Freedom of Information Act

Prashanth Mundkur mundkur at ece.uci.edu
Mon Oct 2 23:33:19 PDT 2000


Matt C wrote:


> On Mon, 2 Oct 2000, Chuck0 wrote:
>
> > matt hogan wrote:
> > > "Network centric Warfare". I'll have more to say about this word in the future.
> >
> > Hey, Matt, could you give us a quick one sentence definition of this
> > phrase?
>
> Dunno if you meant me-Matt or he-Matt, but.....
>
> http://www.nawcwpns.navy.mil/~analysis/
>
>
> Matt

On perhaps a related note, here's a portion from Phil Agre's report from the 1997 Telecommunications Policy Research Conference

http://commons.somewhere.com/rre/1998/RRE.notes.and.recommenda4.html

<snip>

In the new world, the military guys said, warfare is no longer conducted along borders and boundaries, with front lines and supply lines and all of that. Warfare, in fact, can no longer be comprehended in spatial terms. To the contrary, in a world where communications infrastructure is everywhere and every element of communications infrastructure is a sensitive military target, war has no spatial limits. And when terrorists can use public communications networks to conduct endless low-level attacks anywhere in the world from anywhere else in the world, war has no temporal limits -- they actually used the phrase "permanent war".

That's not all. War, on these guys' conception, is now conducted in every aspect of society. Foreign manipulation of the content of American news media, for example, is "cultural war". Taken all together, the result is -- and this is their term -- "total war". You might have thought that the Soviet Union had fallen, that the United States was by far the greatest military power on earth, that the heavy cloud of the Cold War had lifted, and that it was time for the United States to stand down from its total mobilization, disband the national security state, end the culture of secrecy, reshape the military in some reasonable proportion to its plausible adversaries, and get to work on the rest of society's problems. You might think all of that, but you would be wrong. In the world of the Internet, it would seem, things have only gotten worse. We are now in a world of permanent, total, omnipresent, pervasive war. Cold War plus plus: all war, all the time. They said this.

</snip>

Off to a restful sleep...

--prashanth



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