McNair Paper 59, Right Makes Might:  Freedom and Power in the Information Age, Chapter 3, May 1998

So far, this essay has argued that free-market democracies that are integrated into the world economy have distinct advantages in inventing, making, and using information technology. The strength of this technology in the civil economy, especially to meet the demands of decentralized and globalizing private enterprises, also gives such countries an edge in military applications, which utilize the same technologies (semiconductors, software, networking) and skills (design, engineering, integration) that the larger civil market requires and produces. Freedom, long a source of moral strength, is now the key to physical strength as well.

This essay's second proposition is that military power and other types of national power depend increasingly on broad-based competitiveness in the creation and use of the dominant technology. If true, in conjunction with the first proposition, then power will come more easily and be more sustainable for states whose economic and political freedoms and integration in the world economy make them competitive in information technology.

Information technology is beginning to dominate military operations and power. This will remain the case for the indefinite future, as the information revolution settles into the information age. (Arguably, nuclear weapons can "trump" information-technology-based military capabilities; but nuclear weapons have, if anything, become less useful in practical military strategy and power since the end of the Cold War.) The centrality of information technology in military capabilities is now recognized in the two most authoritative recent statements on U.S. defense strategy: the Report of the Quadrennial Defense Review and Joint Vision 2010.¹ It took the failure of the Soviet Union, victory in the Gulf War, and an information revolution in the country's private sector to bring the U.S. defense establishment to this conclusion. In fairness, that is relatively quick: the annals of strategy reveal that successful militaries are slow to change unless jolted by a clear threat or costly war. Moreover, the U.S. military is a good deal further along in exploiting information technology than any friend or foe.

If the industrial age produced the "hardware" of modern warfare—mechanization, propulsion, vehicles for land, sea and air, long-range weapons, high explosives, and the factories to make it all—the information age is creating the "software." Already, the new era—with its precision weapons, battlefield intelligence and information—has solved the hardest military operational problem the industrial age produced but never could solve (short of using nuclear weapons): the sudden, swift, massive armor attack, a.k.a. Blitzkrieg. Information technology is also beginning to remedy the main defense management problem that the industrial age caused but did not solve: administering efficiently the staggering complexity and scale of the military establishment and its procurement, planning, personnel, and logistics needs. Until recently, the U.S. military was applying information technology to improve at the margin its traditional ways of fighting and managing. Like many successful private enterprises, it is now beginning to change those ways in order to turn the new technology's promise to strategic advantage.

The U.S. defeat of Iraq in 1991 provided but a sneak preview of information-age military power. The United States fought mainly with mechanized capabilities and tactics, concentrating massive ground forces in the theater of operations, relying on the control and penetration of enemy air space, and moving mountains of supplies within reach of its combat forces. As fortune would have it, Saddam Hussein was a fourth-rate strategist with a third-rate army and a subterranean air force. So U.S. forces were able to render Iraq defenseless and mathematically destroy its forces and infrastructure without running much risk of casualties. Credible combat simulations, in which the United States is assumed to exploit its information technologies, predict positive results for U.S. forces against even more capable foes.²

A decade or so from now, the United States could thrash such an opponent without placing large forces within range of enemy weapons—a true revolution in warfare. As military forces and operations undergo such a revolution, so will perceptions of military might. The size of armies, the heaviness of armored forces, raw numbers of combat aircraft and ships, and even atomic megatonnage will matter less in the new era than in the one now passing into history.

The performance—i.e., accuracy, reliability, lethality—of individual weapons has been enhanced by microelectronics networking. The information technology content of the average military system has grown steadily over the past 20 years. (The growth would be even more dramatic but for the fact that the cost of information technology has been shrinking relative to other components.) Data communications can now unite sensors, platforms, weapons, and command into far more potent capabilities than those of high-performance systems operating autonomously. A new military formation—the network—permits forces to be both dispersed and integrated, making them more maneuverable, deadly and invulnerable.

The ability to integrate weapons, sensors, platforms and other military systems in such networks depends on elegant but rugged command, control, communications, computing, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (mercifully, "C⁴ISR@). The side with C⁴ISR superiority—"information dominance," in the jargon du jour—can track its adversary's every move, manage the network of its own forces, and largely determine the course of the conflict.

