168 Book Reviews

The end of the Cold War has not resulted in detente in Asia, but in a contest between the maritime power America, which cannot tolerate the assertion of hegemony over Eurasia, or any of its vital parts, and China, who is the current candidate. Lim shows how, after 1905, East Asia became the global focus of unresolved great power strategic tension, and how this drew in the United States because of the maritime basis of American security. Lim does not define security, but it is clear that she puts military security foremost. She presents the quadrilaterals as players in a century-old power game to which there is no foreseeable end. As a work of history, the book has a somewhat limited perspective, focusing strictly on the power game and its military aspects. Economic, religious, cultural and domestic policy considerations are rarely discussed at depth. The books strictly military approach sits uneasily with its sweeping rejection of the standard solutions for managing strategic tensions in Asia described by Lim as the economic interdependence fallacy, democracy as a panacea and the multilateral myth. Having said this, Lim provides a highly readable overview of 100 years of East Asian geo-political history in 177 pages. As a concise and yet comprehensive analysis of the military aspects of great power rivalry in the region, The Geopolitics of East Asia constitutes a valuable and interesting contribution in the field of strategic studies. Ingolf Kiesow Swedish Defence Research Agency

The New Face of War: How War Will Be Fought in the 21 st Century Bruce Berkowitz. New York: The Free Press, 2003. 18.99/$26.00. 257 pp. Bruce Berkowitz, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University and a senior analyst at the RAND Corporation, has written an engaging and informative study of war in the information age. It is part theory and part history; both aspects merit attention. The authors central contention is that the information revolution has changed the character of warfare. In his view, the need to achieve an information advantage over an adversary has become a precondition for victory. One of his more original and intriguing contributions is the claim that technology is driving all militaries towards the same organisation and tactics. In his view, the most effective form of organisation is a network of interconnected, autonomous cells linked by robust command and control systems. Most assessments of the war between the West and al-Qaeda have emphasised the asymmetry of the combatants: the worlds only superpower squaring off against a small, dispersed band of terrorists holed up in caves. Berkowitz, however, argues that the combatants have more in common than many acknowledge, including their reliance on secure global communication systems (whether Americas constellation of military communication satellites or al-Qaedas use of the Internet); their deployment of military forces in small, scattered teams (whether American special operations forces or al-Qaeda terrorist cells); and their use of remote command and control. Beyond offering insights into the future of war, Berkowitz also provides an intellectual history of the development of information warfare. While cyber-warfare

Book Reviews 169 burst into public realm in the 1990s, Berkowitz rightly notes that its roots lie much deeper. As he ably describes, the advent of information warfare occurred nearly three decades ago. For example, the late Thomas Rona, an early and largely overlooked theorist of information warfare to whom the book is dedicated, published his seminal monograph, Weapons Systems and Information Warfare in 1975, the same year that Microsoft was incorporated. Berkowitz also highlights the contribution of Andrew W. Marshall, the Pentagons Director of Net Assessment, who commissioned a net assessment of US and Soviet command-and-control capabilities three years later. Berkowitz, a well-respected authority on intelligence, discusses its close relationship to information warfare. For example, he recounts the Pentagons early efforts to tap into and exploit Soviet communications networks during the Cold War. He chronicles attempts to institutionalise information warfare in the Pentagon following the 1991 Gulf War and growing concern in policy circles over the prospect of an electronic Pearl Harbor throughout the 1990s. The problem of any attempt to chart the development of information warfare within the US government, of course, is that so much remains classified and is likely to remain so for years to come. Still, Berkowitz does a good job of piecing together what is in the public realm. Berkowitz finds the US intelligence community poorly prepared to warn of the threat of information warfare and poorly configured to infiltrate and exploit enemy networks. In particular, it lacks the agents that are needed to gain close access to such targets. As a result, he echoes other analysts who warn that the United States is setting itself up for a future disaster. The New Face of War is a thoughtful and accessible account of an important topic, one that deserves the attention of specialist and generalist alike. Thomas G. Mahnken Acting Director, Strategic Studies Program, Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, The Johns Hopkins University