EVERYWHERE MAN
“[T]he internet has become a battlefield,” one that “changes how conflicts are fought,” co-authors P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking write. “[T]his battle changes what ‘war’ means,” with victory going to those who command more attention, more effec- tively. Te principles of warfare on the internet are already pretty clear, they write. In fact, Prussian general and iconic military thinker Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831)
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“would have implicitly understood almost everything it is doing to conf lict today.” But, as “Like- War” explores, social media have created new rules for war and poli- tics that would have flummoxed Clausewitz and are doing much the same to today’s leaders.
n the ongoing, all-consuming exploration of the future battlefield, the recently published book “LikeWar: Te Weaponization of Social Media” adds a new dimension. Only this battlefield is already well-established: the internet.
Tese many titles of authority are no casual hyperbole. Singer comes by them honestly, and with surprising humility. His thinking and writing venture into virtually every corner of defense: the nature of warfare in all of its realms—land, sea, air, space and cyber—military history, doctrine, emerging and future technologies, war gaming, organizational change and more.
Te evolution of warfare is more than comfortable territory to P.W. (Peter Warren) Singer. It is where he has built much of his life’s work. Singer is a strategist at New Amer- ica, a Washington-based think tank “dedicated to renewing America by continuing the quest to realize our nation’s highest ideals, honestly confronting the challenges caused by rapid technological and social change, and seizing the opportunities those changes create.” He is also an author and an editor at Popular Science magazine and an offi- cial “mad scientist” for the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command.
series of decisions that really attack some of the core advantages that allowed us to be ahead— specifically, spending on research and development and attracting the world’s top talent to America.
“There have been a ”
To call Singer prolific is a glaring understatement. So is just naming the six books he has authored, both nonfiction and fiction. Te Wall Street Journal has called him “the premier futurist in the national-security environment.” Te Smithson- ian Institution has named Singer one of the nation’s 100 leading innovators. Defense News includes him among the 100 most influential people on defense issues. Foreign Policy magazine has him on its Top 100 Global Tinkers List. And Onalytica Ltd., a social media data analysis consultancy, counts him among the 10 most influential voices in the world on cybersecurity and 25th most influential in the field of robotics.
Given mundane but necessary time constraints, Army AL&T had a painful choice to make in talking with Singer: where to focus its discussion. We chose trans- formation to be Topic A, namely the transformational aspects of technology and whether there’s any realistic hope for DOD to transform its acquisition system into one that could be responsive to emerging technologies. Te theme is all too familiar to Singer, based on his experiences with the military.
“Te pressure point for the acqui- sition system is going to be, ‘How do I have my tentacles out there so that I am aware of this tech- nology, when and where these breakthroughs are happening,
and I’m incorporating it as rapidly as possible?’” he told Army AL&T in an interview, explaining how the game-changing tech- nologies are increasingly proliferated around the world. “Te thinking can’t be, ‘We’re going to be the only ones with this technology.’ Rather, it should be, ‘We’re going to be the ones that make use of it the best.’”
THE NEXT Straightforward and plainspoken, Singer asks as many ques- tions as he answers; but then, that’s the point. In interviews Singer has done with the military specialty media, one of the key questions he has embraced centers on technology, which now happens to be the focus of the Army’s push to modernize so that it can establish a decisive advantage in the battlespace. Is the U.S. military in a position to seize advantages that are already there, such as the internet? It’s one thing to adapt tech- nologically in response to a known threat, but quite another to waste no time in harnessing technology to claim the battle- field in the first place.
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Army AL&T Magazine
January-March 2019
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