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"What we're seeing now is the weaving of electronic warfare, psyops and other information warfare through every facet of the plan from our peacetime preparations through execution," said Maj. Gen. Paul J. Lebras, chief of the Joint Information Operations Center, a secretive military agency based in Texas that has sent a team of experts to join the Central Command info-warfare team for the Iraq campaign.
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As modern combat relies increasingly on precision strikes at targets carried out over long distances, the military is likewise increasingly aware that there are many ways to disable the operations at those targets.
An adversary's antiaircraft radar site, for example, can be destroyed by a bomb or missile launched by a warplane; it can be captured or blown up by ground forces; or the enemy soldiers running the radar can be persuaded to shut down the system and just go home.
"We are trying very hard to be empathetic with the Iraqi military," said a senior American information warfare official. "We understand their situation. The same for the Iraqi population. We wish them no harm. We will take great pains to make those people understand that they should stay away from military equipment."
Even so, the military's most ardent advocates of information warfare acknowledge that American pilots ordered into enemy airspace would rather be told that antiaircraft sites were struck first by ordnance, rather than by leaflets.
Aerial pictures help the military assess bomb damage to a target. The softer kind of strike is harder to assess.
Information warfare experts look for what they call "the voilà moment."
"In Afghanistan, the biggest lesson we learned in our tactical information operations — the radio and TV broadcasts — was the importance in explaining, `Why are we here?' " a senior American military officer said. "The majority of Afghanis did not know that Sept. 11 occurred. They didn't even know of our great tragedy."
During the war in Afghanistan, this officer said, "The voilà moment came when we saw that the population understood why coalition forces were fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda."
In Iraq, he said, "it will be when we see a break with the leadership."
Delivering radios to the people of Afghanistan presented a particular problem. About 500 were air-dropped over the country, and all of them were destroyed on impact. The military and aid groups passed out more than 6,500, and millions of leaflets were dropped telling the Afghan people of frequencies used for the American broadcasts.
The American military also took over one important frequency, 8.7 megahertz, used by the Taliban for its official radio broadcasts. That became possible once the towers used by the Taliban for relaying their military commands were blown up as part of the war effort. As in most totalitarian governments, the military and government used the same system for their radio broadcasts. The American military continues to broadcast to the Afghan people over that channel.
Improvisation remains a hallmark of the emerging information war, said Brig. Gen. Thomas P. Maney, of the Army's Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command.
In Afghanistan, General Maney said, the American military found it hard to get its radio and television messages out to many villages that had access to neither. So Special Forces troops made contact with local coffee-house managers, and offered them the same radio programs being broadcast from Commando Solo planes, but on compact discs to be played over a boom box for the patrons.
The program gave birth to a new icon on the military's maps of Afghanistan: a tiny picture of a coffee mug to indicate the location of village businesses that agreed to play CD copies of the American radio programming.
If Mr. Bush orders an attack against Iraq, the information offensive will expand to a fierce but invisible war of electrons. Air commanders will rely on a small but essential fleet of surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft, including the radar-jamming EC-130H Compass Call and electronic-eavesdropping RC-135 Rivet Joint. There are just over a dozen of each aircraft in the American arsenal.
Flying from Prince Sultan Air Base, outside Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the Rivet Joint is already playing an important role in collecting Iraqi radio and radar emissions, which are jammed when American and British planes in the no-flight zones periodically attack targets on the ground. The RC-135, a military version of a Boeing 707 jet with a bulbous nose filled with sensors, is essentially a flying listening post, orbiting at the edge of the battlefield above 30,000 feet.
