Industrial Age Versus The Information Age: Rethinking National Security in the 21st Century

摘要

This briefing, produced under IDA's Central Research Program, illustrates a number of cognitive distinctions as they apply to differences that are perceived to exist between the Industrial Age and its transition to the Information Age. These cognitive distinctions have specific implications when they are considered from a national security or a military perspective. As noted at the end of each discussion, all of the distinctions noted in the briefing are closely tied in their logic to at least several, if not all, of the others. They all address somewhat different dimensions of the same problem: discontinuity. Discontinuity, as used in the briefing, is a watershed event or confluence of events or trends that produces a new set of circumstances that challenge the continued relevance of past experience and the assumptions that it empirically supported. The fundamental point of these distinctions is to highlight the cognitive challenges of transitions, and that the transitions redefine progress as a new trajectory to the future rather than as mere advancement over the past.