For many Americans, ‘high-tech’ may be an adjective attached to a panoply
of benign gadgets designed to improve both work and play. But high-tech has
a darker side, especially when it’s connected to relations between nations.
The Information Technology, War and Peace Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies, established with support from the Ford Foundation, tracks the effects of information technology on traditional statecraft and new forms of networked global politics.
Recently, the Providence Business News spoke with professor of international studies and Director of Global Security Programs James Der Derian about how technology has changed the conduct of global politics.
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PBN: Why was the Information Technology, War and Peace Project created?
DER DERIAN: The project was started in response to many new issues raised by the 9-11 attacks. It has a particular focus on how information technology is driving many of those issues. Not only is technology conveying these stories, but in some ways, they’re driving the stories. They’re producing effects that are shaping U.S. foreign policy. An image of a hooded prisoner at Abu Ghraib can circulate the whole global network system and almost instantaneously produce a very profound effect.
Q. How do you define information technology?
A. Infor-mation technology is shorthand for everything that makes it possible to produce enormous amounts of information and transmit it in near real-time over fiber optic networks. But it can be as old as print technologies or as new as satellite imaging.
We’re also looking at the new convergence of the different forms of technology that rely on computers and digital code – everything from the Gnome Project and how it has political and global implications to understanding how warfare is fought in network-centric fashion.
Q. What is the relationship between information technology and warfare in the world today?
A. There’s an intimate connection now between information technology in the business world and how wars are fought. The United States now fights wars as it conducts business. The idea is to have just-in-time inventories, to interconnect many different arms of the military in joint operations, to have the capability to see further, faster and get there sooner than your enemy; all that is based on what the military calls commercial off-the-shelf technology, or COTS. The military has learned that by the time it takes them to do the startup research, they’ve already been surpassed by Silicon Valley. So now they’re outsourcing.
Q. How is information technology used to advance global conflict?
A. You can track the rise and fall of every civilization on how it manages to use various forms of information technology. In the past, people tried to intimidate their enemies through the use of drums and gongs. Propaganda has been used to demoralize opponents. So it’s always been part of warfare. What’s new is the extent it can be used to represent warfare. Some people say there’s been a breakdown between the representation of war and the actual conduct of warfare. The way we train for war, the way we simulate war dominates the public imagination more than the dirt and grime and gore of actual warfare.
Q. Isn’t the technological representation of combat and combat merging?
A. Absolutely. Increasingly, warfare is mediated by technology, be it the screen inside the tank, the console in the jet fighter or even the war room where command and control now operates from Virginia. All that is made possible by information technology. And it’s something to worry about. If you have higher lethality in these highly precise weapons and you can lower the threshold of collateral damage, it lowers the threshold for using violence. If you have an intractable political problem and some civilian in the Defense Department or some general in the Pentagon says, ‘We can solve that in a smart way using precise munitions with low collateral damage,’ it means that civilian leaders might be more willing and ready to take advantage of that.
Q. So information technology has made war less of a last resort in settling political disputes?
A. I don’t want to play down the role of national interest or ideology or national security doctrine in determining when and where and how we go to war, but we do see increasingly what I call a ‘wag-the-dog syndrome.’ What’s supposed to be the technique or the method, as opposed to the goal, is wagging the civilian policy-making. If you have this extraordinary capability in the hands of the military and a diminished capability in diplomatic circles, you’re going to look to the military first for the solution of a lot of global issues.
John Mello is a freelance writer who writes on business and technology
from his home in Woonsocket. He can be reached at jpmello@cox.net.
