http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/columnists/toffler/toff03.htm

Can the world make a peaceful transition into what we’ve called a "Third Wave civilization" – a knowledge-based economy and society?

Unfortunately, the world cannot undergo so profound and accelerated a transformation without conflict. Too many forecasters and trend extrapolators forget that conflict is the other face of change, that change does not occur without conflict. So they end up with pollyanna prophecies.

If you haven’t factored conflict into your forecast, it’s likely to be wrong.

Conflict, of course, doesn’t have to be violent. It may just take the form of corporate politics. It can even be creative and constructive. It may be social, religious, or cultural conflict in a community or country. But whatever form it takes, no significant change can occur without it. When you add the speed of change we’re now experiencing to all the changes in technology, economics, family life, demography, ecology – and you put all these together, you have a recipe for conflict – and escalation.

History is filled with similar conflicts

When the industrial revolution began in England it triggered 50 years of political conflict with the "landed gentry," the agrarian elite trying to maintain its economic and political power against a rising group of commercial and industrial interests. That conflict was more or less peaceful.

In the United States, by contrast, a similar conflict erupted into the Civil War, the bloodiest war in human history until that time. It was not just a war to maintain the union or to "free the slaves." It was a war between an industrializing North and a backward, slave-based agrarian South. And the United States didn’t begin full-scale industrial development until the North won.

If we understand these conflicts of the past, they suggest that when a new wave of change brings a new type of economy, new technology, and a new way of life, it conflicts with those whose pocketbook and psyches are hitched to the previous system. When a new wealth system and way of life arise, there are winners and losers.

Today you still have those who think of the American economy in terms of assembly lines and smokestacks, centralized government and traditional welfare systems, and still underestimate the importance of intangible capital. They are threatened by the digital revolution, the rise of biotechnology, and the fast-paced, "Internetted" way of life they bring. Put another way, they are defenders of yesterday’s Second Wave urban-industrial way of life against the arrival of a knowledge-based economy and society – a Third Wave society.

Conflict at the political level

This clash is reflected in a confusing way in everyday politics. You had this seemingly strange alliance of Pat Buchanan and the unions with Ralph Nader and some environmentalists against the World Trade Organization, and before that against NAFTA. Buchanan is an ultra-nationalist identified with the far right, Nader is, if anything, identified with the left.

All it shows is that "left" and "right" don’t mean anything anymore. Neither does Democrat or Republican, Labor or Tory. What matters is your underlying attitude toward the new society and economy introduced by the Third Wave. It is a clash between two ways of life or two civilizations, one in decline, the other still emerging.

This is what we have called the "master conflict," because if we look at many of the civil wars and conflicts around the world today that appear to be religious or ethnic and based on "thousand year old hatreds," we find that under the surface they are rural vs. urban, First Wave vs. Second Wave.

Types of warfare – Is the U.S. Prepared?

Societies make war the way they make wealth. That is the thesis of our book, War and Anti-War. When countries industrialized their economies, they also industrialized their militaries. The machine age gave us the machine gun. Mass production gave us mass destruction.

Today we are moving to a new Third Wave economy and society, so it's hardly surprising that the U.S. military is utterly dependent on computers, information-technology, satellites, advanced communications and "smart weapons."

This knowledge-based technology, along with corresponding changes in organization, doctrine, force structure, training, and other dimensions of military power has contributed to America’s giant lead in certain forms of military power. But the transition from Second Wave military doctrine based on massed forces, positional combat, frontal assault, heavy units, and traditional weapon platforms is not complete. Inside the military there is a competition for budget, and a battle between officers still committed to industrial-style, Second Wave warfare and resistant to the new Third Wave war-form based on power projection, fast maneuver, smaller, lighter units, deep battle, precision strike, the coordination of land, sea, air and space and other Third Wave elements.

Above all, the full implications of what we termed Third Wave "knowledge warfare" have not yet been digested – even in the United States. The wars of the future will increasingly be prevented, won or lost based on information superiority and dominance. And that isn’t just a matter of taking out the other guy’s radar. It means waging the kind of full-scale cyber-war we described in War and Anti-War. Cyber-war involves everything from strategic deception and perception management down to tactical disruption of an adversary’s information systems. It also means understanding the role played by the global media in any conflict today. It means enhancing all your knowledge assets from intelligence, to research and development, training, and communication.

And it means protecting not just the information assets of the military, but those of the society and economy on which it depends.

Precisely because the U.S. military and economy are the most advanced and the most dependent on information technology, they are also the most vulnerable. The United States still has a long way to go in protecting its knowledge-assets that are being attacked every day by spies, hacker/crackers, and the information-warriors of other states, not to mention free-lance terrorists.

What is the greatest U.S. weakness?

