Or how about a radar that confuses the Iraqi air defense system by showing U.S. bombers in the wrong locations, or heading in the wrong direction?

Although information operations has been a tool of warfare for centuries, the Internet and other technologies are boosting capabilities -- and the stakes. Already, the Pentagon has sent unsolicited e-mails to Iraqi generals, encouraging them to defect.

"Warfare is less and less about pushing men and machines around the battlefield and more and more about pushing electrons and photons," said Loren Thompson, a defense analyst with the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Virginia.

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