Air Force FIFTY
TWO DAY INTERNATIONAL AIRPOWER SYMPOSIUM
April 23-24, 1997...Las Vegas, Nevada

Dr. Alvin Toffler

Thank you, General Shaud. I want to thank General Fogleman and also our friend, General Jay Kelley, for honoring us on this truly memorable occasion with the opportunity to share some of our thinking about the fast emerging, global system of the 21st century and also, of the new vulnerabilities that arise from changes in the global system. I am going to use the word "we" throughout and when I use the "we" it is not just an author's trick, it really refers to Heidi, who is my co-author and co-author of all our books and all the work that we've done over the years.

We would like to focus today on what we regard as the biggest vulnerability of all,. The single biggest vulnerability of the United States right now, in our opinion, is not Iran, or North Korea or possible events that one can imagine in Russia or China or the likelihood of a hundred Zaires or Albanias. All of these may or may not pose real dangers in the future, but there is one vulnerability that seems to us even more serious and that is the lack of an adequate, realistic paradigm or model for understanding the 21st century global system.

At a time when both Russia and China are going through a period of political turmoil for succession or post-succession, at a time when Japan, for the first time in decades, is seriously rethinking the U.S. military relationship, at a time when the Middle East is once again, potentially on the edge of new violence, and when the entire relationship between Europe, Asia and the United States is shifting tectonically, when the policies of deterrence and mutual assured destruction have run their course perhaps and need to be replaced by what might be called an anti-war policy, at a time when the Gulf War coalition appears to have splintered and relations between the U.S. and the West and the Moslem World, from Turkey and Iran to Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan appear to be worsening, neither American political party has articulated a coherent, cohesive strategy in global relations. And, it is hardly a surprise, therefore, that the American public is turning inward.

In fact, I would argue that we are gasping for strategic oxygen in the worst strategic vacuum in at least half a century. I don't think that is purely an American phenomenon. I think the leaders of all countries are upset or confused in a confusing world which no longer follows the rules that it followed for the past half century and indeed followed for the past 300 years. I am going to argue that it is not primarily the end of the Cold War that has produced this strategic shift or change or vacuum, but something even deeper. It is impossible for any country to formulate an appropriate global strategy to intelligently restructure its military, to maintain an appropriate industrial base, let alone to imagine the next 50 years of air power if its model of global relations and its theories of conflict are obsolete. We believe they are.

They are obsolete not simply because the Cold War is over. They are obsolete because a world filled with global positioning satellites is still relying on maps drawn in the age of Metternich in the last century and on 350-year-old concepts drawn from the Treaty of Westphalia. We are now living through the greatest wave of change on the planet since the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.

Let me interrupt for just a moment to introduce those of you who are not familiar with the shorthand that my wife and I use in describing these historical changes. We use the metaphor of "waves of changes." We say that 10,000 years ago, some prehistoric Einstein, a genius, probably a woman, planted the first seed and launched an agrarian revolution that moved across the planet very, very slowly. It is estimated to have moved from the Middle East to Northern Europe at the rate of one kilometer a year for 9,000 years. That transformed the way of life of nomads and hunters and foragers, transformed those tiny tribal communities into permanent settlements, peasant-based civilizations or cultures. That wave of change, which lasted so many millennia, is today still completing itself in some parts of the world where we have tiny tribal populations that are not yet agricultural. In Brazil, for example, you have people going into the Amazon and decimating the tribes into order to sieze land for agriculture. That is the end of the agrarian wave of change.

Three hundred years ago, give or take a half century, the Industrial Revolution exploded in Western Europe and launched a second great wave of historical change and transformed peasant-based civilizations into factory-based civilizations, urban, industrial, smoke-stack civilizations based on fossil fuels, mass production, brute force technology, bureaucracy, secular culture, democratic or pseudo-democratic political forms and gave rise to national markets, nationalism and nation-states in the modern sense. These industrial societies, whether capitalist or communist, were based on certain common principles and systems. There was mass production, mass consumption, mass media, mass education, mass entertainment, mass recreation, and in terms of the military, weapons of mass destruction, based on Clausewiczian theory of mass warfare. Put briefly, the machine age gave us the machine gun. Call that age Industrialism or the second wave.