Information technology is eliminating the inverse relationship between weapon range and accuracy, and thus lethality. Combined with the improved ability to find and follow enemy units, such lethality permits rapid and systematic destruction of enemy targets. The need to fly manned aircraft into unfriendly air space to do this job is declining, as accurate standoff weapons can be used to destroy any target and as unmanned vehicles are developed.

Small, light ground units able to call upon large arsenals of affordable precision-strike munitions on remote platforms can pack a heavy offensive punch. This will make them more than a match for much larger enemy forces and permit quicker deployment and reduced logistical demands, all thanks to the improved lethality and connectivity provided by information technology. These capabilities will expand the ability of those possessing them to project power, strike with impunity from any distance and direction, and achieve decisive victory, all with lower casualties—projecting and concentrating "force, not forces."

The day could come when standoff firepower is so effective that the battlefield will consist of only enemy forces at the receiving end of withering long-range bombardment from unseen weapons platforms. Tactical operations could be fought from strategic distances. Mechanized aggression could go the way of the cavalry charge. In the case of the United States, not only will its homeland enjoy sanctuary, but so will its forces. This asymmetry will improve the credibility of the threat to use force by those with this capacity and give pause to those without it, thus improving deterrence.

The networking of forces does not eliminate the need for ground forces in all instances. However, it can revolutionize the way they too are organized and employed. With information technology, they can disperse and "swarm," executing extremely fast maneuvers and lethal attacks without massing. An enemy force without such C⁴ISR, deployed in large formations, will find it difficult both to attack such networked ground forces and to survive their attacks.

Information technology has also brought within reach the elusive goal of joint warfare, which provides enormous combat advantages over those that lack it. Instead of waging segregated warfare among ground-, sea-, and air-based components, "jointness" unifies forces to carry out decisive operations. Theoretically, any capability from the entire integrated force, depending on priorities, can be brought to bear on any component of the enemy's force, but not vice versa. As options multiply, the adversary's hope of defending its disjointed forces and its infrastructure fades. The effects of concentrating forces can be delivered without the risks and costs of spatially concentrating them—not unlike the way global corporations can now achieve scale while being distributed.

Using private-sector information technology and practices, defense logistics are becoming leaner and quicker. American military leaders still lament the difficulty of restructuring and shrinking their huge support establishment and inventories. But they have at last begun to scale the foothills of this mountain chain. Most other militaries, far behind, remain cursed with sluggish support establishments that drain resources and hamper operations as much as support them. Information technology also offers the possibility of streamlining procurement, improving resource management, sharpening training (e.g., with simulations), and enhancing productivity throughout the defense establishment.

As the military procurement system is made business-like, the cost of the information technology content of military equipment and communications should begin to fall as steeply (by double digits annually) as have the costs of comparably complex civilian systems and the root information techno-logies. Those defense establish-ments that have the technology and the brains to exploit it will then enjoy a compounding cost-performance advantage over those that do not. Like every new generation of computer and communications system, tomorrow's long-range precision-strike weapons, being chock-full of information technology, will be both superior and cheaper. In addition, reliance on target-location data from distant sensors (e.g., the Global Positioning System), thanks to data communications, enables weapons systems to achieve pinpoint accuracy without expensive onboard guidance systems.

While less thrilling—expect no Tom Clancy novels about it—this "revolution in military business affairs" will have strategic importance. A clanky, information-challenged, defense establishment can rob a nation of the resources needed to field strong forces, and then rob the forces of agility—perhaps even victory—when they are used. Information technology, in hands of determined reformers, can slay this monster. A state-dominated, industrial-age political system might be able to make, buy and use this or that weapon, but it is condemned to make do with a calcified industrial-age military establishment, which will severely limit its power.

In sum, dramatic enhancements in all key military "bilities"—mobility, penetrability invulnerability, supportability and affordability—are available to defense establishments that can transform themselves. Both "tooth" and "tail" are exploiting the information revolution. Compared to commercial sectors, the military is getting a late start, even in the United States. But it will have a running start in countries with robust private sectors.

Such change depends vitally on whether a much larger information revolution is underway. The U.S. experience shows that the applications, techniques, and principles that permit such reform are mostly imported from the surrounding economy and society. The fundamental concept and technology—networking—has been and will continue to be honed by the private corporations tying together distributed operations. Moreover, the research needed to carry forward all the information technologies of military value far exceeds the capacity of any military establishment, whether the U.S. Defense Department or China's Peoples Liberation Army (PLA). The Pentagon's annual R&D budget (roughly $30 billion) is only a fraction of the total R&D from which U.S. forces benefit. The more a military utilizes information technology, the more nourishment it can get from the private economy.

