Purpose of the lesson

SE-503 THE TECHNOLOGICAL/INFORMATION DIMENSION

PURPOSE:

To understand how technology and information has revolutionized the international environment. Technology and information has created a dynamic environment that can enhance interaction but also create instability that can eventually lead to conflict.

LESSON OUTLINE:

Thesis: Technology and the mobility of information that technology engenders directly affects how states and groups interact with one another. Since advances in technology will proceed unevenly, the nature of global group interaction will likewise change asymmetrically. Modern, technology-based societies depend on timely access to and movement of massive amounts of information and knowledge. The ability of state and non-state actors to adapt culturally, economically, and ideologically in the face of new sources of information will determine their place in a New World order. The media is playing an increasingly central role in shaping perceptions of the international environment. The media can shape attitudes and influence public opinion.

Main Point I: Technology can enhance interaction, stability, and cooperation among states.

a. Long term technological advance can be the foundation for international cooperation.

b. Technology can increase life expectancy and improve quality of life.

c. Technology has the potential to improve interaction via advances in communication and transportation.

Main Point II: Technological advances can create disparities among states and be the basis for conflict.

a. Uneven technological development can create relative advantage and ultimately instability.

b. Uneven diffusion of technological can create disparities and potential for conflict.

c. Technological advances favoring offensive military capability can create instability.

Main Point III: Our ability to adequately manage information can give us a critical advantage in the strategic environment.

a. We must be able to acquire timely information.

b. Use computers and software to enhance our ability to process information.

c. Need to develop sophisticated systems to distribute information to those who need it.

We need to be able to defend our information.

Main Point IV: The media is playing an increasingly central role in international relations.

a. It can play a significant role in how people perceive the world.

b. It can shape opinions.

c. The media's ability to disseminate information quickly can have a direct impact on decision makers.

d. It has the capability to shape perceptions of reality.

LESSON INTEGRATION AND RATIONALE

This lesson explores how information and technology can have a direct impact on the strategic environment. Information and access to information has socioeconomic impacts. It has the ability to shape perceptions and decentralize decision making. Technology and the increasing ease with which it can be transferred between societies can be a potential source of instability. The transfer of dangerous technology is difficult to control and has the potential to spark conflict.

LESSON OBJECTIVES:

Before we get to the objectives, it's important to understand the five precepts upon which these objectives are written (according to the Hughes article). Proposition 1 & 2 are based on what the author calls the "globalist" perspective, the last three are based on a "realist" perspective.

Much technological advance is essentially nonzero-sum-individuals and states can very often assist one another without cost to themselves. Therefore, long-term technological advance is a basis for international cooperation.
Many technologies increase and potentially improve the interaction of states and trans-national actors. These include communications and transportation.
Despite the nonzero-sum nature of technological change in the long-run, interim leads in certain technologies create inequalities. Thus in the short-term technology can be a basis for conflict.
Technology advances unevenly over time as well as across states may affect interstate relations.
Some specific technologies, particularly military ones, can make conflict more likely. In particular, certain technologies favor offensive military action.

503.1 Comprehend how technology can be the basis for cooperation and integration among state actors.

503.11 Discuss how technology can enhance life expectancy and quality of life.

Life expectancy has risen drastically over time. (Hughes) Much of this can be attributed to:

Advances in medical technology
Increases in productivity in agriculture (automation, pesticides, etc.) means there's more food available
Increases in income levels: risen from $940 in 1800 Western Europe to $19,590 in 1992; and $883 in the Third World to $1,096 (in 1990 dollars). This was caused by industrialization.
Energy production begets increased productivity (Watt's steam engine produced 40 horsepower in 1800, while a modern electric plant produces 1.5 million horsepower.)