The product of that second wave civilization or way of life was a new kind of global order, the Westphalian model of global order. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, we had many different kinds of political entities on the planet. After the industrial revolution and as the second wave moved across the earth, we got the familiar map in which every country has an unbroken line around it -- every inch of the planet is governed by somebody and there were pink and green and yellow areas on the map. You had, in effect, a closed-system of nation-states all claiming total sovereignty, all bouncing off each other like billiard balls.

This second wave global system is now being challenged and, as I say, not primarily because of the end of the Cold War, although that is an enormous historic event, but because a new third wave civilization has begun to arise on the planet, rapidly taking on its own form, creating a new kind of economy and new forms of military might and its own definitions of sovereignty.

In 1956, Nikita Kruschev, then leader of the Soviet Union, said we will bury the West. Now we all know what that implied. What he didn't know, and what most of us didn't know, including Americans, was that 1956 was the first year in the United States when the number of white collar and service employees outnumbered blue collar factory workers. From that time on, America's labor force has moved increasingly from muscle work to brain work. That has been a fundamental change. It is still completing itself with implications for every aspect of American life. It is giving rise to a new form of civilization, based on knowledge-enhancing technologies and accelerated change. It is symbolized by the computer, which is the most powerful tool for amplifying human intellect since the invention of writing and movable type.

What I am saying is a little bit different from most economic and social theories that say first you go from agriculture, then you go to industry, then you go to post-industrial or knowledge-based economy and society. We believe that you can have multiple waves of change rolling through any country at the same time. In fact, a good example of that is Brazil, where they are still taking land for agriculture and completing the agrarian revolution. They also have enormous industrial development, with all of the familiar characteristics of assembly lines, traffic jams, pollution and streets choked with cars and urban life. But also, in Brazil, you have the beginnings of a third wave economy and society. It is a surprise to most Americans to learn that, whereas the largest computer and electronics show in the world is held here in Las Vegas once a year, the second largest is not held in Japan or in Singapore but in Brazil. Just two years, it sold 635,000 tickets at $10 each for people to come and look and play with and use the latest computer and electronics technology. You cannot keep a personal computer in the stores in Brazil these days.

What is happening is a new way of working and a new way of living, a third wave way, is beginning to spread outside the United States, where it began and sink roots or establish cells in various countries around the world. For the military, it seems to us that just as the machine age gave us the machine gun, the new third wave economy, based on advanced knowledge, requires smart machines, smart workers, smart weapons and the need for smart soldiers and even smarter strategy. This does not mean that old forms of war die away or vanish. We still have cases of hand-to-hand combat so basic to first wave war. Nor, necessarily, will all examples of second wave mass warfare suddenly disappear magically. But the fact of the matter is, that as third wave civilization develops, spreads and as technologies mature and the people learn to use them and our militaries learn to use them, it is third wave, information-based brain-based warfare, rather than muscle-based warfare, that we believe will eventually come to dominate.

This new form of warfare makes use of greater precision and it takes the mass and demassifies. I believe, in fact, as far as the United States is concerned, it today faces potential adversaries one can imagine capable of waging both first wave and second wave warfare and more than a few that are now racing to acquire third wave capabilities in their militaries. Moreover, as we saw over in the Gulf War, one can see mixtures of these kinds of warfare. For example, in the Gulf War, we saw carpet bombing in the south, which was not terribly different I suspect, from the kind of carpet bombing we saw in other wars. This is mass warfare, second wave warfare. But in Baghdad, we saw the incredible precision and attack on the information structures, the nervous system, of the government and the military. That was one of the first evidences of the application of third wave warfare.

