The Future of War: Power, Technology and American World Dominance in the 21st Century - Hardcover

Friedman, George

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 051770403X ISBN 13: 9780517704035

Publisher: Crown, 1997

Synopsis

Making a brilliant case that the 21st century, even more than the 20th, will be "The American Century, " and that America's global dominance will be associated with a revolution in weaponry and warfare as basic as the one that arose with the development of gunpowder 500 years ago, The Future of War speaks of a new geopolitical system that will shape the next century. 480 pp. Author tour. Radio & print ads. National publicity. 25,000 print.

About this title

About the Author:

George Friedman is coauthor of The Coming War with Japan as well as numerous other books and articles on politics and international and military affairs. He is on the faculty of Tulane University in New Orleans and is chairman of Strategic Forecasting in Baton Rouge, which specializes in business intelligence and analysis.

Meredith Friedman was born and educated in Sydney, Australia, and moved to the United States in 1976. She is a freelance writer who has published on international affairs and other topics and was coauthor of The Coming War with Japan. She is a senior writer for Strategic Forecasting and manages research on business intelligence.

From Kirkus Reviews:

From those wonderful folks who brought you The Coming War with Japan (1991), another arresting, thoughtful, and closely reasoned appreciation of how and by whom armed conflicts might be successfully conducted in the post-millennial era. Persuasively dismissing the beguiling notion that global interdependence, economic or otherwise, has made war unthinkable, the Friedmans (who run the GPA Strategic Forecasting Group, a corporate intelligence service) assume that the days of shooting irons (artillery, machine guns, mortars, rifles, et al.), which ruled the world's battlefields for over five centuries, are numbered. As the final stages of Desert Storm made clear, they assert, precision ordnance (directed by lasers or other advanced means) is supplanting ballistic firearms. The advent of so-called smart bombs and missiles, the authors point out, has made a wealth of inordinately expensive weapons systems obsolete by making them unacceptably vulnerable to assault; cases in point range from manned fighter planes crammed with avionics through aircraft carriers and tanks. Nor, the authors maintain, do nuclear capabilities loom large in the strategic scheme of things, other than as a deterrent against other countries' nuclear arsenals. Accordingly, the Friedmans conclude, the key to military domination in the 21st century will be conventional ordnance precisely applied, and the willingness to use it. With unrivaled command of computer, guidance munitions, radar satellite, and sensing technologies, they argue, the US is in the strongest position to seize the high ground of space (for use not only as a reconnaissance site but also as a launching pad) and achieve a capacity to engage in remote-control warfare in which pilotless vehicles deliver explosives at hypersonic speeds and with deadly accuracy to enemy targets anywhere on earth. Provocative, accessible perspectives on the long history of war and on a new world of belligerency whose convincingly documented emergence could give pause to prophets of Western decline. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Crown
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 051770403X
• ISBN 13: 9780517704035
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 464