503.12 Describe how technology can enhance human interaction.

No one country could unilaterally have accomplished the progress made globally on these four indicators (medicine, agriculture, income, and energy) in the last 200 years. Globalists point out that the spread of agricultural, industrial, and health technology around the world made possible this collective global success (that the spread is incomplete explains many of the great inequalities still existing globally). Do not individuals from around the world who are better fed, clothed, housed, and educated increase their own contributions to technological advance and thus our collective well-being? Impoverished and hungry Russians and Japanese might not threaten our military security, but they would also make limited contributions to global fusion or electronic technology. Richer and better-fed Indians might compete with us in world markets, but they would also push back technological frontiers and improve our own lives in ways we could never anticipate. (Hughes)

Human interaction requires transportation and communication. Although the word "revolution" is overused, no other word can adequately describe nineteenth-and twentieth century developments in these arenas. A trip around the world in 1800 required several years by sailing ship. Jet aircraft can now circle the earth in one day and an orbiting spacecraft can do it in ninety minutes. Before the invention of the telegraph in 1840, nearly all messages traveled with human beings so that communication speeds were the same as those found in transportation. Today communications satellites transmit information between any two points in the globe almost instantaneously. (Hughes)

While building global community, modern transportation and communication simultaneously make contemporary states permeable and increase penetration by external actors. Yet societies can cut off transport much easier than they can restrict communication. (Hughes)

503.2 Comprehend how technology can be the basis for conflict.

503.21 Explain how uneven technological diffusion can create inequality and conflict.

Medical, transportation, communications, and production technologies developed anywhere on the globe eventually come into use everywhere in the world. In the short and mid-runs, however, realists point out that all of these technologies confer to particular states advantages that translate into relative power. (Hughes)

While globalists may argue that technological advance will ultimately diffuse throughout the world and help all of humanity, the last section indicated that a problem lies in the geographic unevenness of that advance. (Hughes)

States who obtain technologies early have an advantage.
In addition, technological advance does not necessarily proceed uniformly over time.

Many economists have noted what they call Kondratieff (or Kondratiev) cycles of approximately fifty to sixty years in the world economy. Joseph Schumpeter made distinctions among invention (identifiable technical change), innovation (the "introduction of new products, techniques and systems into the economy"17), and diffusion. (Hughes)

After the initial invention, surge of innovation, and associated economic growth, a period of diminishing productivity improvements and slower growth follows. Although the technologies (as inventions) for a new upswing are often available throughout the downturn, they initially contribute little to productivity. In fact, recognition of their potential contributions may even retard investment and contribute to slowing economic growth or stagnation.

503.22 Describe how certain technologies can favor offensive military weapons and how this can lead to conflict.

Thus individual countries seek to develop a wide variety of technologies, especially those with military application, before their acquisition by other states, and act to maintain their monopoly as long as possible. The struggle for relative advantage gives rise to considerable interstate rivalry. (Hughes)

Military technology also shrinks and integrates the world. All states must now attend to the military capabilities and intentions of many other states scattered around the globe. It is less clear, however, whether this force will develop global community and institutions, or whether it will reinforce states in their unilateral efforts to provide security. As we have seen, technological advantage can also be the object of interstate competition. Thus some modernists are realists rather than globalists and foresee an indefinite continuation of interstate rivalry. (Hughes)

503.3 Comprehend the implications of the information revolution on the Strategic Environment.

503.1 Give examples of how the rise of the "Global villager" may impact security interests.

What turns the world into a global village, with everyone capable of looking over each others' shoulders, may also promote the creation of global villages-communities of interest and inclination that span the globe but let members isolate themselves from others outside. (Libicki)

The net's ability to connect people with the world is what allows them to identify their own communities, archives, and news groups and pretty much stick to them.
It's a continuation of the 20th Century phenomenon that saw the reduced costs of transportation and communications forge a mass American consumer market from a collection of smaller regional ones
Communications at first enables the "CNN-ization" of perception. Continued evolution results in deCNN-ized perception and the rise of the same voluntarily isolated communities that predate mass consciousness. This time, though, such communities will subset and superset national boundaries and thus the states that govern them. This distinction could matter a great deal to how national security is defined and ensured.
World leaders use broadcast media as bully pulpit. Dictators' activities are checked by external interest groups' ability to highlight atrocities (Bosnia, Africa) and influence international action (UN resolutions, peace keeping force deployments). Dissident groups gang international support through like minded ex-patriots connected through the Internet.

