The study of warfare is full of theories regarding the nature of future conflict. The majority of these theories consider traditional or conventional warfare as the basis for military evolution, and simply propose alternative approaches to traditional war fighting techniques. Classical theorists such as Clausewitz and Jomini are still quoted, studied and their works held high as models on which the hundreds of billions of dollars that are spent each year by the world's various military organisations can be justified.
Yet all of the popular classical theorists lived in a world that was very different to today's. The rapid increase in the rate of technological development over the past thee decades, particularly in the field of Information Technology (IT), has transformed societies throughout the world IT has changed the ways that companies trade, commnnities live, people are employed, nations are governed and wars are fought. Military forces have demonstrated that they can and do incorporate technological changes into their operations, but they have often displayed a reluctance to embrace these technological changes and to apply technology to maximum benefit.
The employment of rapidly advancing IT in modem Information Systems (1%) is changing the nature of human existence and in so doing is challenging military forces to rethink their findmental doctrine. The rate of technological advance in the area of IT is now so fast and dramatic that for the first time since the industrial revolution the nature of war, not just the way that wars are conducted, may he changing fundamentally.