In Athena's Camp: Preparing for Conflict in the Information Age
Typically thorough RAND fashion...the authors ponder, correctly, whether a rigid, military command structure can adapt to the decentralized organizational restructuring that Net war will demand...The book correctly points out the importance of creating new doctrines within which to place the new technological developments. After all, to be effective, information must be combined with a coherent strategy, consistent organization and proper management of resources.Intellectual Capital.comI enjoyed reading the book In Athena's Camp with its hard-hitting ideas and historical images of tactical warfare down the ages...a real eye-opener...I found the book to be thought provoking and an excellent reference guide on the use of information in warfare - past, present and possible future. Anyone interested in military history and cyberspace should read this book.Science and Technology JournalArquilla and Ronfeldt's contributions provide the most interesting conceptual meat of the book...They propose that 'information is a bigger, deeper concept than traditionally presumed and should be treated as a basic, underlying, and overarching dynamic of all theory and practice about warfare in the information-age.' This view of information as having a 'transcendent, if not independent, role' leads them into fascinating discussions of the nature of information and knowledge.Information, Communication, SocietyThis lively and highly readable survey of trends in information warfare provides an excellent overview of an expanding field in military science. The editors, John Arquilla of the Naval Postgraduate School and David Ronfeldt of the RAND Corporation, are well versed in the complex theories of information warfare, and they render the subject highly approachable to those not fully engaged in the debate...it represents one-stop shopping for any serious military analyst seeking to understand the current language, trend lines, and tensions in the discussion of information warfare.Naval War College ReviewAlthough some of its passages will be of more interest to philosophers than to soldiers, In Athena's Camp is an interesting book. It should be read by anyone in the special-operations community who is interested in information operations, especially those in PSYOP, a field that is only beginning to better use technology to form network-hierarchy hybrids in order to act faster than our competitors.Major Bill Gormley