We don't have the time today to describe fully the third wave economy that is springing up in many parts of the world and that gives rise to this third wave form of war. But the crucial fact is that today's dominant technologies amplify human intellectual power by helping to generate, collect, enhance and distribute the knowledge that we use to create wealth and to augment our capabilities to wage both war and anti-war campaigns. Knowledge is now the central resource of any advanced economy or the central resource of the advanced sector of any economy, even if the economy, in large measure, remains industrial or agrarian. The advanced sector is knowledge based. Never before in history have both economic might and military might been as dependent on knowledge as they are today.

To understand the future of warfare and of anti-war methods and the methods that we will need to prevent, limit, and contain warfare, we need to look, briefly at least, at what is happening in the economy. I want to throw some numbers at you. You may be familiar with some of them, some of you in the room will probably be unfamiliar with some of them. So let me run through this quickly. There are now a quarter of a billion personal computers on the planet; that is, 257 million PC s, one for every 22 human beings alive. In the United States, computers are approaching the 100 million mark, which is almost one for every 2.5 people. Today, more U.S. workers have jobs making computers and software than making cars. Thirty seven percent of American homes have computers in them and many of those home computers have more power than the computers those same people use at their offices. The office computers are frequently less powerful than the ones in the home.

Roughly 30 million U.S workers now do some or all of their work at home and when we first forecast that in Future Shock in 1970 and then in a book called The Third Wave in 1980, we were regarded as crazy sensationalist visionaries. The New York Times made fun of us on page 1 for saying that people might work at home. Then about two years ago, in the same location on page 1, there was an article in The New York Times saying, guess what? People are working at home. In fact, millions upon millions more will be working at home as we go forward.

Much of the work will be done in home offices, but also, as we all know, on airplanes and in automobiles and all over the place. Phone companies cannot keep up with the demand for additional lines for home offices. The average American home has an estimated 200 microchips in it. Those chips are in the automobile, they are in the household appliance, they are in everything we touch practically. Novell, the networking company, has announced plans to link up a billion appliances. That means, the appliances in the kitchens of America, so that the appliances themselves are smart, they have microchips in them and indeed they can talk to each other. IBM is working on the AIRIGO system. COMPAQ, Microsoft, Apple and others are racing each other to connect intelligent appliances in the home or to take advantage of systems like those when they are in place. BMW is working on linking all the chips in a car to create a rolling network, the components of which could in theory automatically report their condition to a central BMW computer somewhere. Some Motorola people, and undoubtedly some are in this room, are talking about a completely intelligent environment in which, as you move through your home, the various appliances know exactly where you are and communicate with each other. They measure, or at least potentially can measure, not only heat, dampness, light and smoke, but at least in theory, and this is our own science fiction extension of the idea, why could they not also monitor biosensors that continually report the individual's heart rate, blood pressure or someday, who knows, mood and brain patterns. All that raises that old science fiction question of "Who's in charge, us or the computers?"

But this is only a small part of a much larger picture. In 1995, more than 95 billion, not million, e-mail messages were exchanged. Seventy percent of American homes with children between the ages of 8 and 12 have Nintendo computer games. Every American presidential candidate in the last campaign had a home page on the Internet. It didn't amount to too much, but it was symbolic. This is not just America. In 1966, the best telephone cable across the Atlantic carried 138 messages at one time. The latest ones can carry 1.5 million simultaneous messages. All of this is not just spreading across the Atlantic, as we know, there is a phenomenal rise in Asia over the last generation. India homes equipped to receive satellite or cable television reached 14 million by 1994. India expects to have 80 million cable TV homes, able to receive up to 250 channels each within just a few years. Add to this the incredible story of Singapore and pockets of rapid development in other countries.