The ascendance of net over nation could alter what people would fight over. Historically, wars have involved challenges to territorial control- since it is the source of wealth. The Industrial Revolution made factories, infrastructure, and resources-all of which could be physically seized-the source of wealth. Even today's postindustrial service economies are tied to place. Otherwise why would so many put up with Manhattan when Maine or the Ozarks would be much more pleasant? Yet, the true assets of Wall Street-the knowledge, connections, and legally valid financial claims-are, themselves, place-independent . (Libicki)

As networks expand to enable better remote communications, the validity of holding on to any one place becomes increasingly questionable. A future Hong Kong could as easily be relocated to Vancouver or even to a hundred Chinatowns scattered about but networked together. The less wealth can be captured by physical possession, the less motivated others will be to use physical means to capture wealth.
The shift to net from nation lets communities be knit by constant communications regardless of place. Communities without political self governance can maintain their cultural mores by establishing their own sub-networks as self-contained universes.
It will become increasingly easier to tune out the rest of the world, for better or worse. The expansion of communications (and easy syntactic if not semantic translation) and ability to accommodate separate domains gives competing cultures room to roam without collision. Hence, more sprechenraum, thus less strife.

The 20th century has seen large wars result from the alignment of national communities with the state violence. Millions died when Germans fighting for the Fatherland fought Russians protecting Mother Russia. The net works against such correlation by making it easier for people to be different, letting them pick and choose among communications flows and thus messages.

The increasing importance of spanning communities over local or national ones may be a harbinger of less war-but not necessarily less violence.

503.32 Describe the impact of information revolution on communities according to Martin Libicki.

The Libicki article was pretty interesting. It described the impact of the Internet on national security. Apparently written just a couple of years ago, many of the "future" capabilities he mentions have already come to fruition. Much of what he describes is included in what the military now refers to as either information warfare or information operations.

Libicki argues: The impact of information technology can be discussed in terms of five broad trends: the erasure of distance, fixed and floating networks, universal translatability, the mutability of truth and, as a consequence of all this, the rise of the global villager.

Technology has impacted all conflicts, but information technology has made the greatest impact on national security affairs in the past 20 years. Offers these examples: The use of cassette tapes in the 1979 Iranian revolution; fax machines getting word out to protestors/sympathizers/news media during the in Tiananmen Square uprising, the use of CNN as a means of communications between world leaders (Iraq, Panama, etc). Coins the term CNNization (ubiquity of broadcast media), which is a two edged sword: separates people because they can live any where and still maintain contact with home, and joins people because like minded people are no longer separated by geography. Argues that "The state is not ready to wither away, but its suzerainty (dominion) over a world of global villagers (despite some resurgence of nationalism in the Second World) will be redefined."

Erasure of distance: The cost of doing business over wide distances (especially overseas) will keep dropping dramatically.

The volume of international calls will keep rising briskly, and low-power cellular phones are likely to, in ten years, permit satellite connected phone calls from anywhere. Most cities will also have the infrastructure for dial-up videotelephony.
Freer communications tend to cut the cost of conducting both routine and knowledge-intensive business
Other barriers to business that derive from differences in language or currency would also fall. Computers that can recognize anyone's speech will reach the market by the mid-199O's (replacing systems that must be trained to the nuances of each speaker). Language translation is making comparable progress. More people will want to learn English to understand the growing warehouse of entertainment and educational material. Similar barriers are falling in currency translation. Electronic banking and the virtues of automatic currency markets will let people keep bank accounts with equal facility in any currency
Globalization, in the 1980s at least, promoted old fashioned liberal values (e.g., free commerce) in both West and South because it freed wealth from state influence The information revolution can only deepen such trends. When wealth is reified in physical, largely immovable objects like land, resources, factories, and buildings, it is subject to diversion by governments. When markets must be serviced from local sites, the state gains similar leverage.
As more wealth is contained in the movable intangibles of information, or when markets can be served from anywhere the influence of the state recedes.
The Internet's vast, fast, and reliable electronic mail network, public files access and bulletin board group foster the growth of global communities linked by interest and earlier separated by geography. In the 1990s and beyond, savvy nations will complement human capital with dense robust information infrastructures to jack their growth path upwards.
The communications revolution will also accelerate the transfer of open-source defense-relevant technology, making it much harder to control. Any computer chip reducible to an algorithmic formula could, one day, be manufactured in one of hundreds of facilities. The world will not lack small rogue fabrication shops willing to evade export controls to make money. Technology control regimes for unclassified software and microelectronics will be virtually impossible to police.

