The Art of War in the Network Age

Conclusion

The RMA/Transformation is an eminently paradoxical phenomenon, in several respects. It is above all based on a social discovery of the effects of technology, of which one of the major trials was the Vietnam War and its consequences, which included the second offset strategy, about the planning of American defence. However, even the Vietnam experience is paradoxical in itself, as an attempt to apply rationalities proper to fluid spaces in one of the most solid spaces there is – a country with a geography profoundly marked by jungles, rice fields, swamps and mountains. In this sense, the military practices were directed towards a verticalization of the battle spaces [ADE 13], in a perspective seeking to simultaneously get away from the reality of the war and attempting to seize what was relevant. However, the fact remains that reality is stubborn and the art of war is based on its own rationality. From Khe Sanh to Kandahar or Kerbala, advanced technologies do not compensate for a strategy that is fundamentally flawed any more today than it did yesterday. The search for a “perfect war” has hardly even resulted (again) in a confrontation of its fundamentals. It is in solid environments that politics transpires, so we cannot avoid them [HEN 13a].

Certainly and evidently, the process of informationalization of war through the development of the combination of the “hunter/killer” and logics of reticulation – the “reconnaissance-strike complex” of Soviet military theory in ...