While Kessler provides a credible description of a CIA on the rebound, using information thoughtfully and with some awareness of its importance, his discussion of the war on terror is very weak. The information is thin, often drawn from newspaper accounts. The innovative campaign in Afghanistan receives scarcely four pages, a discussion that introduces an important CIA branch (the paramilitary Special Activities Division) we should have read about much earlier. Kessler's description of Tenet's reforms before and after September 11 consists largely of sweeping statements in the place of analysis (e.g., "In the end, it required a commitment by the entire U.S. government to change the way business was done").
Kessler's celebration of Tenet and his renovated agency becomes shrilly defensive in the face of criticism. When other observers charge that poor information-sharing in the intelligence world made the 9/11 attacks possible, the book responds by blaming the State Department and FBI while simultaneously claiming the attacks were impossible to predict. The constructive contributions of other agencies are sidestepped, as when Kessler removes the Philippine police from the scene of Operation Bojinka in 1995, when a Manila police officer acting on her own broke up an Al Qaeda plot to bomb civilian jetliners over the Pacific Ocean. Kessler defends other aspects of the war on terror in strange ways, as when he says Jose Padilla was arrested for "the attempted dirty bomb attack on America," rather than the sketchier explanation the Department of Justice actually presented.
The 2003 war in Iraq receives fuller treatment, with more detailed descriptions of the CIA's preparatory work. Several passages in particular suggest information operations of the sort that Berkowitz describes. But Kessler barely explores the ramifications of this transformation in warfare. Instead, tantalizing references alternate with passionate denunciations of the Hussein regime and reiterations of the Bush administration's casus belli.
Kessler's thinness of information is complemented by a light style. Portentous sentence-long paragraphs dot the text. ("There were lessons to be learned from 9/11, Peterson told the analysts.") Policy discussions have a tendency to slide into detailed descriptions of meals and sex habits. Passages contradict themselves or lose their way -- one begins by asserting that North Korea was not much of a threat, then concludes that it's a threat after all. The book jumps frequently across the 20th century, not always coherently; useful details are dropped in odd locations.
Taken together, these books make an implicit argument for the importance of historically grounding information operations. Netwar theory proves a useful lens through which to view recent history. Institutional transformation, for example, becomes something more than internal careerism and budgeteering; instead we see complex organizations grappling with novel concepts. When Berkowitz narrates the growth of information warfare through the Cold War, the conflicts of the 1990s, and the war on terror, information operations emerge as one replacement for the Pentagon's Cold War�era hierarchical command structures.
Kessler covers a different institution with a shorter chronology, seeing the new paradigm appearing instead from the ruins of the CIA's decline during the years just before and after the Soviet Union's collapse. Both the Defense Department and the CIA mutate and survive, generating new forms: netwar teams, counterterrorism centers. One open question is to what extent information warfare requires such creative structures, and how long they will last.
While Berkowitz emphasizes the universal utility of network warfare -- he considers Al Qaeda's strikes a brilliant example of netwar -- his primary focus is on America's use of it. Kessler is even more America-oriented, ignoring the intelligence agencies of U.S. allies and treating current enemies more as demons than as networks. Limitations of space, time, and institutional focus explain these omissions, but a more distributed sample would shed more light on the topic.
Netwar, after all, is a global tool, used by Serbian hackers and by Philippine protesters, by globalization activists and by transnational crime syndicates. The rapid growth of the I.O. model surely deserves attention, as does its role as one of the first truly global organizational structures.
The cultural framework behind networked warfare remains underexplored. Kessler makes a first pass at this, linking networked creativity to the American dream of economic advancement and innovation, arguing that each supports the other. But he fails to develop his analysis of I.O. enough to establish a connection. Berkowitz's account is more institutional on this score, focusing on the Pentagon's development (sometimes despite itself) of netwar. But we can go further. America's military tradition has long emphasized low-level initiative, and our libertarian tendency supports the free flow of information. American culture is a fertile ground for netwar teams and their rapid, nearly improvisational operations.
Changes in business culture are also relevant to a discussion of I.O. To his credit, Berkowitz discusses this angle, partly through references to Arquilla and Ronfeldt, who in their analysis move readily from military to business to criminal groups. With due allowance for the persistence of managerial authority, the sustained shift from vertical command in enterprises to an increasing reliance on horizontal, team-based work suggests further grounding for American I.O. One detail merits further development, given American backwardness in the area: mobile technology. It would be interesting to see a non-American study of the American use of mobile devices in information warfare.
Perhaps more significantly, the recent history of political Islam bears on Al Qaeda's attachment to netwar. With the exceptions of the Iranian Islamic state and the brief Taliban rule in Afghanistan, Islamists tend to be in opposition, out of central governmental authority. Decades of experience in dissenting Brotherhoods, insurgent militias, or local leadership contesting central control encourages a greater affinity for information-centric organization than does running a traditional statist military organization.
Likewise, the marginal, guerrilla, or revolutionary experience fosters a facility for information operations. Consider Al Qaeda's distributed nature and roving career, its central core migrating from Saudi Arabia to Sudan to Afghanistan to (almost certainly) Pakistan, with franchise-like affiliates around the world negotiating for local leverage, material power, media play, and religious persuasion.
Some Islamists, such as those influenced by Sayyid Qutb, see the secular world as fallen and threatening enough to justify sustained disguise and deception, as the 9/11 hijackers likely did. They are well prepared for the invisibility required by swarming. Such a movement is already practicing netwar in its daily operations.
The war in Iraq continues as a guerrilla struggle, with coalition forces seeking energetically to get inside the insurgents' OODA cycles. The global campaign against Al Qaeda continues, in much the same form as in early 2003. Viruses continue to spread wantonly across networks, without any proven cases of an electronic Pearl Harbor. Information warfare has emerged from its larval stage, and new I.O. organizations vie for global reach. Between them, Berkowitz and Kessler offer a useful framework for studying this pattern as it continues to emerge.
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