States that shun free markets might nevertheless be able to acquire particular information technologies for military purposes. Of course, the more ambitious those purposes, the more technology they need. The fear that an unreformed, hostile China, will "leapfrog" the United States by acquiring an arsenal of cheap, easy-to-assemble, easy-to-use precision-guided munitions overlooks the fact that such munitions are vastly more potent when used within a larger and integrated network of sensors and forces. Moreover, as noted, the reason precision-guided munitions are getting cheaper is that guidance intelligence is no longer on board each missile but in that wider network. Lacking the network, states buying "smart" weapons will find them dumber than they expected.

Information technology, physically defined—hardware and software, devices and systems—only partly accounts for U.S. military superiority and for the inherent advantages of open societies. The quality of American military personnel, on the rise since after Vietnam, is an equally towering strength. The importance of quality pervades the officer and enlisted ranks. If the superiority of American troops over Soviet troops (and of West German over East German troops) that became clear at the end of the Cold War is not evidence enough, just wait until we get a good look at the average North Korean soldier.

While personnel quality encompasses a bundle of aptitudes and education, more and more it emphasizes skill in "knowledge" tasks and technologies. An ample supply of high-quality information-oriented people has become a critical ingredient for military excellence, and it is more readily found in free-market economies and open societies with ubiquitous information technology. Democracies are more capable of providing both the "machine" and "man" halves of information power in military affairs.

Even though the United States is transforming its forces, structures, and doctrine to exploit information technology, it does not automatically follow that other states must mimic this approach in order to pose military challenges. North Vietnam, for example, understood the weaknesses of U.S. strategy and tactics—not to mention will—and did just the opposite, fighting on foot beneath U.S. airpower. In the future, reliance on massed platforms in open territory, skies, and waters will guarantee defeat against information-rich forces like those of the United States. But low-intensity conflict, the use of dispersed infantry, and hiding are promising tactics against such forces, and they do not require information technology.

Does the prospect of low-tech asymmetric strategies contradict the idea that nations must excel in information technology if they are to avoid being at a military disadvantage? The revolution in military affairs is in its infancy. As the application of information technology improves, a growing assortment of counter-strategies will fall victim to it. Stationary troops and exposed tank columns are the easiest but not the only targets that can be detected and destroyed by increasingly precise, quick, and affordable munitions of a joint, networked force. This does not exclude that some hostile state might be able to buck the trend, shun the dominant technology, and still present a military threat. But any state that aspires to be a "great power"—the subject of this essay—or is headed for a strategic showdown with the United States, will have to incorporate information technology increasingly into its military capabilities. In time, as it steps onto a field of competition defined, preferred, and dominated by the free-market democracies, it will be able to advance only by exposing itself to the pressures for reform and freedom that create modern knowledge-based power.

Not surprisingly, this is what China is doing, not because it is bent on confrontation with the United States, but because the Chinese appreciate that projecting power effectively requires information technology. The more ambitiously they attempt to buy or make information technology, and the more widely they apply it, including for military capabilities, the more they will find themselves sucked into a larger revolution.

Yet pessimists warn that the information revolution is posing new security problems that could prove more severe for open than for closed societies. Because the United States and its democratic partners are more economically dependent than other countries on connectivity and computing, they could become more vulnerable to information warfare. This threat could eventually end the sanctuary from hostile attack the United States now enjoys. Integration in the world economy, with its crisscrossing networks, enlarges the risk.

Threats to the democracies' cyberspace could endanger not only their citizens' quality of life but also their resolve. As it is, Americans are ambivalent about projecting power. The prospect of a disruption of the national economy due to network attacks could tilt that ambivalence distinctly negative, thus emboldening a militarily inferior enemy to challenge U.S. interests.

Moreover, as the United States and other advanced nations become more dependent on information technology in their military systems, they will become more susceptible to information warfare attacks during operations. The revolution in military affairs places a bull's eye on the C⁴ISR that is critical to it. In the extreme, the ability of the United States to project power and to strike at will could be undermined if an otherwise weaker enemy interfered with the links that fuse U.S. sensors, permit joint warfare, and connect small, potentially vulnerable units to stand-off firepower. Even if the military establishment secures its own dedicated links and nodes for combat operations, effective information warfare attacks on the U.S. public telecommunications network, on which 95 percent of military traffic flows, could create havoc in a crisis and hamstring a major power projection campaign.

