Neglected Strategists: Timothy L. Thomas

Joseph Fouche used to run a series called "neglected strategists," where he'd bring strategic theorists who hadn't really gotten mainstream attention to light. I'm going to copy him and start out with the Foreign Military Studies Office's Timothy L. Thomas--America's most astute historian and theorist of information warfare. Thomas has written a great deal on Russian and Chinese information warfare in great detail, and also written on the subject of information warfare more generally.

What is so great about Thomas's work? First, his mastery of Russian and Chinese literature is nothing short of breathtaking. Thomas brings us insight from obscure Russian and Chinese theorists as well as practical case studies such as Russia's strategic information warfare campaign in Chechnya over the last ten years. He makes obscure doctrinal debates between Chinese thinkers as riveting as the dialectics of Sun Tzu. Like David Glantz's many works on Soviet operational art, he does so by digging deep into the primary sources and reporting with a technical eye, but relating it to the larger strategic and doctrinal picture.

Thomas also understands the coercive purpose of information warfare. Public diplomacy, propaganda, and other such tools are wider tools of statecraft. They aren't really military but advance larger interests. Information warfare, on other hand, is an aid to military operations and is about coercion. It is another tool for forcibly bending the adversary to your will. In his many works such as "Human Network Attacks," "The Mind Has No Firewall," and "The Russian View of Information Warfare," Thomas looks at the both contemporary and future potential coercive use of information to break organizations and target humans individually.

Thomas' future predictions--such as the use of future information technology to cause intense feelings of psychological pain and suffering--may be controversial, but they are interesting all the same especially in light of the technology of less-than-lethal weapons such as the Active Denial System. If you are interested in military futurism, Thomas's work ranks up with H.G. Wells in his willingness to explore hitherto unexamined future dimensions of information warfare. Like Barton Whaley, Richard Szafranski, John Arquilla, and David Ronfeldt, Thomas is an information warfare theorist that is cognizant of military history, reads widely, and always focused on the human dimension behind the machines.

Thus, he's worth your time. Check the FMSO website for links to his FMSO reports and articles in Military Review, Parameters, Special Warfare, and specialist journals on Russia.  Amazon.com also lists (out of print) his three books on Chinese information warfare theory. Several of his articles are also archived on IWAR.UK and the University of Leeds communication studies website.

Comments

[Joseph Fouche]

The Svechin post was the Waterloo (so far) of the series. There was so much in Strategy that I was having a hard time stuffing it into a single post. Megalomania drove me to envision a giant Svechin Neglected Strategist series but laziness stymied it since I can't cut and paste from my copy of Strategy.

I look forward to future installments.

[A.E.]

I think if you do a bunch of medium-length posts with different people it works. You're right that it's difficult to accurately express a given theorist's legacy in anything less than a 20-page essay (The Makers of Modern Strategy) format.

Next, I think, will might be Rudolf von Caemmerer or Robert Leonhard. By the way, I downloaded your copy of Burnham to my iPhone, and am reading along. Great stuff.

[Joseph Fouche]

Burham is a steely eyed missle man.

[A.E.]

Burnham would make a nice pilot of a giant robot.

[torrent download]

You're right that it's difficult to accurately express a given theorist's legacy in anything less than a 20-page essay (The Makers of Modern Strategy) format.