SciAm, December, 1995: "Fighting Future Wars. U.S. military planners may be preparing for the wrong conflict." Policy experts, technical gurus and defense contractors have begun to study a range of other potential threats, from a newly hatched superpower to a regional power with dramatically altered fighting tactics, to legions of mercenary hackers that bring down banks and stock exchanges with computer viruses and other malevolent software. The vast array of scenarios is a measure of the speculative turn that has gripped the military-planning establishment. Debate on high-tech fighting culminates in the question of whether information technologies -- a computer virus, for one -- could make conventional military hardware obsolete and whether they would make possible a virtual invasion of the continental U.S. A battle of the bits would be fought by destroying an enemy's information assets, its financial, electrical, telecommunications and air-traffic-control networks. Direct strikes at the military would not be ruled out: cracking a government computer is already a not infrequent hacker rite of passage. In addition, more than 95 percent of military communications travel over public networks. CJR_war