No long ago, my wife and I received a letter from Prime Minster Mahathir of Malaysia in which he said Malaysia is setting out to build what the letter called a multi-media utopia. Here is a quote from the letter. "We plan to make the multi-media supercorridor the world's best environment for harnessing multi-media technologies. The Malaysian government has committed to a 'bill of guarantees' that will remove restrictions on foreign ownership, immigration, and the hiring of foreign knowledge workers for multi-media supercorridor companies, guaranteeing unrestricted access to information and to provide the best intellectual property protection in the region. We are currently enacting cyberlaws to accelerate this development. We are targeting 8 flagship applications. By 2000, we want to move toward electronic government, a single national multi-purpose smart money card, telemedicine, worldwide manufacturing webs, borderless marketing centers, research and development clusters, including a new, multi-media university and smart schools."

Take all of that and lay on top of it the fact that we have an estimated 50 million people at present who have access to or are using the Internet from China to the Chiapas in Mexico. We've all read about the Internet and there has been enormous hype about it, and now there is even a little backlash against it. But this thing is exploding and it is going to continue to explore for years and eventually there are incredible forecasts about how many people are going to be hooked together before long. But it is important not to think that what we are experiencing is purely a computer revolution, because equally dramatic changes are taking place in other fields -- conductive polymers, composite materials, optics, energy, medicine, sensing, artificial life, super molecular biology, micromechanics, nanotechnology, not to mention, Dolly the sheep in Scotland and cloning.

It would be a profound mistake beyond this to say, okay, it affects other technologies as well, but it is not just technology. These changes converge and change societies. They change social structures. They change institutions. They change family life. They change demography. They change environment. They change ideas, values, culture, and social paradigms. They change religion. They change politics. They will change everything. And when we combine all of these, we begin to see on a truly civilizational-scale change more far reaching and certainly faster than any previous civilizational transformation.

One of the key differences between what we write in books like War and Anti-War or The Third Wave, and makes what we say a bit different from a lot of other social scientists and social commentators, is that we do not believe you can have change on this massive a scale without the other side of change, conflict. You cannot change civilizations without a degree of conflict. When we look at what happened when the industrial revolution arrived, when the second wave of change arrived, we saw in Britain, for example, between 1830 and 1880, a constant political struggle between first wave, or agricultural elites, called the landed interests, and on the other hand, the rising, industrial urban elites identified with the new industrial system. England managed to resolve those struggles without bloodshed. We in the United States were less fortunate. We had the Civil War, 1861-1865, in which a rapidly industrializing North confronted and ultimately defeated a backward, agrarian, slaved-based South. That cast the die that said the United States would from now on be a major industrial power, not an agrarian power.

In Japan, you had the Meiji revolution. In country after country, wherever industrialism came, wherever the urban, industrial way of life arose, there was conflict at the levels of politics, culture and many other levels, but also sometimes, at the level of violence. If we look at the world today, we have what appears to be, sometimes, incomprehensible struggles. Why are these people fighting? What are they fighting about? It is hard for us to understand and we attribute some of the bloodshed and horror, for example, from the war in the Balkans to so-called thousand year old ethnic hatreds. I would suggest there is another way to think about that. I would urge us to look at the statement made not so long ago by the mayor of Belgrade in Serbia who said the Bosnian war pits the traditional and religious values of the villages against cities, like Sarajevo. It is a war of the mountains against the cities. Now keep that quote in mind as I read you another quote pertaining to a conflict in another part of the world. This is a quote about the takeover of Kabul by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Here from an Afghan employee of a humanitarian organization on this site, he says "Theses people are just coming from the mountains and the forests, they are wild, and now they are in the city and are telling city people how to live."

I believe that if we look around the world we will see many examples of first wave-second wave collisions, which are essentially collisions between ways of life or civilizations. In one case, civilizations based on land and in the other case, civilizations based upon industrial development. And with the arrival of the Industrial Revolution, there was internal struggle and internal conflict in all of the industrializing countries. Then, once those internal struggles were completed in Europe for example, the industrialized or second wave countries proceeded to colonize much of the rest of the first wave world. And so we wound up with a global power structure in which you had second wave countries on top and first wave countries on the bottom.