The Mutability of Truth:

As the amount of information increases, its marginal utility declines, but so does its veracity. Why? Start with broadcasting. Today's satellite broadcasting systems relay material to terrestrial broadcasting stations which then relay them to television sets. Tomorrow's systems will reach television sets (equipped with eighteen-inch satellite receivers) directly-bypassing the investment in both television stations, and the political control that nations can have over transmissions.
Virtually every Third World village is likely to have at least one such television
Dictators will be hard pressed to keep rivals off the air. No coup plotter could keep his prey off the air either.

Other points:

Three problems frustrate any effort to deny technology to specific states. (Hughes)

Collective goods and free riders. Example: NATO members collectively benefited from a militarily weaker Eastern opposition and such weakness thus constituted a collective good for the alliance. Yet each individually could benefit by expanding trade ties with the East. Cheating did not take the form of blatant shipments of military goods, but rather of trading in categories that were in the large gray area. Consider, for example, the ambiguity of technology for a truck factory or oil refinery. Similar problem for nuclear proliferation, as such items are called "dual use" technology like supercomputers and vacuum pumps.

Technology is sometimes difficult to identify by origin. Thus technology that the Iraqi nuclear program obtained from the West has often been nearly untraceable. This has encouraged cheating on the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons regime.

Would-be proliferators of this technology have circumvented restrictions with an extensive network for economic and military technology espionage, using diplomatic missions, exchange students, and other personnel. Example: Iraqi weapons deliveries.

As third wave (information age) war-form takes shape, a new breed of "knowledge warriors" has begun to emerge-intellectuals in and out of uniform dedicated to the idea that knowledge can win, or prevent, wars. (Toffler)

Duane Andrews former Assistant Secretary of Defense for, underlined the difference when he termed information a "strategic asset." That means it is not just a matter of battlefield intelligence or tactical attacks on the other side's radar or telephone networks, but a powerful lever capable of altering high-level decisions by the opponent. More recently, Andrews spoke of "knowledge warfare" in which "each side will try to shape enemy actions by manipulating the flow of intelligence and information."

Cyberwar implies "trying to know all about an adversary while keeping it from knowing much about oneself. It means turning the 'balance of information and knowledge' in one's favor, especially if the balance of forces is not." And exactly as in the civilian economy, it means "using knowledge so that less capital and labor may have to be expended."

Certain things are nevertheless clear. Any military-like any company or corporation-has to perform at least four key functions with respect to knowledge. It must acquire, process, distribute, and protect information, while selectively denying or distributing it to its adversaries and/or allies.

READINGS:

Hughes, Barry B., "Economic Development and Distribution of Wealth"

Toffler, Alvin and Heidi, "The Knowledge Warriors"

Libicki, Martin C., "The Net and Its Discontent"

Reading Rationale:

The excerpt from Continuity and Change in World Politics provide the basis for discussion of the concepts of the role of technology in the modern era, technology transfer between international actors, and concerns about dual use technologies. The excerpt from War and Anti-War suggests that information proliferation and information dependence presents opportunities as well as security challenges for Third Wave, technology-based societies in the areas of command and control and the media. Martin C. Libicki's article "The Net and Its Discontent" provides an overview of how information is reshaping the strategic environment.