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Information is key to future military might: US general

"Two of the individuals in the world today who are masters in the use of information are President Bill Clinton and Saddam Hussein."

Paul Cerjan, retired US Lieutenant General

The adept use of information technology can help a country gain the upper hand over its adversary, a former president of the US' National Defense University said yesterday.

"Two of the individuals in the world today who are masters in the use of information are President Bill Clinton and Saddam Hussein," said retired Lieutenant General Paul Cerjan, who spoke in Taipei yesterday.

"President Clinton has defined, over the last eight years, a new political environment that is driven by information knowledge. In military terms, it is the use of the principle that says you must make a decision inside the decision cycle of your opponent," Cerjan said.

"Universities in the US for the next 10 years or more will be studying how Clinton made use of information knowledge. It is the ability to make his team respond with information before his opponent puts an answer on the table," he said.

When it comes to using information, Clinton and Hussein operate in the same fashion, Cerjan said.

"Hussein does exactly the same thing. Every six months or thereabouts, Hussein does something that brings the world to the brink of some kind of horrendous military action. He does it with the use of CNN, continuously and constantly," he said.

"Another individual who uses Hussein's process is former Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milosevic, also a user of information technology."

Cerjan made the remarks yesterday at a conference on national security and military strategy, which was held by Taiwan's National Defense University.

"I know personally that in the US military in the future, no commander will be able to go to a conflict, a hostile conflict, without having people next to him who understand the concept of information warfare," he said.

Information is another element of national power, he said, which deserves special emphasis and understanding in addition to the traditional four elements of power: economic, military, political and social.

Minister of National Defense Wu Shih-wen (伍世文), who was also at the conference, also highlighted the importance of information technology.

"Strong and weak countries have different defense guidelines. A strong country's guiding principle is to fully exploit its information superiority and high-tech weapons as well as to launch attacks from faraway distances," Wu said.

"A weak country has to choose to best use its geographical advantage and preserve its forces for a sustained war with the enemy. Its resistance power lies in the fighting will of the whole people," he said.

Lieutenant Colonel Chang Ta-shun (張大順), an instructor at the defense university, said in the presentation of his paper that China's fast progress in the development of information warfare capabilities was something to worry about.

"We must admit China is superior to Taiwan in such information warfare fields as the use of long-distance video-conferencing networks," Chang said.
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