Under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. Armed Forces have moved father than ever before in developing anti-ballistic missile and space-based strategic assets, and trying to integrate combined operations around the globe using state of the art Information Technology.

In the short term, America's lead in these areas is, indeed, growing faster than ever. And the stunning success of the three-week campaign to destroy the Iraqi armed forces and topple Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in March-April 2003 bore witness to how irresistible forces equipped this way can be when they are firing on all cylinders.

But there are two structural problems with this strategy.

The first is that the technology on which it is based is, even its in its most mature developments, extremely fragile at best, and vulnerable to enormous disruption from the outside at the worst.

And there is no doubt that potential hostile nations, including Russia and, most of all, China, are well aware of this. The Department of Defense has acknowledged 79,000 cyber attacks on U.S. armed forces web sites in the past year, a disproportionate number of them appear to have been launched from web-sites located in China.

Indeed, Chinese military journals in recent years have even in public discussion given high priority to discussions of concepts of asymmetrical war whereby America's vast high- tech superiority in real time intelligence, weapons targeting and command and control could be disrupted and neutralized in the event of a an all-scale conflict.

Even in peacetime, recent electronic viruses have shown a disturbing ability to disrupt U.S. military electronic systems and bases.

U.S. forces on Okinawa discovered that the hard way only last month when the Zotob computer worm infiltrated thousands of systems on the island.

Because the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps systems on Okinawa do not yet operate on the more modern and secure NMCI network, but use the older, less secure "Legacy network," they were vulnerable to the worm, Electronic Data Systems (EDS) Okinawa Site Manager John McKnight told marine.com.

As a result, McKnight said, the Legacy network suffered "across the board infection of non-classified NIPRNET machines."

Also, most Navy and Marine Corps systems on Okinawa use the Windows 2000 operating system, which is most vulnerable to the Zotob worm, McKnight said.

EDS battled the worm throughout the weekend of Aug. 13-14, and McKnight said and even by Monday, Aug. 15 the network had been only 70 percent cleared of the Zotob worm.

The United States and its Northeast Asian ally Japan were at peace, so the worm experience was just that: a learning experience. But disruptions on such a scale, or even greater, in times of war would have devastating consequences for any military as dependent upon reliable and secure electronic communications as the U.S. Armed Forces are.

Second and more serious in the long run, the United States cannot count on any inherent superiority over other nations either in the quality of its software engineers and resources, or in terms of their absolute numbers.

The word "can't" is not in the lexicon of a serving three star general in the U.S. Armed Forces. But at the recent Directors of Information Management/Army Knowledge Management conference at Fort Lauderdale, Fla., a remarkable number of top ranking U.S. officers in the information technology area spoke frankly about the scale of the challenges certain to face them.

Indeed, in terms of absolute numbers, the battle is already lost. China is out-producing the United States in scientists by 10 to one, a U.S. general warned at the DOIM/AKM conference.

In 2004, universities and colleges in the United States produced only 60,000 hard science graduates. But in the same year, China produced 600,000 of them, Lt. Gen. Robert M. Shea of the U.S. Marine Corps, J-6 and Director of Command, Control, Communications and Computer Systems for the Joint Staff of the U.S. Armed Forces told the conference.

India too was outstripping the United States in the number of its software engineers, Gen. Shea warned. "There are more software engineers in Bangalore than Silicon Valley," he said.

Far from getting better soon, this crucial strategic imbalance looks certain to get far worse over the coming decade. For the number of computer scientists graduating per year has now been falling for nine years, Michael Capellas, president and CEO of MCI told the DOIM/AKM conference.

Capellas said the problem was not caused by the outsourcing of software work around the world, especially to India, but preceded that development. "The problem existed long before (the Internet bubble burst in March 2000)," he said.

"We are declining in science ... in the 5th and 6th grades," Capellas said. "Young ladies are not entering math and science -- and when they do, they go to medicine." Yet because a majority of the teachers in U.S. schools were women, this imbalance had already led to a proportionately greater shortage of science and math teachers, he said.

Nor can the United States even count on quality over quantity any more. Because in the "flat world" of virtual reality and global electronic communication, the resources already available over the worldwide web have already ensured that cyber-experts around the world have every opportunity to be as good as any in Silicon Valley and the U.S. Armed Forces, and they are already proving it, Capellas said.

We no longer have a huge lead in applying (communications technology)," he said. "Technology is being rapidly developed around the world. Get used to it."

"Data will become more and more available everywhere through search engines," the MCI chief said. "We have digitalized virtually everything."

The dissemination of information through the Internet means that people around the world "are smarter" in a lot more ways "than they used to be," Capellas said.

Can, therefore, the United States continue to secure its most vital IT systems for both conventional military supremacy and anti-ballistic missile defense when other nations already equal us in the quality of their software engineers and are already outstripping us in the sheer quantity of them?

As William Shakespeare's Hamlet, the most notorious prevaricator in human literature, said: "Aye, there's the rub."

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