Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: The New Face of War: How War Will Be Fought in the 21st Century by Bruce D. Berkowitz ISBN: 0-7432-1249-5 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 24 March, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (4 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Warfighting in the new century
Comment: I've had a couple of tries at "information warfare" without finishing the book on offer. But Berkowitz personalizes this stuff by tying each aspect to an individual--generally an interesting one. So he kept me reading all the way through.
Basically, he argues that in the age of the internet, all the old bets are off. Thus a ragtag band of guerrillas was able to inflict one of the largest calamities upon the United States in its 200-year history. Mohammed Ata held the "high ground" of information technology, while NORAD and the FAA tried and failed to play catchup on September 11, 2001.
In Afghanistan, by contrast, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, Army, and Air Force seized and kept the high ground. Thus we had Special Forces soldiers mounted on horseback, knowing their exact location by means of Global Positioning satellies, and using lasers to mark targets for B-52 bombers--bombers that had taken, flown to Afghanistan, and orbited for minutes or hours without knowing what their target would be.
Well written and definitely worth owning...
Rating: 3
Summary: Quickie Book, Misleading Title, On Balance Disappointing
Comment:
I know and admire the author of this book very much, and consider his and Allan Goodman's book on "Best Truth" to be among the top ten books on the topic of intelligence.
This book, unfortunately--and I am dismayed because I was really hoping for some new thoughts and stimulation that the author is certainly capable of--is what I would call a "quickie" book. It is also very misleadingly titled. In brief, this is the book Tom Clancy would write if a) he worked for RAND and b) did not care about making money.
It is not completely superficial--what is there is valid, documented, and for someone that does not read in this field, satisfactory. But to take just one example where my own work is dominant, that of open source intelligence: the author, who knows better, covers the topic with a trashy vignette of his visit to Margot Williams at the Washington Post and the result is, to me at least, quite annoying in its glibness and ignorance of all else that is going on in the open source world.
This book is also not about the future of war, unless one is a prisoner of (or funded sycophant to) the morons in the Pentagon that think that "information superiority" is still about expensive secret intelligence satellites, expensive unilateral secret communications links, and using very very expensive B-2 bombers to go after guys in caves. There are four future wars that will be fought over 100 years on six fronts: big wars with conventional armies (e.g. between India and Pakistan), small wars and criminal man-hunts around the world; nature wars including the wars against disease, water scarcity, mass migration, and trade in women and children as well as piracy and ethnic crime; and electronic wars, where states, corporations, and individuals will all vie for some form of advantage in the electronic environment that we have created and that is, because of Microsoft, a national catastrophe waiting to happen.
On the latter, the author gets 4 stars. On the former, zero. I hold the author blameless for the lousy title. This is about not how war is going to be fought in the 21st Century--it is about what the beltway bureaucracy is trying to sell to the Pentagon, at taxpayer expense, and it covers just 10% of the future needs and capabilities.
Rating: 3
Summary: Analysis combined with Short History
Comment: To clarify - if 3 1/2 stars were available that is where my gut would have put this book. Whilst this book serves a good historical perspective of the evolution of information age warfare in US Government and Civil Agencies (and in particular the DoD) it left me a tad disappointed. The author definitely, as highlighted in other reviews, makes some extremely pertinent points (nuggets is probably an apt description) on the future of war how it may be fought he perhaps doesn't pursue these as far as I would have hoped and I was left with the impression that the book, whilst an interesting and easy read, was unnecessarily 'padded' out with historical examples. This aside, it is easy to criticise, and I wish to note that Chapter 12 dealing with assassination in the information age is a particulary good discussion.
 |
Title: Stray Voltage: War in the Information Age by Wayne M. Hall ISBN: 1591143500 Publisher: United States Naval Inst. Pub. Date: December, 2003 List Price(USD): $36.95 |
 |
Title: Fixing Intelligence: For a More Secure America by William E. Odom ISBN: 0300099762 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: March, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
 |
Title: Transformation Under Fire : Revolutionizing How America Fights by Douglas A. Macgregor ISBN: 0275981924 Publisher: Praeger Publishers Pub. Date: 30 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $34.95 |
 |
Title: Best Truth: Intelligence in the Information Age by Bruce D. Berkowitz, Allan E. Goodman, Allan Goodman ISBN: 0300093977 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: 01 March, 2002 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
 |
Title: The Iraq War: Strategy, Tactics, and Military Lessons by Anthony H. Cordesman ISBN: 0892064323 Publisher: Praeger Publishers Pub. Date: September, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
