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War 2.0: Irregular Warfare in the Information Age [NOOK Book]
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War 2.0: Irregular Warfare in the Information Age argues that two intimately connected trends are putting modern armies under huge pressure to adapt: the rise of insurgencies and the rise of the Web. Both in cyberspace and in warfare, the grassroots public has assumed increasing importance in recent years. After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, Web 2.0 rose from the ashes. This newly interactive and participatory form of the Web promotes and enables offline action. Similarly, after Rumsfeld's attempt to transform the US military into a lean, lethal, computerized force crashed in Iraq in 2003, counterinsurgency rose from the ashes. Counterinsurgency is a social form of war—indeed, the U.S. Army calls it armed social work—in which the local matrix population becomes the center of strategic gravity and public opinion at home the critical vulnerability.
War 2.0 traces the contrasting ways in which insurgents and counterinsurgents have adapted the new media platforms to the new forms of irregular conflict. It examines the public affairs policies of the U.S. land forces, the British Army, and the Israeli Defense Force. Then it compares the media-based counterinsurgency methods of these conventional armies to the more successful methods devised by their asymmetric adversaries, showing how such organizations as Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Hezbollah use the Web not merely to advertise their political agenda and influence public opinion, but to mobilize insurrections and put insurgent operations into action. But the same technology that tends to level the operational playing field in irregular warfare also incurs a heavy cost in terms of the popularity of insurgencies.
Overview
War 2.0: Irregular Warfare in the Information Age argues that two intimately connected trends are putting modern armies under huge pressure to adapt: the rise of insurgencies and the rise of the Web. Both in cyberspace and in warfare, the grassroots public has assumed increasing importance in recent years. After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, Web 2.0 rose from the ashes. This newly interactive and participatory form of the Web promotes and enables offline action. Similarly, after Rumsfeld's attempt to transform the US military into a lean, lethal, computerized force crashed in Iraq in 2003, counterinsurgency rose from the ashes. Counterinsurgency is a social form of war—indeed, the ...