The greatest U.S. weakness is the absence of a global strategy. The Clinton administration not only has never put forward a clear strategic view of the world, it is hostile to the very idea of strategy. The President’s national security adviser has been quoted as saying that strategy is merely an after thought – it’s what you say you had after you have acted. That is a truly revealing and frightening comment if he actually said it. The United States has the biggest, strongest, most expensive, best educated, best equipped military in the world, but it is strategically brainless at the top because the President and his advisers think that agility is a substitute for strategy. Agility is necessary, but it is reactive. If you have no strategy, you are very likely to become part of someone else’s strategy.


There are many different ideas out there about the future of war. What's your take on it? Big flash and it's over, or smaller, regional skirmishes?

Bio and chem weapons will probably have a major role in WWIII. No major nukes, in that they are a double edge weapon. Tactical atomic bombs? Not really: too small to serve real tactical purpose and too dangerous (long term radiological effects and political liabilities). Better, cleaner (God forbid!) explosives are being invented daily, especially by the Russians. It will be a matter of "Divide and conquer", anyhow, as it has always been!

The next war will be fought with nuclear weapons and other WMD's. However, the war after that will be fought with sticks and stones because the world is going to be back to the stone age era.

I hope you are wrong.

However, in case you are right, human kind as a whole called for it.

Figure out what the Russians are doing at that dig site (for the last 18 years) and when it will be finished and then you will know when/what the next world war will start.

I would bet that it lasts about an hour.

We've already seen "future" warfare. Began with Vietnam and is currently being fought in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I don't believe we will ever see anything similar to World War II. I don't believe there's any nation that would be foolish enough nor capable to wage a multidimensional major regional conflict. The war of the future will be a series of smaller scale battles fought to achieve immediate political goals or for immediate media impact. Taking a hill is not as significant as killing a bunch of men, women and children in a market square. That massacre is likely to have a much more significant impact on how national leaders shape their policies depending on how the media portrays that incident.

I am not passing judgment on Abu Ghraib one way or the other and am only using it to illustrate a point. In the grand scheme of things, what happened at Abu Ghraib was not militarily significant. A bunch of naked prisoners being paraded around in front of a young female soldier is not the worst thing that can happen in combat; in fact, it IS comic relief. However, those little internet images set into motion a huge wave of public opinion that affected everything from Guantanamo Bay to how a president was elected (no, not saying that this directly affected Obama's election, but it certainly helped give him a political platform that he otherwise would not have). The infamous images of a Vietnamese officer shooting an unarmed prisoner with his arms tied behind his back in the head certainly had far more significant impact on US policies than any tactical gains on the battlefield the North Vietnamese army ever accomplished or could ever hope to accomplish. The images of a naked US soldier being dragged down the streets of Mogadishu also had that same impact. The list goes on. My point is that THESE are the wars of the future not some showdown between tank armies arrayed neatly across a battle front that could be neatly displayed on some mapboard in a TOC.

furture wars in my opinion will be fought with technology. i feel the sense that people are going to let machines to the talking. infintry will slowly dissapate which makes me angry. but this is only one mans opinion

They will shout at each other, then have sex until one yells "I have enough"...

The problem with popular writers is that they are often far more popular than accurate. Evidently, accuracy doesn't sell books as well as imagination and paranoia. Alvin Toffler is no exception. If you pick up his 'Future Shock' book of the 1970s, you'll find his dire predictions about "the future" laughable in the extreme. Absolutely none of his conclusions came true yet he and his wife are still writing and publishing 'forward thinking' books and calling themselves 'futurists' (whatever THAT means), and commenting on things like the military and warfare when neither of them served so much as a day in uniform.

It boggles the mind how people buy this stuff hook line and sinker.

As for the subject of this interview:

quote:

"Only the dead have seen the end of war." George Santayana

I find it amusing that many people can find parallels in the current wars (Malaya, Vietnam, Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, etc.) but stick to the idea that war will somehow change dramatically in the near future, based upon nothing more than the introduction of a few new weapon systems or technological advances.

The introduction of wireless radio didn't change the rate of march of infantry soldiers in WWI. Nor did the machinegun suddenly swing the pendulum of advantage to the defense in a day. Neither did the art of manuever die in the trenches on the Western Front. Many of the changes in warfare took decades to implement (Maxim machineguns were on the hilltop of the Spanish positions on Kettle and San Juan hills - 1898).

If you remove the example of warfare that was the Western Front from 1915-1918, you'll find that the operations of Moltke the elder in 1871 dovetail nicely with those of Guderian in 1941. Taken in a certain light, this would seem to indicate that the war that saw the greatest rate of change on the battlefield (wireless, tanks, indirect artillery, aircraft, strategic bombing, etc.) had no lasting impact on the 'art' of war. It only changed the scale on which the priciples of war were applied.

