Customer Reviews

The New Face of War: How War Will Be Fought in the 21st Century

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

To clarify - if 3 1/2 stars were available that is where my gut would have put this book. Whilst this book serves a good historical perspective of the evolution of information age warfare in US Government and Civil Agencies (and in particular the DoD) it left me a tad disappointed. The author definitely, as highlighted in other reviews, makes some extremely pertinent points (nuggets is probably an apt description) on the future of war how it may be fought he perhaps doesn't pursue these as far as I would have hoped and I was left with the impression that the book, whilst an interesting and easy read, was unnecessarily 'padded' out with historical examples. This aside, it is easy to criticise, and I wish to note that Chapter 12 dealing with assassination in the information age is a particulary good discussion.

Dr. Berkowitz's new book is a terrific follow-on to his previous title, "Best Truth". Rather than focusing on the intelligence community, in this title he takes a long, hard look at current state and direction of the armed forces and gives the reader real insight into how the military can be and is being improved.

In order to acheive this, he leans heavily on recent history and the ideas of his contemporaries. One of the ways in which this manifests itself is in examining the strategic brilliance (albeit evil) of the 11 September attacks. In this attack the embedded enemy combatants were well into the execution phase of their OODA cycle before the US became aware of the presence of enemy. Bruce breaks this down into its key components and shows how the US has leveraged the concept of embedding in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also shows how superior information can be such a force multiplier that enemy troop counts become irrelevant to the campaign.

If you've admired the work of Drs. Ronfeldt and Arquilla then you should definitely pick up this book. It leverages their work and shows clearly how swarming and zapping can be applied at an army or fleet level.

At the risk of being repetitive, I too will comment on the fact that the title of the book and the dust jacket description seem to be two to three steps removed from the actual writings of the author. Now it could be that I had an unfair expectation, but I expected the book to focus more on how the military uses the new technology available to it to fight wars. I was looking for detailed explanations about how a military unit goes into to battle and fights. With this said the book offered more of a last 50 years review of how technology has changed the way we plan for war, build and buy weapons systems, and overall espionage. An interested topic, but not one that was advertised.

I do not read a vast number of these types of books so the rather high level review of many of the topics was enough for me. I can see how if you are well read on the topic and / or work in the fields discussed, this book could come across as light weight, but for a novice it was an interesting review of the topic. The author has a nice light and easy writing style that keeps the reader interested during some entertainingly dangerous technical discussions. I also really liked the side stories the author peppered through the book about topics as diverse as how this computer was designed or how this bit of espionage trick was created. I also picked up on a sense of humor that could be described as being influenced by Star Trek conventions and Dilbert books. Overall I enjoyed the book. I was disappointed at the misrepresentation of the title and could have done with some more detail, but overall it was an interesting easy book to read.

Edit of 21 Dec 07 to add links.

I know and admire the author of this book very much, and consider his and Allan Goodman's book on "Best Truth" to be among the top ten books on the topic of intelligence.

This book, unfortunately--and I am dismayed because I was really hoping for some new thoughts and stimulation that the author is certainly capable of--is what I would call a "quickie" book. It is also very misleadingly titled. In brief, this is the book Tom Clancy would write if a) he worked for RAND and b) did not care about making money.

It is not completely superficial--what is there is valid, documented, and for someone that does not read in this field, satisfactory. But to take just one example where my own work is dominant, that of open source intelligence: the author, who knows better, covers the topic with a trashy vignette of his visit to Margot Williams at the Washington Post and the result is, to me at least, quite annoying in its glibness and ignorance of all else that is going on in the open source world.

This book is also not about the future of war, unless one is a prisoner of (or funded sycophant to) the morons in the Pentagon that think that "information superiority" is still about expensive secret intelligence satellites, expensive unilateral secret communications links, and using very very expensive B-2 bombers to go after guys in caves. There are four future wars that will be fought over 100 years on six fronts: big wars with conventional armies (e.g. between India and Pakistan), small wars and criminal man-hunts around the world; nature wars including the wars against disease, water scarcity, mass migration, and trade in women and children as well as piracy and ethnic crime; and electronic wars, where states, corporations, and individuals will all vie for some form of advantage in the electronic environment that we have created and that is, because of Microsoft, a national catastrophe waiting to happen.

On the latter, the author gets 4 stars. On the former, zero. I hold the author blameless for the lousy title. This is about not how war is going to be fought in the 21st Century--it is about what the beltway bureaucracy is trying to sell to the Pentagon, at taxpayer expense, and it covers just 10% of the future needs and capabilities.

