YET ANOTHER ARTICLE ABOUT INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND THE CHARACTER OF WAR
War has an unchanging nature. War is violent, interactive, and fundamentally political. War’s character, by contrast, changes, and reflects how technology, law, ethics, and many other factors influence combatants’ use of violence to create political outcomes.
The evolving nature of information technology and its use by militaries may change the character of war. If and when this takes place, competence in and even mastery of some previous ways of war will become less relevant. Failure to lead the next change to the character of war could result in the U.S. military’s advantages in training, resources, and technology quickly diminishing or disappearing altogether.
Information Technology and the Character of War
Napoleonic warfare found agrarian societies pitting their armies and, at its pinnacle, most of their resources against one another. Similarly, World War II showed the devastation that industrial nations could produce. The four possibilities below explore how information technology may affect the character of war.
Autonomy
Software’s Acceleration of Adaptation
Infrastructure as a Weapon System
Individualization of War and Politics
... the effects of a new type of technology are only fully revealed when two well-developed forces fight each other, creating emergent effects that cannot be predicted by viewing the forces in isolation. No-one knows the system behavior that will emerge when information age forces fight each other.
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