The question then arises, what happens when a third wave way of life and a third wave civilization begins to arise on the planet? I would argue that the power structure on the planet is going to go from two level to three level, from bisected to trisected, and that one could symbolize these differences in civilizations of the hoe or the plow, civilizations of the assembly line and civilizations of the computer. The question facing us, since we are responsible for maintaining a degree of peace and stability in the world, is how to make all of these things work together with minimum violence in the transition?

The new rising civilization collides with all of the rules of the old one. It challenges borders, sovereignty and the nation-state itself. As far back as 1980 or even earlier, my wife and I began forecasting not only the break up of the Soviet Union, that was a decade or more before it actually happened, but the relative decline of the nation-state. What we are seeing today, I believe, is a radical change in the character of the nation-state and the rising importance of non-national players on the global stage. In Power Shift, another book we wrote, we called these players the global gladiators. In a first wave world, in a world made up of agricultural communities and political groupings, as I said before, you had a world of city-states, leagues of city-states, papal states, principalities, empires, and ungoverned territories. You had a high diversity of political forms around the world. Then came the second wave of change, and it was reflected in that map that I described before. You had a closed system of nation-states with national markets and there were, in theory, no ungoverned areas. It was a Newtonian model; it was just like an atomic model coming out of Newtonian physics in which balance of power, equilibrium and nations were the dominant issues. The third wave global order is just now beginning to emerge. We move toward a radically different model, where power is unbalanced, not balanced and there is disequilibrial, not equilibrial, with quite different definitions and concepts of sovereignty among first wave, second wave and third wave populations, each of whom seems sovereignty in a different way, a world no longer exclusively dominated by national or nation-state units, marked not only by the globalization of the economy and a second wave nationalist backlash against these third wave developments, but also separatism and growing demands for a subnational, regional or even local autonomy.

Not only does a third wave bring new players into the system, it shifts the relative power among these various players and links them up in new ways and leads to new levels of interdependence never previously known. But roughly speaking, first wave countries typically depend upon one or a few countries to buy their raw materials. They may sell food; they may sell iron ore; they may sell copper, but by and large, these are bulk sales with relatively few customers in the outside world. When I visit an iron ore mine, one of the largest in Brazil, and I said, how many customers do you have, they said 35. Well, that is a manageable comprehensible number. The second wave, as in states industrialized, the number of connections with the outside world increased. But even so, because they have to have markets at a distance, they have to get raw materials from other countries and so they had more connections with the outside world than first wave countries usually have. The level of interdependency rose, but even so, was still limited. The numbers, for the United States, are remarkable. In 1930, the United States still had only 34 treaties or agreements with other nations. In 1968, there were 282 such treaties or agreements. The United States began its transition into the new economy in the mid-1950s. The third wave economies require hyper-connectivity with many more units in the world system. As of 1990, the United States was a party to over 1,000 treaties and literally tens of thousands of agreements. That great proliferation comes as it makes the transition from a brute force to a brain force economy and society. It also produces a paradox of power on the planet. The more power you have in this sense, the more constrained you are in using it. And the less power you have, sometimes, the freer you are to use it for good or for ill.

The third wave global paradigm, which does not deny the roll of nations but places it in realistic perspective, must take into account linkages, not just between nations, but also, the fact that there are additional big players on that global stage. In addition to countries, there are giant corporations, world-wide religious movements, criminal syndicates, and non-governmental organizations by the thousands. In 1975, I testified before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, there were about three thousands organizations or associations like the Air Force Association that were international bodies. Today there are more than 25 or 30 thousand such international associations. You are getting a very tightly networked set of linkages among non-governmental organizations all around the world. They are significant players on the world stage. Just ask France how it felt about Greenpeace's campaign against nuclear testing in the Pacific.

