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Foreign Policy
Winter 1998–99
Future Schlock?
Last year, the United States Air Force celebrated its 50th anniversary with the largest gathering of international air and space leaders in history. Among the honored guests were former president George Bush, then-Russian air force commander in chief General Petr Stepanovich Deynekin . . . and futurist author Alvin Toffler.
Toffler did not disappoint his audience. He offered a cache of the high-tech predictions and apocalyptic warnings that have endeared him to so many military theorists and made his books-Future Shock, The Third Wave, and War and Anti-War-so popular. Arguing that the “rules” of international relations of the past 300 years are now obsolete, Toffler declared that war planners must “replace deterrence and mutually assured destruction with force-backed, anti-war strategies for the turbulent world to come.” The future military will face “a world of Sun Tzu technology in which the best victories are those that come without combat and in which information superiority can prevent or even win wars before they begin.”
The pervasive influence of Toffler in certain military circles can be measured by how often he is cited. Glenn Buchan, an analyst at the rand Corporation, has observed that Toffler’s jargon is in “widespread use” throughout “the national security establishment.” In particular, he notes, the U.S. Army habitually employs Third Wave vocabulary when describing the significance of information in future warfare. Even Defense Secretary William Cohen has declared that the technological advances of the past quarter century have confirmed Toffler’s “visionary brilliance.”
Not everyone, however, shares Cohen’s enthusiasm for Toffler. Steven Metz of the U.S. Army War College dismisses the futurist’s latest book, War and Anti-War, as a superficial “MTV clip.” By failing to construct “a psychologically sophisticated notion of why people fight,” Metz observes, “[Toffler’s] theory of anti-war is incomplete.” Buchan frets about the proliferation of “cyberbabble” and “Toffleresque” oversimplifications. The expression “information warfare,” he argues, has become “ambiguous to the point of being misleading because various organizations are defining it differently and emphasizing different aspects of the problem.” Or as George Smith, the editor of Crypt Newsletter, an online journal dedicated to debunking myths of the Information Age, put it: “ . . . one of the strong suits of information warriors appears to be the burying of the enemy with floods of vague military philosophy, impenetrable jargon, clichés, scenarios, and aphorisms gathered from popular books attributed to Alvin Toffler, Tom Clancy, and Sun Tzu.”
—FP