Fast forward to our present day. We still have infantry soldiers assaulting insurgent strongholds in much the same manner as Rommel described in his book 'Attacks' based upon his experiences in the Great War. Despite its announced demise after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, armored tanks still dominate the battlefield and are a mainstay in the armies of the developed world. Likewise the aircraft carrier battle group is still the ruler of the world's oceans 65 years after the battle of Midway. Strategic bombing and air superiority are still as important to successful ground operations as they were in WWII, and fighter pilots still practice 'dogfighting' according to the rules first outlined by Oswald Boelcke at age 25, despite the fact that he's been dead for nearly a century.

No better proof of Pattons' dictum:

quote:

"Wars may be fought with weapons but they are won by men. It is the spirit of men who follow and the man who leads that gain the victory."

This is not to say that technology has NO impact. The issue is that any improvement in technology has only a momentary impact at best. Future technological advances may negate current changes just as quickly. Suppression of communication, both wireless and data may lead to the implementation of tactics in which 'normal' communication is not used at all. In effect, removing radios and digital data updates entirely. Is this an improvement or regression?

Warfare is about adaptation and deception. Sun Tsu wrote about this 3000 years ago, and his principles are still valid today. If you want to know how wars will be fought in the future, read his book 'The Art of War'. Despite how technology changes tactics, the fundamentals will always hold true.

Sullivan013

I can't ever imagine replacing everything with robotic systems. Even excluding all of the logistic, and command and control issues it seems impossible. Yeah, you could have an advanced fleet of little unmanned ground vehicles but what happens when your run into a ladder of flight of stairs?

The Obama administration is railing us all on the fast track to his disarmed Marxist utopia. He goes beyond ignoring his oath to defend or honor our Constitution, and showing only total contempt for this document With every move he has made is as if by design to undermine this nations monetary, banking, insurance, and private industry. On the $787 billion stimulus bill he preached doom and gloom if these funds were not made available. He got his billions and now we are in worse shape than the doom and gloom he predicted without them. Not a penny of those billions went where he said it would go. No funds were loaned out to start the economy. He used those billions for the largest government buy outs of both banking and private industry in history. In doing so he overstepped the authority given him in section 2 article 2 by leaps and bounds.
Healthcare 15% of the private sector are now in his sight with government mandatory suicide counseling and other requirements not fit for any free society. Gun Treaty completely removing the Second Amendment

This is only a fraction of what this man has done to dishonor our Constitution and he hasn't slowed down. I swore an oath to defend the U.S. Constitution in January of 1970 2 days before my 18th birthday entering the army. I feel the oath I took was forever. I now have grandchildren 5 boys I would lay down my life for any of them. I want them to all know the freedom I had as a boy To walk out in the fields with a .22 to shoot and hunt. I won't let a government steal their pride rob them of all self worth and making their most simple decisions for them without choice. My grandsons and the U.S. Constitution are the priorities in my life. I believe there are many more that feel the same as I As much as I hate thinking about it at the rate this treasonous tyrant is going the next war will have American against American on American streets. Some will choice to follow a socialist with no honor that forces his will on all around him and I pray most will follow the ways of our founders.

No matter what anyone says I believe that you can never remove the human element from combat. There is nothing better then a properly trained and equiped team of men who are able to complete the mission without burning alot of money and assets. Tomorrows wars will be nothing but a rampt up version of todays wars. Its just like history has already tought us. From the Civil War to Iraq the only true change has been in increase in Technology.

War never changes. The future war's will expand in to space and the internet. While we will see smaller conflicts more often. You will a major increase in internet attacks against The Defense networks of any major and minor country.

We will see a bigger conflict everyonce in a while. where Whole armies go at it. The whole idea that to unman the front lines is like throwing a rock at the moon. Not matter how hard you throw it you wont hit the moon. That being said

The front lines will always have men. The only difference is what they will be using. You could see a more futuristic version of FW2025. You might see more unman Weapons.Such a automatic turret system for base defense and what not. But the front lines will still be muddy with blood.

Now if you go Say a major power is losing ground. you might start seeing more major weapons coming out to play. Such as Gas and tactical non nuke weapons such as the moab and foab.

If the great nation is on the verge of defeat and the armies it fighting is crossing in to there land and getting ready to destroy the capital and what not.Then you will see the use of nuclear weapons.

Even after The world goes though a nuclear war. Men will still be fighting on the front lines.
The human races will survive anything. Gun will still be in to play. Might be old guns going back to such as the m-16 and ak's. but they will still be there.

You might see the country's who once was rebuild into something new and what not. but that the human race for you.Always on the move.

Many people believe that there will be wars fought with proxy conflicts; such as Korea, Vietnam and so on. It is always easier to find a 3rd world country which could be the battleground without spilling blood on home ground.