MUNICH, Germany, Feb 13 (AFP) - Like warriors throughout the ages, Donald Rumsfeld says he wants the highest technologies available, the lowest costs to life and treasure possible and the surest means conceivable of ensuring the acquiescence of adversaries.
But at the annual Munich security conference this weekend, the controversial US defense secretary mounted a passionate argument for his conviction that the Internet and other modern means of communication have magnified the value of the most powerful weapon of all: information.
"Bloggers and hackers and chat rooms!" Rumsfeld exclaimed Saturday during a question-and-answer session with defense and security officials and experts from around the world. "E-mails and cell phones with global reach!"
"It alters how you have to behave... it adds a level of complexity" to warfare in the 21st century.
Discussion at the gathering focused on the future of transatlantic security institutions -- with NATO chief among them -- and was saturated with academic notions about how, and whether, the United States and Europe still needed to be close security partners in a post-Cold War world.
Rumsfeld delivered a set-piece speech calling on both sides of the Atlantic to put their divisions over the Iraq war behind them -- he even joked that it was the "old Rumsfeld" who had made the contentious remark about "old Europe" here two years ago.
But it was only at the end of his impromptu responses to questions about US views on the fate of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the nature and purpose of global security in general that Rumsfeld launched with obvious enthusiasm into his pet theme: military transformation for warfare in a high-tech world.
"We have to recognize that this global war on terror is the first war in history that's being conducted in a world dominated by a particular set of new realities," Rumsfeld said, also listing 24-hour cable television news networks and a US Congress "that's nearly always in session" as factors that fundamentally alter global security concerns.
"It's more a matter of culture and attitude than it is of technologies and platforms," Rumsfeld said.
The United States has "an executive branch of government that really is still organized for the industrial age, not the information age. We have an enemy, these terrorists, that don't have democracies ... and are able to turn on a dime.
"They also lie. They're able to lie -- and a lie travels across the globe in seconds, and of course the truth is still putting on its shoes," he said, loosely quoting the wartime British prime minister, Winston Churchill.
"So there's two or three news cycles where the lie lives, and dominates... it's the world we're in."
Rumsfeld's critics -- and they are many, even within his Republican Party in the United States -- charge that he is arrogant, needlessly provocative, secretive, excessively bellicose, ignorant and fundamentally wrong in his approach to upholding the security of the United States.
Rumsfeld made clear in Munich however that whether he was revered or reviled he would stick to his guns.
"It is a heck of a lot easier to sit outside and critique... than it is to do it," he said, adding that popular use of modern communication technologies made it imperative to change the way military forces approached the entire security equation.
Western military forces have for centuries been, and remain, configured for fighting massive conventional armies.
"And that is not what we're doing" any more, he said. The main security challenge of the modern era was "to take these large institutions and turn them to fit this new century."
02/13/2005 01:14 GMT - AFP