ABSTRACT
Despite the general enthusiasm for applying information technology to military affairs, insufficient work has been done on the question of how new systems will facilitate the management of international crises. Crises often set the initial conditions under which military competition must take place. The prevailing wisdom treats them as a less intense form of military conflict, so the same gains that revolutionary technologies have achieved in combat should obtain during crises. However, crisis management has its own dynamics apart from warfighting. Wars are fought to eliminate competition, while crisis managers seek to induce cooperation – producing a favorable agreement while avoiding war. Crises call upon leaders' political intuition, their personal style of information processing, and their capacity to respond after surprises in different measures than combat does. A historical comparison of US crisis management during the Berlin crises – 1948–1962 and the crises in the former Yugoslavia – 1992–1999 shows that information age capabilities for the collection, analysis, and distribution of information neither reduced the difficulty nor lowered the intensity of crisis dilemmas for decision-makers.
