For those who have en-dured combat, Carl von Clausewitz's classic military metaphor about "the fog and friction of war" needs no explanation; it's a truism. For those of us who have never served, the line is only understood rationally. No doubt the tone and tenor of this review would have been different if it had been written in the guts of an Apache helicopter or Abrams tank on a combat mission. Then again

Lifting the Fog of War is both title and theme of Admiral Bill Owens's smoothly written and crisply argued book about what America's high-tech military infrastructure should be. The admiral-vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the first Clinton administration and commander of the U.S. Sixth Fleet during the Gulf War-is a champion of both technological and organizational innovation. In fact, he wants them integrated. He wants new command and control infrastructures to redefine communication and coordination between and within the services. He proposes joint forces training, exercises and initiatives to annihilate anachronistic army, navy, marine and air force doctrines. His harsh-but astute-interpretations of the technical and interservice conflicts surfaced by the Desert Storm and Kosovo conflicts merit particular attention. Owens doesn't flinch from critiquing his civilian counterparts either.

Unsurprisingly, Owens grasps the nettle of the cultural and institutional politics that both thwart and enable military innovation. The pleasant surprise is that his comments are candid without being cutting. And they're targeted at an Economist-type audience-not just the Brookings or Georgetown defense policy crowd. Even the endnotes are informative and entertaining.

While Lifting the Fog of War isn't propaganda, Owens's ideological bias and technical sensibility make it a policy polemic. In particular, he promotes the "revolution in military affairs" doctrine, a profound effort to redefine America's war-fighting architecture that has provoked superheated debate inside America's military-industrial complex and the national-security community.