Professor Jon R. Lindsay’s book, Information Technology and Military Power, examines the way state-of-the art information technology has influenced the challenges of military operation. Lindsay analyzes what that means for global conflict and shares lessons for complex organizations in the information age. It was published in 2020 by Cornell University Press.
Your intro says that the book is inspired by your experience in war and you describe your time in Naples and Iraq. Did you know at the time that you would eventually write a book exploring your takeaways from those experiences?
Yes. I was very interested in this question of how the human experience of war has changed in the latter part of the 20th century and the 21st century. As people are interacting more through technology, they are perceiving the reality of the battlefield remotely.
Everything they do to influence or understand that reality is happening indirectly through technology. Over the past few hundred years there's been a shift in military labor patterns from physical labor to intellectual labor, or from fighting to managing, so military organizations are emphasizing brains over brawn.
Let's talk about being part of the U.S. military with the knowledge that are you going to be gathering information to write something like this in a very public way.
Absolutely. This is a very nonstandard methodological approach in security studies. There is a lot of fantastic ethnographic work in different communities, but ethnography in security organizations is more difficult for a lot of reasons. How do you get access? What are the ethics of being involved in that organization? How do you deal with classified information? I was studying what I call ”information practice,” which is what people do with information in their day-to-day work, it’s what practitioners do with information. The book is about how human computer interaction in complex organizations constructs knowledge and facilitates control.
One of my findings in this study is that practitioners in complex organizations are constantly coping with breakdowns in their information systems. There are technical breakdowns, there are social breakdowns, and there are organizational misunderstandings. But they also spend a lot of time asking, "How do I know this works? Can I trust this data? Why is this machine malfunctioning? Why did we just blow up the wrong target?" There's this constant alternation of attention between what information means and how information works. And the fact that people are doing that all the time is interesting for understanding how information practice works. It also facilitates my involvement as a researcher because what do you want to know as a researcher of information practice? You want to explain how information practice works. What are practitioners doing? They're alternating between what it means and how it works! I was very, very fortunate in that I picked a topic that was uniquely suited for this approach.
To what degree did the way other countries operate their militaries inform your focus of the book?
I believe this concept of information practice and the struggles between top-down and bottom-up innovation are incredibly relevant, not just to the U.S. military in the digital age, but of previous eras. It’s also relevant to other militaries in different eras, as well as non-military organizations.
I included the historical case of the Battle of Britain for a couple of reasons. Number one, it's not a digital case, right? And so it's fantastic to look at a different generation of information technology to really drive home the point that I'm trying to make, namely that social context is ultimately more important in explaining success or failure of technology than the nature of technology itself.
Also, everybody's heard of the Battle of Britain. It was one of the great mythological moments of the modern British nation. So there's a ton of material on this episode, which gave me that fine-grained ethnographic level of detail that I needed about how people actually interacted with these technologies. Also, the Battle of Britain is often remembered and recognized as this massive success in intelligence and command and control information, so it is important for a theory like mine to be able to explain it.
So what kinds of solutions are there for when information practice fails?
Part of the story of the book is there's no one-size-fits-all solution. The things that work for planning a nuclear war are not the things that work in counter-terrorism or cybersecurity. These are different problems, and different information problems have different information solutions. The challenging thing about conflicts is that once you go into that conflict situation, the adversary and sometimes your allies start actively changing the problem. As the problem evolves, your solution has to evolve. But your solution then also ends up changing the problem, so you get into this tail chase which is a fundamental and unavoidable part of the drill.
Is there anything you learned that surprised you?
What keeps on surprising me is we have this sense — and even some people that are really deeply in the national security business have this sense, it’s not just the Hollywood portrayal of high intensity warfare — that there's all this sophisticated technology and really, really smart people are playing three-level chess.
But what is astounding is how mundane and almost quotidian modern warfare can be. War is boring. There's a convergence between what happens in corporate office spaces and what happens in war. It shouldn't be surprising: if we pay attention to history we have found that with science and business, similar mundane processes matter. It's all about meetings, paperwork, administration, the negotiation for access to data, and all of this rather boring stuff. There's this little icing on the cake that's super sophisticated theoretical intellectual work, but a lot of science is actually logistics, politics, and organizations. But that's not the mythology that we have of science. And it’s not the mythology we have of war.
I hope that the book will create a sense of surprise and concern that this mundane office information processing environment coexists with this deeply tragic, violent, historical event that is warfare.
Who did you have in mind as your audience?
This book is written for three different audiences. The first would be the security studies community – people who are interested in questions like: how does military innovation work? What explains military effectiveness? What is a revolution in military affairs? How do we understand military power in the information age?
The second audience would be practitioners. How you understand some of the questions above influences decisions about getting into a war and, should you get into a war, winning it instead of losing. I wanted to speak to practitioners because I think that something important has happened in their world that is worth understanding.
The third group would be another academic group called STS – science and technology studies. This group is really interested in how people and technologies work together. The field has, over the last couple of decades, shown the interaction between technology and culture is so intimate that it's very, very hard to pull them apart.
Can you share a little more about what you’re writing next?
I’m focusing on cyber conflict. Unless somebody's been living in a cave for the last 20 years, we know that American cyber warfare, Chinese espionage, and Russian disinformation are incredibly important now. Information technology is just a massive amplifier of covert conflict. We also know that a lot of this conflict does not take place in war, it's in this gray zone between war and peace.
The argument of the next book is that you compete in this gray zone by engaging in deception, secrecy, subversion, manipulation. And that means that we're looking at a set of conflicts that look less like war and more like intelligence competition. Classic practices like espionage, subversion, covert action, disinformation operations, etc., are things that have been going on for a long time, but haven't been studied as much as war and peace. So I think that cyber conflict, which is the subversion of information practice on a global scale, is making it imperative that we develop a more sophisticated understanding of intelligence competition in international relations. So that's really what this next book is doing: supersizing this concept of information practice.
Back to Information Technology and Military Power. What kinds of conversations do you hope this book sparks?
There are many persistent and enduring assumptions, expectations, myths, fantasies, hopes and dreams about information technology. I call them collectively “the technology theory of victory,” and this really had a heyday in the 1990s. There was talk about “a revolution in military affairs,” the same way that there was enthusiasm about a new digital economy and the dot-com boom. I track this same rhetorical pattern as early as 1909, when very similar things were being said about telegraphs and wireless. Today, we are seeing very similar things being said about quantum computing and artificial intelligence.
The book is saying, " the technology theory of victory is the gift that keeps on giving. It is evergreen. It emerges with every new generation of technology, and it is always disappointing." The book cautions that when you get very excited or very afraid of AI and the future robot war, you should take that with a grain of salt. You should remember that it's not the technology, it's what we do with it. And the more sophisticated the technology gets, the more important the people get.
