Information warfare."gentlemen,you can't fight in here!...this is the war
room!"
United States: Media principles Killed by friendly
fire in US infowar
Increasingly, the US administration's infowar policy - along with the steps
soldiers are taking to implement it - blurs or even erases the boundaries
between factual information and news, on the one hand, and public
relations, propaganda and psychological warfare, on the other. US military
affairs analyst William Arkin warns that while this policy ostensibly
targets foreign enemies, its most likely victim will be the US electorate.
It was California's own Hiram Johnson who said, in a speech on the Senate
floor in 1917, that "the first casualty, when war comes, is truth." What
would he make of the Bush administration?
In a policy shift that reaches across all the armed services, Secretary of
Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and his senior aides are revising missions and
creating new agencies to make "information warfare" a central element of
any U.S. war.
Some hope it will eventually rank with bombs and artillery shells as an
instrument of destruction. What is disturbing about Rumsfeld's vision of
information warfare is that it has a way of folding together two kinds of
wartime activity involving communications that have traditionally been
separated by a firewall of principle.
The first is purely military. It includes attacks on the radar,
communications and other "information systems" an enemy depends on to guide
its war-making capabilities. This category also includes traditional
psychological warfare, such as dropping leaflets or broadcasting propaganda
to enemy troops.
The second is not directly military. It is the dissemination of public
information that the American people need in order to understand what is
happening in a war, and to decide what they think about it.
This information is supposed to be true. Increasingly, the administration's
new policy -- along with the steps senior commanders are taking to
implement it -- blurs or even erases the boundaries between factual
information and news, on the one hand, and public relations, propaganda and
psychological warfare, on the other.
And, while the policy ostensibly targets foreign enemies, its most likely
victim will be the American electorate.
One of Rumsfeld's first steps into this minefield occurred last year with
the creation of the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence. Part of its
stated mission was to generate disinformation and propaganda that would
help the United States counter Islamic extremists and pursue the war on
terrorism.
The office's nominal target was the foreign media, especially in the Middle
East and Asia. As critics soon pointed out, however, there was no way - in
an age of instant global communications - that Washington could
propagandize abroad without that same propaganda spreading to the home front.
Faced with a public outcry, Rumsfeld declared it had all been a big
misunderstanding. The Pentagon would never lie to Americans. The Office of
Strategic Influence was shut down.
But the impulse to control public information and bend it to the service of
government objectives did not go away.
This fall, Rumsfeld created a new position of deputy undersecretary for
"special plans," a euphemism for deception operations. The special plans
policy czar will sit atop a huge new infrastructure being created in the
name of information warfare.
On October 1, in a little-noticed but major reorganisation, U.S. Strategic
Command took over all responsibilities for global information attacks. The
Omaha-based successor to the Strategic Air Command has solely focused up to
now on nuclear weapons.
Similarly, the country's most venerable and historic bombing command, the
8th Air Force, which carried the air war to Germany in World War II, has
been directed to transfer its bomber and fighter aircraft to other commands
so that it can focus exclusively on worldwide information attacks.
The Navy, meanwhile, has consolidated its efforts in a newly formed Naval
Network Warfare Command. And the Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan, or
JSCP, prepared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, now declares information to be
just as important in war as diplomatic, military or economic factors.
The strategic capabilities plan is the central war-fighting directive for
the U.S. military. It establishes what are called "Informational Flexible
Deterrent Options" for global wars, such as the war on terrorism, and
separate plans written for individual theaters of war, such as Iraq.
To a large extent, these documents and the organisational shifts behind
them are focused on such missions as jamming or deceiving enemy radar
systems and disrupting command and control networks.
Such activities only carry forward efforts that have been part of U.S.
military tactics for decades or longer. But a summary of the strategic
capabilities plan and a raft of other Pentagon and armed forces documents
made available to the Los Angeles Times make it clear that the new approach
now includes other elements as well: the management of public information,
efforts to control news media sources and manipulation of public opinion.
The plan summary, for instance, talks of "strategic" deception and
"influence operations" as basic tools in future wars.
