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Argos Press |
Preface |
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This book may never have been written had it not been for the sudden emergence in the United States of the Network Centric doctrine of war, which would rest all current military thinking upon the use of information technology. This increasingly popular doctrine is so fundamentally out of sorts with the historical pattern of how western powers acquire military technology that it became necessary to subject its tenets to a thorough scrutiny. The fact that, despite the absence of any serious attempt on the part of the proponents to justify the claims of this doctrine, money is already being spent to implement its recommendations both here in the United States as well as in the United Kingdom, made the writing of this book a matter of some urgency as well. Written as it was to do battle with a prevailing movement, the book can not help its polemical tone. Behind that tone, however, there lies a non-polemical attempt at understanding the proper military role of information technology. That attempt is guided by two general principles: that military technology must serve national security and that systems analysis is the best way of ensuring that it does. Consequently, this book has acquired a rather strange voice; it mixes historical, cultural, and political conversation with the language of mathematics to determine the ways in which information technology could be of service to the security of a western nation confronting the novel challenges of the post Cold-War international environment. If, despite its unconventional voice, this book succeeds in
generating a healthy debate about the strengths and weaknesses of the prevailing
doctrine, it will have amply fulfilled the purpose for which the author has
undertaken the effort of writing it. For, absent such a debate, how is the
defense community to ever know whether the siren call of Network Centrism, with
its promises of “shock and awe”, is not sending us down the road to national
insecurity? Alfred Kaufman |
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