ABSTRACT
No military forces have ever placed such faith in intelligence as American ones do today. Advocates of the “revolution in military affairs” (RMA) assume that information (as technology or superhighway or revolution or age) will transform the knowledge available to armed forces, and thus their nature and that of war. This faith is central to American doctrine and policy. Joint Visions 2010 and 2020, which guide strategic policy, predict forces with “dominant battlespace awareness” (better knowledge than) a “frictional imbalance” with and “decision superiority” over an enemy, and unprecedented flexibility of command: the ability to combine freedom for units with power for the top, and to pursue “parallel, not sequential planning and realtime, not prearranged, decisionmaking”.1 Officials have created new concepts about intelligence and command, aiming to pursue power by fusing, into systems, matters which once were split into “stovepipes”, and new forms of information technology. These concepts include net-centric warfare (NCW), the idea that armed forces will adopt flat structures, working in nets on the net, with data-processing systems at home serving as staff for the sharp end through reachback; C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; loosely speaking, how armed forces gather, interpret and act on information); the “infosphere”, the body of information surrounding any event; and “IO” (information operations), the actions of secret agencies.
