Frank Tiboni, Federal Computer Week, Feb. 13, 2006
The military has a new weapon in its arsenal, and it’s not an impenetrable tank, silent submarine or UFO-like aircraft. It is information.
The most noteworthy element in the-now famous picture of U.S. special forces on horseback riding across Afghanistan is the steel-cased satellite communications equipment they are transporting, not their iron-clad arms. Information is now a weapon in the increasingly transformed military. (more)
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This is one of the best, short accounts of the increasingly central role that information is playing in U.S. military strategy. It demonstrates several phenomena that are under investigation in my own research, including how and why the military comes to know that we have passed from the "Industrial Age" to the "Information Age", how and why information, as both problem and solution, becomes the central element in an emergent mode of warfare which is said to be a response to the historical transition from industrial to information age. In short, information warfare/network-centric warfare are results, not first causes. The task is to better understand the processes of observation and orientation, of knowledge and subject formation, that come before and result in the articulation of new strategies and doctrines.