Worrisome enough in the hands of a small rogue state, information warfare could present a major challenge if a large and technically capable country like China, India, or Russia chose to develop it. Perhaps the PLA or what is left of the Red Army will conclude that chasing the United States into the revolution in military affairs would, for now, be futile. Instead, concentrating on techniques to disrupt U.S. computer networks could yield interesting results with modest investment—and without waiting for the larger information revolution to occur.

In view of such vulnerabilities, could the economic and political openness of the United States and other advanced democracies become more of a strategic liability than asset as the information revolution unfolds? Probably not. Recall fears during the Cold War about perceived Soviet "advantages"—a submissive populace, no free press or public opinion pressure, a well-oiled propaganda machine, inherent secrecy, more spies, no consumer demands to compete with state needs. They turned out to be Soviet handicaps. If openness helped decide the struggle with a closed superpower before the information age, it should be even more advantageous in the future, despite some pitfalls.

More concretely, free-market democracies should be able to fashion sufficient security, resilience, and redundancy into their civil and military information systems to avoid being hobbled by hostile information warriors. Private enterprises, especially large providers and users of information systems and services, are already working to improve security, for their own profit-and-loss reasons. The national effort to combat information warfare, measured in dollars and genius, will far exceed what the Pentagon budgets. Moreover, the United States does not need absolute security from cyberspace invasions, as it does from nuclear attack. A certain tolerance and toughness should be possible for an open society that frequently experiences blackouts, stock market dips, cable cuts, and traffic jams.

Yes, the combination of societal freedom and global integration might seem to increase the likelihood and consequences of cyber-space attacks, conceivably producing a finite risk of multi-system failure. But it is also possible that the irregular, unregimented, decentralized, and adaptive patterns of open societies will make them more able than rigid, closed systems to withstand disruptions. After all, it was the more structured and inert Chinese and Arab civilizations that could not keep up with the tumultuous West after the Middle Ages. The image of democracies as fragile does not track with McNeill's description of their rugged origins and rough ride through history.

Some vulnerability will be a fact of life for democracies in the information age, if only because they will make greater use of information technology. Yet countries that are superior in the military application of information technology will also have the greater potential to conduct offensive information warfare—which is the case today (led by the United States). They will hardly be defenseless. Moreover, the democratic powers are unlikely to confine themselves to responding in kind to damaging information warfare attacks. If they can find the source, which improved "track-back" technology will help them do, they can settle scores with their superior conventional military strength.

In addition, the skill needed to wage information warfare could carry a "political virus" that might lead to the weakening of the perpetrator's own position. Whatever the application, information-age warfare depends on skills that depend on or can contribute to openness, because of the technology's nature. Ultimately, this technology is bound to be a better offensive weapon against states that dread information than those that thrive on it.

A more fundamental question is whether we are experiencing no more than a bend in the endless, winding road of military power that happens now to favor democracies. If so, the next turn could benefit despots. With the relentless spread of virtually all technologies, what faith have we that states and non-state actors hostile to the interests of the democratic core will not get weapons, perhaps cheap high-tech ones, that neutralize the superior capabilities of the United States and its friends?³ After all, integration rapidly propagates innovation throughout the world economy. Arguably, this will flatten out technological strength, which could in turn lead to the equalization of military power, or at least trouble ahead for any country that relies mainly on an edge in technology for its power.

Even though the democracies might retain military superiority because of their lead in information technology, their ability and will to use their power could be undermined by improved missiles, mines, and of course chemical and biological weapons in the hands of hostile states. It might not take a very high forecast of casualties to deter the United States from taking military action even against an inferior enemy, especially if no vital U.S. interests were at stake. Perhaps the military importance of information technology will wane in the next cycle, supplanted by weapons of mass destruction or swarms of guerilla fighters (this time, mujahideen instead of Vietcong). Democracies would then have no advantage and certain major disadvantages, including the higher value they place on human life.

Then too, even if democracies can more easily achieve military superiority in the information age, it is important not to overrate the importance of superiority per se. If the United States is held at bay by its own fear that weapons of mass destruction could be used against its forces or even its territory, nominal U.S. superiority will be of little military value, and U.S. strategic standing will suffer.

