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After a decade of fighting several, simultaneous wars on terror, contradictory signs of slippage began to appear in Washington’s global dominion. By , it appeared that U.S. military power, unchallenged for decades, was slowly being eroded by the country’s fiscal crisis and waning economic influence. Prominent among those who have predicted this decline, historian Eric Hobsbawm has long argued that America’s attempt to achieve “global supremacy” would “almost certainly fail.” For Hobsbawm, “empires were mainly built, like the British Empire, by aggression and war,” and it was usually winning or losing big wars “that did them in.” As a “middleweight country” Britain, he observed, “knew that it did not and could not rule the world,” saving London from “the megalomania that is the occupational disease of would-be world conquerors.” As U.S. economic power declines, Washington, he warned, might be “tempted to maintain an eroding global position by relying on political-military force.”1 Though some trends seem to corroborate this gloomy prediction, Hobsbawm ’s focus on the old imperial verities of military, economy, and territory may well overlook less visible technological elements in a changing global architecture . Just as he grew up a British subject in a world shaped by war and empire, so I was raised, a generation later, the son of an American electronics engineer who told me childhood stories of continental radar shields and telecommunications satellites.2 Beyond the spectacle of war, we are witnessing, from my generational perspective, a new global hegemony founded not on sea power or even air power but in aerospace and cyberspace. From this technological viewpoint, the most significant feature of Washington ’s ascent to world power in the century past was not its victory or defeat in particular wars but the relentless rise of a powerful U.S. information infrastructure. If Britannia once ruled the waves and, lest we forget, the telegraph cables beneath, then America now reigns over sky, space, and cyberspace. Whatever the fate of Imperial Illusions Information Infrastructure and the Future of U.S. Global Power alfred w. mccoy  U.S. global power might be, Washington’s mastery over these strategic domains is emerging as key to its plans for future global dominion. Information and U.S. Global Power My emphasis on information’s role in Washington’s global power admittedly departs from the conventional emphasis on military might, economic weight, or cultural influence. In its  futurology exercise, the U.S. National Intelligence Council cited “the transfer of global wealth and economic power now under way—roughly from West to East— . . . without precedent in modern history” as the primary factor in predicting that by  the “United States’ relative strength—even in the military realm—will decline.”3 The council conceded that its analysis may have downplayed “the role of technology in bringing about radical change.” But it still insisted that “over the past century, geopolitical rivalries . . . have been more significant causes of the multiple wars, collapse of empires, and rise of new powers than technology alone.”4 Similarly, historian Paul Kennedy awarded technology a secondary status in the fate of world empires. The two tests that “challenge the longevity of every major power,” he writes, are whether it can balance “the nation’s perceived defense requirements and the means it possesses,” that is, whether “it can preserve the technological and economic bases of its power” amid global economic change.5 Even in this formulation, technology is subordinate to the determinative dyad of military power and economic means. To focus on information is not to deny the undeniable import of economic or military factors but to argue that an evolving information infrastructure was nonetheless critical in America’s past ascent to world power and may prove key in its future global leadership. Since the late nineteenth century, U.S. data management advanced largely from the stimulus of domestic demand. But at three points during the past century these technologies were plunged into crucibles of counterinsurgency in Asia and thereby transformed into innovative military information regimes. In the Philippines, Vietnam, and Afghanistan/Iraq, a mix of guerrilla resistance, protracted conflict, and unfamiliar Asian cultural terrain forced the U.S. military beyond conventional tactics into the unfamiliar domain of unconventional warfare. During each of these protracted conflicts, the U.S. military was pushed to the breaking point and responded by drawing together contemporary information technologies, fusing them into an infrastructure of unprecedented power, and forging an advanced array for data management. Over...

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