War & Peace Quote by William J. Perry

Perry’s line reads like a calm briefing, but it carries the chill of someone who has watched the battlefield migrate from trenches to terminals. “Driven by information” isn’t just a neutral description of modern life; it’s an argument about power. If information is the engine, then whoever controls sensors, networks, satellites, data pipelines, and the ability to interpret them controls the tempo of conflict. The quote’s restraint is strategic: it avoids sci-fi alarmism while quietly insisting that the old categories of military advantage (mass, territory, even industrial capacity) are being reordered by code, bandwidth, and intelligence.

The ellipsis in “Technological breakthroughs...” does work, too. It gestures toward a rapidly expanding list - cyber operations, precision-guided munitions, real-time surveillance, drone warfare - without naming any single platform that might age poorly. That vagueness is a feature, not a bug; it frames change as structural and relentless, not a passing fad tied to one weapons system.

As a late-20th-century defense figure, Perry is also speaking to procurement and doctrine: “how we prepare for war” is the real target. Preparation becomes less about stockpiling hardware and more about investing in R&D, interoperability, secure communications, and human expertise that can metabolize data into decisions faster than an adversary. The subtext is an admonition to institutions that move slowly: in an information-driven era, bureaucratic lag isn’t an inconvenience. It’s a vulnerability.