I believe that what is happening is that we are beginning to see a different kind of interactivity, with nations having more or less open borders, or porous borders, and it creates the potential for all kinds of new and strange connections and competitions. Consider Country "A", heavily dependent on revenues of tin, for example. Suddenly it learns that a country on the other side of the world is about to gouge a mine out of its jungle and compete in the world tin market. Now imagine that it wants to prevent that new tin mine from ever opening so that it can't compete with it. It launders funds and passes them to a transnational environmental organization that finances a campaign to save the rain forest where the new tin mine would go. What you have is, in fact, a country and an NGO being linked perhaps covertly into a campaign, which then the media picks up and amplifies and all of these players go to work on the situation.

Now that sounds crazy. But I know the governor of a province, a key province, in Latin America and South America who literally believes this has happened, that an Asian country has funded campaigns for environmental quality in his country to prevent them from competing in the tin market. That may be a paranoid fantasy on the part of that governor, but on the other hand, it is not an impossibility in the world that we are moving to. The NGOs can exploit the global media, which is ok, why not? But we need to be aware of that and how it is done.

Or, imagine alliances caused between countries and particular transnational corporations. Or imagine cross-national regions that are springing up around the world, all the way from the northern Asian continent to Europe and else where, or bi-national regions, like the United States and the southwest, between the United States and Mexico, where you get organic regions springing up and eventually meeting, greater decentralization and a degree of autonomy if they are to economically develop and begin demanding that from their central governments.

What we have is a much more complicated global order than the one that the old second wave map indicated. Put all these together on the global stage at the same time, their voice amplified by the media, increase their access to information and communication through 250 million computers and a sky full of satellites. Put it all together at the very same time that old economic barriers are breaking down, when trillions of dollars dance electronically every night or every week, when central banks and other institutions are weakened, when intergovernmental organizations from the UN to the World Bank are in crisis, and when 50 million soon to be 250 million people can zip information back and forth from their homes all across borders, some of them invading each other's privacy, learning how to make bombs for that matter, or hacking into military computer networks. Put all this together and we no longer have the neat second wave map of the world in which every country knows its place on the map and every country has air-tight borders.

What we have is a third wave system that is more like that of the pre-industrial world. It is more like a first wave world of 350 or 500 years ago, only now, on a very high technology basis with weapons of mass destruction in many hands. Anyone who pictures, therefore, that the decades ahead will be peaceful and orderly and suggests that we can get along without military intelligence institutions or that we can do them unthinkingly and without a strategy and without understanding this new system is in fact smoking marijuana and inhaling it.

We now live in a revolutionary, non-linear environment that demands a totally rewritten definition of security and it is in this new reality that we need not only new physical tools, but new concepts. Take the idea of coalition. You have been discussing coalition all day and we heard memorable remarks of President Bush. It used to mean that a coalition was a group of nations who joined together to accomplish something. It meant things like NATO or the Warsaw Pact or the astonishing coalition that President Bush managed to put together in a supreme high wire act of diplomacy and amazing brilliance. But all these coalitions consisted solely of nation-states. In the 21st century, my wife and I would suggest, coalitions will go beyond the mere alliance of nations. The concept of deep coalition will come to the fore. And a deep coalition is a systematically constructed, multi-layered, often stealthy linkage of nation-states and non-state actors, companies, religions, NGOs, media, empires and other transnational or non-national allies all moving toward a common temporary goal. Temporary because effective coalitions of the future may be deep, but they are not likely to last as long as they have now in a less rapidly changing era.

We will see such deep coalitions spring up and we will see counter-coalitions of the same king spring up. The rise of this new third wave global system, so complex, so dramatically different from the one that we have lived with now for some three centuries will determine the environment in which the Air Force of the United States and many other air forces as well will develop over the next 50 years. It is a world in which third wave development can do fantastically good things for the human race. Third wave development can lift a billion people out of poverty in a single generation in Asia, if in fact Asia remains politically stable, militarily stable. It is a world in which third wave economic prophesies can be used to radically reduce the ecological threats to the planet.

