Preparing for information‐age conflict: Part 1 conceptual and organizational dimensions

Abstract

Prevailing hopes for the peace‐enhancing tendencies of interconnectivity must be tempered by a realization that the information revolution augurs a new epoch of conflict, in which new modes of armed combat and social upheaval will emerge. We propose a four‐part vision to prepare for this new epoch. This article spells out the first two parts — the conceptual and organizational (a second article will convey the doctrinal and strategic parts). In our vision, preparing for information‐age conflict involves rethinking the very concept of ‘information’. This is achieved by adding to the dominant view, that information is largely about ‘information processing’, a less‐developed view that emphasizes the ‘structuring’ roles of information. In this latter view, embedded information is what enables a structure to hold its form; and this helps account for the successful functioning of all sorts of actors and systems, in peace as well as in war. The organizational dimension of our analysis holds that the information revolution favours the rise of the network form, in particular the all‐channel network in which every node may communicate with every other. Transnational terrorist and criminal organizations in particular are gaining strength by resorting to new network designs. For state actors to cope with them, a key challenge is to develop hybrids of hierarchies and networks.

Keywords:

• Cybernetics
• information structuring
• institutions
• networks
• organizational design
• systems analysis