is Everywhere, by James Adams (Simon & Schuster, 366 pp., $25)

A VETERAN faces an overwhelming temptation when he is reviewing a book about the future of war written by someone who has been neither in the future nor in a war. The temptation, of course, is to dismiss the book out of hand. However, veterans have often been wrong about the future of war, and several of those who have come closest to the truth (J. F. C. Fuller, B. H. Liddell Hart, Billy Mitchell) were ridiculed and saw their military careers suffer as a result.

So James Adams, a former defense correspondent for the London Sunday Times, has as much right as anybody to try giving us a peek at the new face of war. In The Next World War, he has done a commendable job of sketching the changes that the information age might bring to U.S. defense planning. This eminently readable volume should take its place alongside George and Meredith Friedman's The Future of War (1996) and Alvin and Heidi Toffler's War and Anti-War (1995).

The subject is crucially important because while the American public has little interest any more in military affairs, the military and an influential cabal of defense thinkers are quietly pushing the Pentagon down a path known as "The Revolution in Military Affairs." With little debate, the Defense Department is channeling billions of dollars into future concepts and systems that ultimately will replace a large proportion of our tanks, ships, planes, and troops with computers (and computer viruses), satellites, precision-guided missiles, lasers, underwater battleships, and unmanned aircraft.

As Adams explains, the idea driving this revolution is that we sit now on the cusp of a radical change in the character of war. The microprocessor and the other advanced technologies of the digital age promise to change not only the way military force is wielded, but also the underlying strategy, and the basic calculations of power itself. Previous revolutions in military affairs have shifted the world's political order. For instance, the change from galleys to fighting ships under sail led to the demise of the rich Mediterranean city-states and projected England, Holland, Spain, and Portugal into the first rank of nations. Similarly, Napoleon's ability to harness together a political revolution (which permitted the levee en masse) and an industrial one (which permitted mass-produced and standardized equipment) allowed him temporarily to overwhelm the set-piece armies of monarchical Europe.

The next revolution in military affairs has arrived, according to Adams. "In this new world, the soldier will be the young geek in uniform who can insert a virus into Teheran's electricity supply to plunge the city into darkness." The Gulf War, to most people a high-tech party on CNN, was in Adams's view "the last hurrah of the armed forces and generals who had trained on the legacy of the Second World War." The only sometimes accurate precision munitions in the Gulf War represented merely one stage of an evolutionary change. The future will see a fully networked array of systems in which many different sensors, based principally in space, will communicate instantly to a multitude of long-range precision munitions based on U.S. soil, beneath the surface of the ocean, in the air, in space, or within information systems themselves. Need to destroy some tanks in Iraq? Why send our tanks? A satellite or submarine will quickly do the trick -- and with little risk to American life or limb.

All this very probably will come to pass, at least in part, but there is still reason to question Adams's ultimate thesis, which is that "war has changed forever."

Well, yes and no. The character of war is always changing but never its nature. Adams fails to appreciate that, for the most part, the revolution in military affairs has been narrowly conceived and technologically driven: Have gizmo, must use. This is backward. Strategists should first decide what they need to achieve politically, and then consider what sort of military force might do the job. The White House has not phoned across the river to the Pentagon with the message, "Because of what America will be doing around the globe in the next fifty years, we'll need a radically different information-warfare military force. Please design and build one."

To be sure, technological advantage must be pursued, and an information-age military will make many defense jobs easier. Superior technology has always been one of America's sustainable military advantages. But information warfare could also price the U.S. out of a market of significant conflicts, render the military vulnerable in important ways, and change the perception of American power for the worse. In many parts of the world, our willingness to shed our own blood will impress the locals far more than our courage in putting our bytes on the line. Moreover, there is always the question, "What if it doesn't work?" In the many conflicts strategic-bombing advocates have promised to win and did not, that question should probably have been asked earlier than it was.