Yet these reservations do not nullify two fundamental advantages of knowledge-based military power: it is more usable than less discriminating weapons, including those of mass destruction; and it reduces the human role inCthough never the responsibility for—international violence. The information revolution in military affairs makes the use of force easier, quicker, more surgical, more refined, and safer (if war could ever be considered safe, let alone refined). The combination of accurate long-range weapons and data networks can improve the ability to project and use power over great distance, in any direction, at low risk. Information technology can reduce its possessors' reliance on placing human beings on battle-fields, whether to fire weapons, man sensors, halt an enemy army, or mount a counteroffensive.

Even if revolutionary military technology finds its way into the hands of rogues, and even if those rogues master its use— which is problematic because they are rogues—its greatest value will not be to them but to those who need to project power without heavy losses. Because of their global interests and public aversion to casualties, the United States and other democracies have the strongest incentive to exploit the technology and stand to benefit the most.

Hostile states will surely develop countervailing capabilities and tactics. But the essential point remains: superior information can provide a transcending military advantage, which the countries strongest in the essential technology will enjoy. While old forms of conventional military power are ultimately enclosed by finite limits in physics, time, space, and velocity, the exploitation of knowledge presents an open field to those who command it.

This century's history (e.g., the 1930s) provides painful examples—Manchuria, Abyssinia, Czechoslovakia—of the failure of Western democracies to use their military might or to convert their economic and technological superiority into military might when, as it turned out, they should have. Information technology cannot instill the wisdom to recognize dangers or the courage to confront them. So why assume free-market democracies will in fact exploit whatever potential superiority they have?

Obviously, we should not so assume. However, it should be noted that the free-market democracies will have the essential materials in abundance: information technology; intelligence capabilities; superior knowledge-based human resources; and greater econo-mic strength. Democracies may not always seem to have superior power because theirs is, by definition, distributed. Consider, for example, the West European members of NATO: their defense budgets have been shrinking, yet they have the world's second strongest collection of modern military power. Japan has the potential quickly to jump to number three despite having eschewed military power.

Democracies might not always make the right, tough choice when faced with a threat. But they will have important advantages when they do. The mobilization of military power in the information age, more so than in the industrial age, will depend on the technological vitality of the civilian economy and the ability of the military to be able to absorb that technology and draw on that vitality quickly. It will thus depend on the degree of econo-mic and political openness of the society and the extent to which those ways have been introduced into the military establishment. There is more power inherent in a democracy—not in the state but in the nation. Information technology is key to harnessing it.

While blind confidence would be foolish, the rise in the relative power and mobilization potential of open societies will not easily be reversed. This rise is due not only to a knack for making better gadgetry, but to a superior ability to gather, share, and digest information for the purpose of enhancing knowledge and performance. The information revolution is not a cycle but a threshold in human advancement. Having been introduced to warfare, as it has been to other spheres of human endeavor, it will be crucial from here on—as defining and permanent as, say, energy is to machines and seeds are to agriculture. Hereafter, the weapons and tactics that appear along that road of military development will be shaped by the dramatic increase in the availability of information and the expanded role of knowledge that we have just begun to witness.

Since the end of the Cold War—perhaps earlier—military power has been overtaken in importance by other, "softer" forms of power in world politics.⁴ Take Japan, which must now be regarded as the world's second most powerful nation (replacing the defunct USSR, whose sole claim was its military strength). Or, more generally, consider the rise of Asia, a region with less military capacity and sophistication than the Atlantic democracies. Yet the connection of freedom and power still applies. Any explanation of the enhanced importance of Japan and the rest of Asia, even without great military strength, must recognize the central role of information technology and the openness that both nurtures and flows from it.

Other than military capabilities, national power includes economic strength and stability, industrial output, technological output, savings and investment levels, market size, infrastructure, exploitable but renewable resources, education, management competence, and scientific capacity. Every one of these sources of power depends increasingly on human knowledge, not commanded by the state but arising from the freedom to create, profit, adapt, and challenge the status quo. Free-market democracies do not monopolize these categories of non-military power, but they are superior in using information technology and human talent to develop them. Therefore, a continued decline in the relative importance of military power will not reduce the importance of information technology, nor the overall democratic advantage.

There is yet another, subtle but increasingly important aspect of power in the new era: the ability of a system, or society, to sense the need for change and to adapt.⁵ The Soviet Union and what became of it illustrate the lack of this power, as well as the consequences. In a world of complexity and flux, with the future unpredictable but surely quite different than the present, the race will be not only to the swift but also to the adaptable.

