Information warfare spotlight

From Info Wars: Pentagon Could Learn From Obama, Israel by Noah Shachtman

On a second pass, I'd probably be more nuanced, covering what the Pentagon might learn from "the two most significant information operations of recent memory. I'm speaking, of course, about Israel's war against Hamas – and Barack Obama's war against Hillary Clinton and John McCain."

But this was my first take. Have a read, after the jump.

- I'm not going to presume to tell you how to do your jobs. Instead, I figured I'd share some general principles about how information tends to spread online. Then I'll look at the two most significant information campaigns of recent memory. I'm speaking, of course, about Israel's war against Hamas – and Barack Obama's war against Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

- I'll skip the part where I tell you that just about the whole world is connected these days. Bottom line: When everybody's connected, word spreads fast.

- How long did it take for that rumor to spread that al Qaeda has caught the bubonic plague? Or the zinger about the terror group using gay rape as an initiation rite? (By the way: Whoever in this room came up with that one – kudos to you, sir.)

- Rule # 2: With that many people connected, keeping control of information is just about impossible. Especially when you combine new media's connectivity with old media's resources to investigate. How long did it take for one sentence from Senator Feinstein's testimony about U.S. drones on Pakistani soil to become worldwide news? 24 hours? How long did it take to find Google Earth images, confirming that sentence? Another 48?


From The Mystical Realm of Human Terrain and COIN: Who Is in Charge? by John Stanton

Human Terrain System employees have been given a stay of execution. On 16 February, HTS management sent the following to HTS team members. "Mr. Robert Reuss TRADOC Deputy G-2 has approved an extension on making a decision to transition until 2 March. The previous deadline of 18 Feb 09 is no longer in effect. This allows all teams more time to better coordinate the transition decision with their families, enables the project to better answer your questions and still allows us to complete program total transition by 31 May. We will send out a thorough update on all questions no later than the end of the week after we have conferred with TRADOC Staff from the G1, Personnel Administration, contracting, legal and security this week."

According to sources, the "transition" underway in the US Army's/TRADOC Human Terrain System has little to to do with the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with Iraq and everything to do with the good-old-boy network. That network, claim sources, is trying one last time to salvage the current version of the HTS program and, in so doing, rescue the reputations and salaries of program manager Steve Fondacaro, deputy program manager Steve Rotkoff, and senior social scientist Dr. Montgomery McFate-Sapone.

But something else seems afoot here. That the US Army would go to wits end on behalf of troublesome $200 million program gives rise to some interesting speculation. It seems plausible that flag rank and/or high ranking civilian officials have staked their reputations on HTS and human terrain geospatial analysis as the new thought of choice underpinning non-kinetic warfare. And that, in turn, makes it seem likely that—in spite of report after report of HTS internal corruption, ineptitude and abuse—-the life of the HTS program has become a political struggle somewhere in Washington, DC, that likely pits US Army General and Dr. David Petraeus and his Think Tank Mafia (Dr. McFate-Sapone; Dr. Mike Meese—advisor; Dr. David Kilcullen—advisor; Dr. John Nagl—advisor; Dr. Fred Kagan—the latter from the American Enterprise Institute and father of the "surge") and more traditional elements in the US Army who know BS when they hear and see it.

[ ... ]

The military/civilian management chain of command above HTS program manager Fondacaro has one noteworthy quality: its unpredictability. That the Army continues to tolerate this programmatic state of affairs can only be due to either complete incompetence in program oversight or, as seems more likely the case, someone further up the chain of command is pushing to keep the effort alive—no matter what the cost. There is a concerted effort within government/business these days to understand and attempt to quantify the Human Terrain for an assortment of strategic and tactical objectives: soft power/non-kinetic power, COIN, Unconventional Warfare, Information Warfare (the media as battleground), etc.. From a business perspective, this is little more than marketing/sales: attempting to quantify consumer/market behavior either as individual or collective.

General Gordon Sullivan, USA (Ret.), now head of AUSA, once said that in the end, the military—particularly the US Army—is about nuts and bolts, blocking and tackling. The new wave of leadership ought to keep that in mind as they pile higher and deeper in Ph D's and lose themselves in network centric warfare.


From The New Ethic of Public Diplomacy by Joshua S. Fouts

From my perspective, it's neither strictly national security nor strictly PR. Strong national security and solid public relations depend upon good relations between cultures. Public diplomacy in its most successful form is authentic communication of our culture with other cultures. This will require an unprecedented level of nuance and open-mindedness to be successful in the post-Bush era, and it gets to the heart of the battle over what public diplomacy is: Is it messaging or dialogue? A conversation or propaganda? "Governments will increasingly be judged by their actions" and not by their self-descriptions, writes British diplomat Carne Ross for Europe's World.

In wartime it is easy to over-emphasize the importance of information warfare in countering extremist messages. But just as reconstruction is a critical part of post-war planning, so too should the quality of narratives be contemplated from a long-term perspective.

Information warfare is funded at levels radically disproportionate to funding for public diplomacy, as Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Kristin Lord points out in the Christian Science Monitor (October 29, 2008). According to Lord, the "Department of Defense will pay private contractors $300 million over three years to produce news and entertainment programs for the Iraqi public." That figure is "equivalent to roughly one-eighth of the State Department's entire public diplomacy budget for the entire world."

If public diplomacy is to include information warfare, then we must also supplement it with something fresh to ensure that we are communicating with the world in an authentic way—in a way that the world will at least listen and, at best, trust.