Revolutionary war.

• Author: Carter, Phillip
• Position: Book Review

THE NEW FACE OF WAR: How War Will Be Fought in the 21st Century by Bruce Berkowitz Free Press, $26.00

Soldiers love to tell war stories. Bruce Berkowitz is not a soldier--he's a former CIA analyst who has worked for the Senate Intelligence Committee and the secretary of defense. But he believes himself to be qualified to talk about war the way grunts do because he believes modern wars will be fought as much with information as ammunition.

"Today the ability to collect, communicate, process, and protect information is the most important factor defining military power," Berkowitz writes in his book, The New Face of War. "As the theories and technology of information-driven warfare have developed since Desert Storm, warfare has changed. The ability to maneuver quickly and concentrate firepower have become less crucial. The new capabilities that decide who wins [include] the ability to pick off your adversary from a distance with a single shot, the ability to maintain a stealthy network of forces ... [and] the ability to control information so that you can complete your decision cycle before the enemy completes his."

It's easy to understand how superior information helped U.S. forces succeed in, say, the Gulf War or in Kosovo. But as Berkowitz explains, information was also a key factor for forces like the Mogadishu mob that fought the U.S. Army in Somalia in 1993. It relied on a network of cellular phones and burning tires to send information about U.S. troop movements.

Unlike much of the military literature published since the Gulf War, Berkowitz does not simply tout the "revolution in military affairs"--the belief that technological advances are central to military power. In The New Face of War, he argues instead that a combination of "people, ideas, and hardware" determines victory. To make his case, Berkowitz draws on four major theories of warfare that have emerged in the last three decades. The first, known as "asymmetric warfare," posits that one should use one's strength to attack an enemy's weakness. Though many people mistakenly believe this concept originated with guerrilla warfare or terrorism, its lineage dates to Sun Tzu and his ancient work, The Art of War. More recently, the United States embraced it as a way of balancing the scales during the Cold War. Unable to compete directly with the Soviet Union on a tank-for-tank, plane-for-plane basis, U.S. leaders recognized that by emphasizing their strength--such as the...