According to another Defense Department directive on information warfare
policy, military leaders should use information "operations" to "heighten
public awareness; promote national and coalition policies, aims, and
objectives ... [and] counter adversary propaganda and disinformation in the
news."
Both the Air Force and the Navy now list deception as one of five missions
for information warfare, along with electronic attack, electronic
protection, psychological . attacks and public affairs.
A September draft of a new Air Force policy describes information warfare's
goals as "destruction, degradation, denial, disruption, deceit, and
exploitation." These goals are referred to collectively as "D5E." In order
to do a better job of deception, the joint chiefs have issued a "Joint
Policy for Military Deception" that directs the individual services to work
on the task in peacetime as well as wartime.
Specifically, it orders the Air Force to develop better doctrine and
techniques for incorporating deception into war plans. The Air Force, in
response, now defines military deception as action that "misleads
adversaries, causing them to act in accordance with" U.S. objectives.
And, like the other services, it is increasingly folding its "public
affairs" apparatus -- that is, the open world of media relations -- into
the information warfare team. "Gaining and maintaining the information
initiative in a conflict can be a powerful weapon to defeat propaganda,"
the Air Force said in its January doctrine.
That echoes a statement by Navy Rear Adm. John Cryer III, who worked on
information warfare in the Combined Air Operations Center in Saudi Arabia
during the Afghanistan war: "It was our belief ... we were losing the
information war early when we watched al-Jazeera," Cryer said at an October
conference, meaning that the U.S. perspective was inadequately represented
on the Arab world's equivalent of CNN.
"We came around, but it took a lot longer than it should have." Of course
there is nothing wrong with making sure the U.S. point of view gets
represented in the news media, both abroad and at home. Done properly, that
is a prescription for more openness and less unnecessary secrecy.
The problem is that Rumsfeld's vision of information warfare seems to push
beyond the notion that American ideas and information should compete with
the enemy's on a level playing field.
And Rumsfeld's vision, with its melding of public information and
deception, is taking root in the armed services. The new Air Force
doctrine, for example, declares that the news media can be used not only to
convey "the leadership's concern with [an] issue," but also to avoid "the
media going to other sources [such as an adversary or critic of U.S.
policy] for information."
In other words, information warfare now includes controlling as much as
possible what the American public sees and reads. The disinformation
campaign being constructed goes against even the military's own stated
mission.
Truthfulness, the Air Force says, is a key to defeating adversaries.
Accordingly, the service branch adds, "U.S. and friendly forces must strive
to become the favored source of information." The potential for mischief is
magnified by the fact that so much of what the U.S. military does these
days falls into the category of covert operations.
Americans are now operating out of secret bases in places like Uzbekistan
and the Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq; Special Forces units are said to
be inside western Iraq as well. In the meantime, the armed forces are
making use of facilities in the Arab states along the Persian Gulf.
In all these cases and more, the U.S. and other western news media depend
on the military for information. Since reporters cannot travel into parts
of Iraq and other places in the region without military escort, what they
report is generally what they've been told.
And when the information that military officers provide to the public is
part of a process that generates propaganda and places a high value on
deceit, deception and denial, then truth is indeed likely to be high on the
casualty list.
That is bad news for the American public. In the end, it may be even worse
news for the Bush administration -- and for a U.S. military that has spent
more than 25 years climbing out of the credibility trap called Vietnam.
William M. Arkin is a columnist and writer on military affairs and a
former US Army intelligence analyst. This item was originally published by
the Los Angeles Times.
Comment on this article.
Links:
The Psywar Society website and a useful collection of background files
(pdf only) from a UK based information war website.
A retired US army psyops officer's home page including notes on planning
psyops operations drawn largely from the US army's Psychological Operations
Field Manual No.33-1.
Rumsfeld's statement on the closure of the OSI and Reporters sans
Frontieres comment.
A collection of articles on war and propaganda from the
www.globalissues.org website.
http://www.indexonline.org/news/20021213_unitedstates.shtml
