ability to strike out - a lesson Jomini and Napeoleon expensively re-learned at the end of their gasping supply lines in Russia in the winter of 1807.75 In our own day, jet-meshed networks, commercial webs, satellite links and finance platforms span the omnipresent routes of America’s global reach. So as we consider the information networks evolving now: the growing connected world that is the largest, fastest, most comprehensive network in history, we should ask ourselves the question Jomini might have raised: Will an even greater empire be based on control of information-powered networks? This new world of connectivity won’t immediately devour the old. In fact, the classic and the revolutionary will contend for some time, side by side. Cyberweapons and nuclear ones in a strange dance, for instance: Imagine that you're ruling a country with no hope of building your own platforms for medicine, finance, information or security.’® You will be, as a result, uneasily and permanently dependent on the nations or groups that do control these elemental, algorithmic and efficient tools. If you're running a medium-sized country there’s no chance your own IT industry can develop a search engine with the reach and fluency of Google; or a cybersecurity system with the omnipresence of some Chinese database. Might this make you more eager for nuclear weapons? For an atomic hedge against the day you find yourself threatened with national unplugging? Networks, we'll discover, don’t lift us above the old conflicts so much as they complicate them. They fill the old hatreds with new fidelity; sharpen the old grudges and make it easier than ever to slap at the world when you're angry. While it is tempting to say that we’ve moved from a world of “cold weapons’ like planes and tanks to a world of “hot weapons” where digital light pulses and biological infections will prevail, really it is the strange blending of these cold and hot systems that is so interesting, so dangerous. Ever more pr