In Saudi Arabia, covering a war mostly from television, the only real action we scribes would see was the occasional Scud that Saddam Hussain sent our way. And when one Scud had its journey cut just a hundred metres short of the hotel by a Patriot, the Allied Command proudly presented its empty casing to the journalists it had saved. Much time that evening was spent writing inscriptions, some funny, some serious, on its orange-brown shell.

Among these, one stood out: ``You saved our lives. Now save the UPI please''.United Press International, theinternational news agency, was on its last legs then. There is some evidence now that it has been saved. But it also seems that its chief executive officer, James Adams, has plenty of free time. So he has produced this remarkable tome (The Next World War: The Warriors and Weapons of the New Battlefields in Cyberspace; Hutchinson; -- 18.99; 366 pp), making sense of the new alphabet soup, RMA, WBOM, COMPUSEC, COMSEC and so on that will soon replace the old one like CTBT, NPT, FMCT, etc, that has so far dominated our security debate -- and thank god for that.

Also, how apt that such landmark work in explaining this latest buzzword, RMA, or Revolution in Military Affairs, has come in the context of the Gulf War, in one sense human history's first cyberwar. But if you think that war demonstrated how technology is changing the modern battlefield, you may be stunned by what is coming. Unfortunately that may also be true of much of our own security establishment still caught in the bean-counting timewarp of tanks,fighter planes and, of course, the megatonnage of the nukes.

Certainly, the mouse will not replace the rifle and the nerd will not outrun the commando. But technology could make conventional armies irrelevant. Smarter nations and nimbler armies will fight battles from computer consoles and destroy the enemy's armies before they even know what hit them. WBOM, or warfare by other means, involves using hacking, viruses, information warfare to demoralise the enemy. Welcome to the battlefield in cyberspace.

Adams is not your usual Washington Belt-way type maniac talking some sci-fi cock-and-bull. While our security debate is still entirely focussed on whether or not to sign that completely outdated piece of paper called the CTBT ``in its current form'' the world has left us far, far behind. While our generals and babus squabble over whether to buy new snowmobiles for Siachen or not, they are yet to wake up to a whole, dramatic paradigm shift in the business of strategy-making.

The usual Indian reaction tosuch new thoughts is: but of course it is irrelevant. It will be ages before such technologies begin to matter here. But remember how easily the Pakistanis just the other day hacked into the Indian Army's new website on Kashmir?

Technology is a great leveller and Adams explains how this new revolution in military affairs is threatening to change power equations entirely. Any nation that does not understand this is in danger of being out-zapped not just by adversarial nations but even by sundry mafiosi, terrorists and thugs. All somebody needs is to hire a couple of cyber whizkids to bring railways to a standstill, freeze banking systems and stock markets, blind radar systems and stop an army in its tracks.

RMA is all about using viruses, logic bombs and electronic sleepers to cripple your adversary economically and militarily. In two fictional scenarios Adams describes how the Americans short-circuit the entire electricity grid in Iran simply by activating ``sleeping'' viruses with which the computerssupplied to them by western companies in the past had been impregnated. Similarly th-ey are able to freeze all of the telecom network in China and disable the computers controlling the sluice gates at the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze, taking 17 gigawatts (equivalent of 12 Bhakhra-Nangals) of power out of the grid besides drying up millions of acres of paddies. When warfare takes this form, the armies of tanks and cannons are going to be rendered good for little else than ceremonial parades. But is anyone in India -- with the solitary, honourable exception of the Navy -- even thinking about all this?

Adams simplifies it all to the extent of idiot-proofing it. Beginning with 1340 AD, when a more sophisticated bow was developed, he lists 11 revolutions in military affairs. In 1420 artillery revolutionised old siege warfare. In 1600, ship-borne artillery, better fortress construction methods and muskets brought a three-way revolution. After the advent of the modern army built around a staff system (1800),steam turbines, submarines and the torpedo (1800-1850), the arrival of the railways, telegraph and the rifle (1860), tanks and aircraft carriers (1920), the last revolution was in 1945.

That, many of our pundits would be disappointed to know, was the nuclear bomb. The 11th revolution, and one that matters now, is the microchip. A glimpse of the multifarious ways in which RMA will redefine modern warfare will appear in this newspaper's magazine section on Sunday. But the key thing about RMA is that much more than with armour, artillery, fighters, bombers, carriers and submarines here, each nation would need to develop its own doctrine specific to its own environment. It will also completely change the old stereotypes of the military-industrial-bureaucratic complex, a possibility first visualised by former US chief of staff General Colin Powell in an article in the July '92 edition of Byte magazine. He underlined the fact that ``increasingly military requirements are being met by off-the-shelf hardware andsoftware''.

That is a remarkable paradigm shift. Traditionally, militaries sustained whole industries and civilian/commercial spin-offs came up as a consequence of that. In the cyber-age, where infotech industry works on smart ideas and massive volumes that create the necessary economies of scale, the militaries will no longer be the prime consumers. They will have to look at the shop shelves, pick and choose and have the ability to employ essentially civilian technologies for military use. From militaries driving the market to market-driven militaries now if that isn't a revolution, find another name for it.

The international strategic affairs establishment is buzzing with this new excitement. The US, the Western world, the Chinese, are all fully focussed on this fifth dimension in warfare (after land, air, water and space). The Israelis have assigned their finest minds to this new pursuit. But are we prepared? Can we afford to miss this revolution?