If you haven’t been living under a rock, and are a reasonably informed person, you’ve been watching the news thats been exiting Iran during this “period of turmoil.” Aside from the obvious Democracy vs. Theocracy and Secular vs. Orthodox debates this country’s media seems to stir up at every possibility, there are two outcomes we can already see that interest me, and not in a political or religious way.

It’s simple really, warfare and media have taken a serious turn, and no one in this country seems to care, or even notice. As an aside, it is scary how often those two topics, warfare and media, follow each other.

On the warfare front, I believe we are seeing one of the first examples of true cyber-strategy during conflict, which in the near future will simply be called war. The Iranian government has taken great steps to block or limit the passage of electronic data in and out of the country. Social networking sites news organizations have been cut off, and a BBC satellite has even been jammed.

Our nation’s military has historically been very unwilling to adopt or adapt to new technology. The air supiriority we flaunt to the rest of the world was a gift from the Japanese; if they hadn’t incapacitated our battleship fleet at Pearl Harbor, we never would have relied on aircraft carriers. Submarine warfare was taught to us through a brutal series of lessons by the German U-Boats. And (unless we’re uncharacteristically careful) the necessity to be able to wage offensive and defensive battles on the information front will be learned only after serious casualties to our technology infrastructure. China spends so much time hacking our networks that its not a far fetched notion that it stems from some sort of cyber boot-camp.

Some lip service has been given to the creation of a “Cyber Czar,” a scary doublespeak title that will amount to little. No one seems able even to decide who he will report to. This position is important enough that it should almost be a fifth branch of the military, if that part of our government had even a chance of being able to support it.

Another interesting outcome of the “Iranian issue” is that old media is most assuredly dead. When the US State Department asks Twitter to postpone their scheduled maintenance because they’re the only news outlet from Iran, newspaper editors, radio producers and TV network execs. should be jumping out of their windows. Add to this the fact that one of the few “traditional” reporters active in Iran works for a show that airs on a comedy channel, and you have a clear message that your parent’s media is dead.

I’ve been trying to follow the activities over there as best I can, and the two resources I’ve relied on the most are Fark and Twitter. Hardly considered equals of the “hard reporting” provided by CNN and the NYT, but in the information age, an age completely ignored by traditional media, their past weaknesses have become their current advantages.

So its official. I will no longer be watching, listening to or reading the news, I’ll be browsing and tweeting it, and at the earliest opportunity, I will be augmeting my “end-of-the-world” bag with some cyber weapons. Rest assured, however, that the 36″ titanium Halligan is still around.