But all these positive potentials could easily vanish in a welter of wave conflict, or conflicts between waves. These are truly stupid and avoidable conflict, but internal to countries and external, resulting from the absence of well-thought-through third wave strategies on the part of our political leaders could break out. Professional military education needs to take that into account. Young officers have to learn how this new system operates, who are the players, what are the dynamics of them for this emerging environment is one of high unpredictability, nonlinearity, surprise, instant communication, information and misinformation warfare, terrorist and other threats to the electronic infrastructure on which much of the world's economy and civil life now depends. It is a world in which internal conflicts are likely to proliferate as first, second and some cases third wave elites clash. We may find major countries tearing themselves apart over these internal collisions.

The lesson of history is that massive change doesn't happen without massive conflict and our task is to prevent that conflict from reaching the level of violence. In such a world, anticipatory, preventive anti-war action becomes a survival necessity. If so, we should expect that the armed services of various states, often in deep coalition with these other players on the global scene: religious leaders, NGOs, media, networks and so on, will be drawn into anti-war campaigns and should be drawn into anti-war campaigns. I am not talking about peace keeping or operations other than war in the conventional sense. What we are talking about will increasingly involve the use of information and C4I capabilities, far better than satellite imagery, the ability to see into an area with microsensors or to use space-borne sensors with currently unattainable levels of sensitivity and resolution, all this in an alliance with special forces, information moving seamlessly back and forth from satellite to individual soldier and back. As we wrote in our book, War and Anti-War, it will likely be a world of smaller, faster, smarter, instantly reconfigurable forces capable of pinpoint action with minimal bloodshed -- a world of Sun Tzu technology in which the best victories are those that come without combat and in which information superiority can prevent or even win wars before they begin. It will be a world in which air and space-based communications may be used to block out the kind of genocidal, hate propaganda that helped trigger the horrible, hideous events in Bosnia or in Rwanda.

Many of today's ghastliest conflicts could have been forecast long before the first gunshot and could have been headed off or at least mitigated by intelligent anti-war action making use of information technology and knowledge and the media. It is a world in which space and air forces will require systems that are instantly switchable to an interoperable width, those of different, frequently changing and hence temporary allies. As World War II and the half century since then proved, old adversaries can become allies, but also vice versa. It is a world in which unmanned flight, nonlethal weaponry and above all instantly available satellite intelligence, fused with human intelligence and open source intelligence all become vitally important to maintaining peace. It is a world in which space-based sensors do a far better job of locating weapons of mass destruction, the most dangerous legacy of the second wave era of mass destruction. Finally, it is a world in which airborne lasers can detonate enemy or rogue missiles before they do any damage.

This at best is an impressionistic at the world in which today's air forces will have to operate even as they begin or complete their transformation from brute force to brain force organizations. This transformation implies also the transition from air to space. The air forces of the world face enormous challenges quite apart from budget stringencies as they make the transition from air to space, not eliminating the aircraft, but employing them in a framework increasingly defined by space-based technologies. Just as surface forces have had to become accustomed to operating under the wings of an airplane, so airmen will become adjusted to operating under the eyes and ears in space. The U.S. Air Force is an amazing enterprise, filled with incredible machines and even more incredible men and women, with leaders, who, in the absence of third wave strategic leadership from either the White House or the Congress, or from either the Democrats or the Republicans, have the responsibility to help fill the strategic vacuum, leaders who know that the most powerful weapon of the future is the human brain, armed and enhanced by the most brilliant intellectual tools in history. It is the history task of today's Air Force leaders, and military leaders in general, to replace deterrence and mutually assured destruction with forced-backed, anti-war strategies for the turbulent world to come as they lead the way into the great vastness that lies beyond the wild blue yonder. Thank you.