War And Anti-War - Survival At The Dawn Of The 21st Century

Alvin and Heidi Toffler’s War and Anti-War is a book about the future of conflict from the people who had already spent a fair amount of time warning everyone that the future was arriving faster than the furniture could be rearranged. Published in 1994, just after the Cold War had supposedly ended and history was meant to be relaxing in a tasteful global cardigan, it asks what war might become in the new century of information, technology, networks, media, precision weapons, economic change and societies no longer organised around the same old industrial assumptions.

The Tofflers argue that war changes when civilisation changes. Agricultural societies fight one way, industrial societies another, and information-age societies bring their own alarming toolkit: data, speed, surveillance, smart weapons, decentralised systems, knowledge as power, infrastructure as target, and the increasingly awkward fact that a computer network may be more strategically important than a hill. The battlefield begins to leak into banks, satellites, newsrooms, laboratories, supply chains and the domestic peace of anyone who thought “cyber” was going to remain a word for specialist magazines.

The title’s double edge is the point. War and Anti-War is not simply about fighting better, but about preventing, limiting, understanding and surviving conflict in a world where power is changing shape. The old model of mass armies, smokestacks, steel production and industrial mobilisation had not vanished, but it was no longer the whole story. The future, as usual, had arrived wearing several contradictory hats: peacekeeping, high-tech strikes, terrorism, information warfare, economic pressure, precision violence and the cheerful globalisation of vulnerability.

There is a fine irony in books about “the dawn of the 21st century.” They are written from the edge of tomorrow, peering forward with charts, theories and the mild confidence that tomorrow will at least have the decency to resemble an argument. Some predictions date. Some become uncomfortably familiar. Reading the Tofflers now is partly a time capsule of 1990s strategic thought and partly a reminder that many of the anxieties they identified — networks, asymmetric conflict, media power, technological acceleration, fragile systems — did not politely go away. They moved in and asked for Wi-Fi.

This is not a memoir of battle or a straight military history. It is a big-ideas book about how conflict follows the structure of society, which means it roams across technology, economics, politics, strategy and culture with the Tofflers’ usual appetite for grand patterns. If armies are shaped by the worlds that produce them, then understanding war requires more than counting tanks. One must look at factories, knowledge, computers, media, organisations, energy, borders, markets and the strange human ability to turn every new invention into either a tool, a weapon or a committee.

For readers of military theory, future studies, geopolitics, technology and society, post-Cold War strategy, information warfare and those grimly fascinating books that explain why the next century may be less tidy than advertised, this is lively and provocative shelf material. It belongs beside works that thought seriously about what came after the twentieth century, before the twenty-first had fully introduced itself and begun breaking things.

Good copy, as sold by Crappy Old Books. A solid Little, Brown volume from the 1990s future-watch shelf, ready to explain why tomorrow’s wars might involve fewer cavalry charges and rather more data, satellites, networks and people saying “systems vulnerability” with worrying confidence.

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