Recommended, with reviews:
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People
The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World
War Is a Racket: The Anti-War Classic by America's Most Decorated General, Two Other Anti=Interventionist Tracts, and Photographs from the Horror of It
The Paradox of American Power: Why the World's Only Superpower Can't Go It Alone
Race to the Swift: Thoughts on Twenty-First Century Warfare (International Series on Materials Science and Technology)
Wilson's Ghost: Reducing the Risk of Conflict, Killing, and Catastrophe in the 21st Century
Why We Fight
The Fog of War - Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara

Even though a few years have passed since it was written, the subject is more relevant than ever. The author presents the material in a unique way to show you how we got to where we are and keeps it entertaining. As a Captain in the Army, this gave me a better understanding of the thoughts and actions of our senior leaders at the strategic level but also gave me some ideas of how emerging threats could effect us at the tactical level. I didn't agree with 100 percent of it but the overall arguments were solid.

Of all the books currently coming out about modern warfare, THE NEW FACE OF WAR by Bruce Berkowitz is conceptual and pragmatic more than political and personal. Its focus is on the vital role of information and communications, and he makes a cogent case for the primary importance of information in modern warfare by showing the evolving role of both in war, as well as the evolving nature of war, before zeroing in on the present. Not clogged with technical jargon, yet cogent, this book is excellent though being three years old, some of his final conclusions about modern information warfare may no longer hold true.

After reading many books on future warfare, Fourth Generation Warfare, Information Warfare and so on (all of them were disappointing to say the least) and after trying my luck with Berkowitz's "The New Face of War" (which is half examples from the past and half simplistic theories about the future) I think it's time to cease looking for credible predictions of the war of the future, since every theory I have read is hopefully outdated the next year! Operations in Iraq proved some things about the value of achieving information dominance but the insurgency that followed proved also that the nature of war has not changed and that high tech information networks are scrap against a determined and cunning enemy. Even a conventional war against a first rate power (like China) is not clear how will be decided nor is the role of information warfare clear. Experience has shown that predictions in these fields are bound to be proved wrong in almost every case because there is the human factor, political considerations and pure luck which overturn everything along the way. Thus, I would not recommend this book to any serious student of war. It's far better to spend time studying military history which contains a wealth of informative examples and simply guess about the future.

Not as good a read as "Best Truth," but it's okay if you want to learn some background on Information Warfare. A more informative book on IW and one that is read by all working in this field is "Information Operations" by Leigh Armistead. It's more expensive, but worth it.

This book is an attempt to look at the modern military, and how wars will, and should, be fought in the future. The idea is to show how wars can be won cheaply, both in lives and in money, and what we need to do in advance to make these things happen.

Warfare is changing, as everyone knows. Technology has moved with what seems to be ever-increasing speed, but it's driven weaponry in somewhat unexpected directions. For instance, while nations who participated in the Second World War introduced new tanks at a prodigious rate during the war, and the various Cold War competitors redesigned these vehicles pretty regularly during that period, the United States hasn't had a new tank in about 25 years now: and ours is typically pointed out as the superior tank, in spite of this.

What is changing, however, is the technology of information. Nowadays, instead of trying to hit a tank with many bombs or artillery shells, the United States has the capability to use various "smart" munitions which can hit the target from hundreds, even thousands of miles away. This means that the technology level of the target is less important: if it gets killed by a smart bomb, who cares how advanced it *was*?

Warfare, then, has transformed from a contest of things like rates of fire, blast radius, and fatigue, to one regarding things like satellite uplinks, reaction times, and global positioning systems. This is the central point of Berkowitz's book: as things change, we need to be paying attention to what warfare has become, not what it was.

The author seems to think that some of this has been covered by the Pentagon, but some of it hasn't. Especially in the area of internet security, he believes the military needs to coordinate much better with the private sector to make sure that our systems aren't disrupted at exactly the wrong moment by our enemies. This is the one thing in the book he pretty clearly advocates.

The book is sprinkled with interesting and amusing anecdotes, connecting Robert Whitehead, the inventor of the modern torpedo, with the movie the Sound of Music, for instance, and explaining how Robert Ballard, the guy who found the Titanic, also worked looking for sunken subs with his robot submersibles. This makes the subject of the book rather more easy to digest than otherwise. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the subject, except perhaps someone already very knowledgeable on it.

I've had a couple of tries at "information warfare" without finishing the book on offer. But Berkowitz personalizes this stuff by tying each aspect to an individual--generally an interesting one. So he kept me reading all the way through.

Basically, he argues that in the age of the internet, all the old bets are off. Thus a ragtag band of guerrillas was able to inflict one of the largest calamities upon the United States in its 200-year history. Mohammed Ata held the "high ground" of information technology, while NORAD and the FAA tried and failed to play catchup on September 11, 2001.

In Afghanistan, by contrast, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, Army, and Air Force seized and kept the high ground. Thus we had Special Forces soldiers mounted on horseback, knowing their exact location by means of Global Positioning satellies, and using lasers to mark targets for B-52 bombers--bombers that had taken, flown to Afghanistan, and orbited for minutes or hours without knowing what their target would be.

Well written and definitely worth owning...