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Ordinary communications technologies are changing the character of war, enabling a form of popular mobilization that belies our predictions of how conflict would evolve in the twenty-first century. Any student of Carl von Clausewitz's On War knows that war has both changing and unchanging aspects. War's essential nature never alters: its violence, chance, danger, friction, and inherent unpredictability are timeless and unchanging. However, aspects related to how and why people fight do evolve dramatically, and here we are experiencing a paradigm shift like the one that occurred at the end of the eighteenth century. Today's dynamic social, economic, and political transitions are as important to understanding the present and future of war as were the changes of the French Revolution that Clausewitz observed. The twenty-first century's version of the levee en masse is the mass networked mobilization that emerges from cyberspace and explodes into physical reality. Yet, the extent of the tectonic shift in connectivity and conflict is misjudged, underestimated, and mistakenly seen as tangential to ordinary military planning, leaving the United States and its allies to react to its effects.
Communication is a key driving force that affects the causes and execution of modern war. Major war in the industrial age involved widespread mobilization of societies, tapping into the economic potential of states to field traditional conventional military forces that fought over territory. While insurgencies and small wars also proliferated, the most effective response to those challenges was to cordon off a region, focus on a population in a circumscribed territory, gradually divide the people from the cause, and target the insurgents.1 The main stakes of war were typically control of territory, economic resources, type of government, collective good will of an indigenous population (hearts and minds), and national selfdetermination. The telephone, television, telegraph, and radio all played important roles in achieving these ends and were supported by a superstructure of satellites, transmitters, broadcast stations, and state regulation. During the twentieth century, communications technologies shaped and reflected an emphasis on the state, often strengthening its ability to govern, to mobilize, and to prosecute and win wars.
While the traditional stakes of national power continue, today the state's longstanding approach to mobilizing and inspiring its population is undercut by the availability of individually accessible communications...