Identifying “revolutions in military affairs” is arbitrary, but some
inflection points in technological change are larger than others: for example,
the gunpowder revolution in early modern Europe, the industrial revolution
of the nineteenth century, the second industrial revolution of the
early twentieth century, and the nuclear revolution in the middle of the
last century.1 In this century, we can add the information revolution that
has produced today’s extremely rapid growth of cyberspace. Earlier revolutions
in information technology, such as Gutenberg’s printing press, also
had profound political effects, but the current revolution can be traced
to Moore’s law and the thousand-fold decrease in the costs of computing
power that occurred in the last quarter of the twentieth century … (to read all)

Joseph S. Nye, Jr ©2017