Conclusion: the changing role of information in warfare

Information achieves value by improving decisions. Thus, the role of information in warfare must be to affect strategic or tactical decisions in one’s favor. This role is as old as warfare itself; indeed, it might be said to be the very purpose of warfare. So what is new, or, more precisely, why does information seem to be becoming more important now? In a word: technology. New machines and new processes have recently become integral to collection, processing, and dissemination of information. An increasing percentage of decisionmaking and decision support has been transferred from people to machines. People operate under familiar physical and psychological parameters. Machines operate under unfamiliar and increasingly complex parameters. They and their logical processes are subject to attacks and manipulations that are both novel and difficult to understand intuitively.