The capacity to change has many components: technology, systems, institutions, practices, legitimacy, and of course freedom. In any "complex adaptive system," the ability to assimilate, share, and act on information is indispensable for success. This requires excellent communications and openness, internally and externally. While the intelligence and policy-making organs of the state have a role to play, decentralization and privatization of economic and technolo-gical decision-making are key, as is the extent of participation in the world economy. Democratic systems, awash with information, in touch with the world, and communicating freely within, tend to adapt better than others.

It has been observed by Brian Arthur that standing among leading information technology firms is not just about product design, cost, and quality but also about "cognizing" the interaction of ideas, market, and competition. The cycle of taste, innovation, production, distribution, maturation, and redefinition is so compressed and demanding that those who can out-fox, out-plan, and out-flank all others can define not only the standards but the rules, indeed the very nature, of the gameCas the point of departure for yet another round, or a new game.⁶

So it is, increasingly, with nations. Power will come from opportunism, from having confidence in one's strengths yet being able to perceive and act on the need for change. It will come from the capacity and daring to shape the environment.⁷ Although President Clinton's appeal to his G-7 counterparts to be more like America was off-putting, many Europeans and Asians—particularly from the busi-ness world—would agree that the United States, a "complex system" to be sure, has been making the right moves, though not by government dictate.

The more insightful renderings of the revolution in military affairs illuminate more or less the same phenomenon: the importance of perceiving and acting on the need for change, getting "inside the decision loop" of the adversary, not in reaction to a crisis, when it could be too late, but by a continuous feel for what is happening, irrespective of complexity.⁸ In a way, the idea of cognizing power and war is ancient. But the speed with which technology can change, itself as well as its objects, has made adaptability more important than ever. And for those with superior information technology and the open-mindedness to make use of it, outsmarting adversaries is a realistic strategic advantage.

To illustrate, no sooner had the advantages of precision strike been demonstrated in the Gulf War, than rogue nations intensified their acquisition of weapons of mass destruction in an effort to neutralize the American advantage. Even before its adversaries have fielded many of these weapons, the United States is shifting toward greater reliance on stand-off attack and the streamlined battlefield forces such reliance permits. But since this revolutionary move depends vitally on information networks, as noted above, it has already prompted U.S. initiatives to counter the anticipated threat of information warfare against C⁴ISR. And so on.

Is the United States the Microsoft of power in the new era, or merely the AT&TCthe market shaper or just the market leader? Does the same openness that fosters superior inventiveness of devices, systems, and applications also apply at the level where strategy is crafted? Or will American thinkers—officers, strategists, stateswomen— succumb to conservatism absent a war, a new global challenger, or some other crisis? The answer depends on how well, individually and institutionally, they can act on information, which the rest of this open society does quite well. With the alchemist's gift to turn data into knowledge, the United States and other free-market democracies should have superior abilities to adapt.

Information technology is generally weakening all forms of vertical authority and strengthening networked communities of interest. One of the human institutions being weakened is the nation-state itself. National governments, including democratic ones, are losing some of their economic, political, and practical importance. So even as nation-state power is concentrating among the free-market democracies, they too will experience losses to non-state actors, some of which could in turn exploit national vulnerabilities.

While this is true, the general erosion of state power will be most dramatic for those nations in which that power has been dominant. The American economy, society, and technology depend relatively little on central government. American pluralism is accustomed to nongovernmental communities of interest. So nations like the United States are less likely to be undermined by information technology than those decrepit states that rely on control rather than legitimacy and where economic and technological performance depend on that control.

Richard Ullman has recently argued that one of the main goals of U.S. foreign policy should be to foster "strong states" in order to help the United States deal with growing transnational dangers. It is his sense of what makes a state strong that is most insightful. It is not state power, based on the control of resources, information, and peoples' lives, but strength from legitimacy. Democratic states are inherently stronger. But we are beginning to notice this only now that the information revolution is revealing the economic and political weakness of illegitimate states.⁹

In sum, the information revolution is strengthening both the link between freedom and knowledge and the link between knowledge and power. It has thus created a link between freedom and power—between openness and strength. In the case of the United States, this is already evident in the combination of military superiority, leadership in information technology, and the withdrawal of government from the economy. But the United States has not cornered these attributes. The formula seems universally valid.

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