In Part II, Owen takes a close look at what exactly is meant by the term Information Warfare.
On Information Warfare
I have often characterized the conflict we are fighting as unprecedented, and indeed it is; so much so that we cannot even adequately name it. We fight this conflict on a global scale, on multiple levels, in various ways. Our enemy is comprised of hostile governments and transnational organizations supported by both international and local groups, many of which reside in nominally friendly governments. Politically, there are governments and groups that are allies, some that are enemies, and a number that are trying to have it both ways. We are not fighting a conventional war, or a counter-insurgency, or a counter-terrorism campaign, but all of these all at once. And all are asymmetric. No wonder we don’t know what to call it. No wonder people are confused about it, or even fail to believe in it.
To go into all the dimensions of this multidimensional, global, asymmetric war is outside the scope of my discussion here; an apt topic for a future book perhaps, to be written by someone else. Here I will restrict my comments to one of the factors that makes this conflict unprecedented: the central role information plays in it. This is, I think, the first conflict that is more than anything else an information war. Given its centrality, some discussion of information warfare is appropriate.
Information warfare has meant different things to different people at different times. When I starting working on IW in about 1991, it was just out of the pet theory stage and many foolish things were said. Fairly quickly, a consensus view developed along with a consensus definition — which I now forget. I made no great attempt to remember it because it did not adequately capture the essence of IW, which is to manipulate the enemy’s decision-making process in our favor while maintaining the integrity of our own. To use this as a definition probably assigns IW an unacceptably wide ambit; it certainly does from the organizational, operational, and bureaucratic point of view.
For this reason, the official definition of IW is much narrower to give it its own place within both the theoretical understanding of conflict and the organizational structure of the military. Under this definition, IW relates to gaining control of or dominance over the information sources and/or channels that an adversary uses to develop what the military calls situational awareness, which they define as the degree to by which one’s perception of one’s current environment accurately reflects reality. (There’s a nice page on it here.)
But I like the broader, more expansive, definition in the context of the war we are currently fighting. It properly emphasizes, in my view, the multidimensional nature of this conflict and the role almost everyone is fighting in it. I think it also help us understand what is going on and gives us a more useful framework for interpreting current events than the traditional one.
So by separating IW out for discussion, I do not mean to imply that we have a coherent IW strategy that guides our conduct of this war. I doubt that we do. Instead I want to highlight how information — that is, the asymmetric use of information — changes the nature of this conflict and what affect that has on the conduct of the participants. [Emphasis mine-SW]
Also when I speak of IW here, I do not necessarily mean IW operations consciously conducted in accordance with a separate IW strategy; I mean the effects we achieve by our conduct when viewed from an IW perspective. Almost everything we do, intentional and not, affects our enemy’s decision-making process, even as everything they do is intended to affect ours.
As there are different modes of warfare, so there are different modes of information warfare. In conventional warfare, one can speak of maneuver warfare and direct assault. Maneuver warfare seeks to maneuver the enemy into an untenable position, at least partly in the hope that he will realize this and surrender. Direct assault seeks to crush the enemy by brute force.
Our enemies have been conducting their IW in a direct assault mode. Their IW strategy is much more explicit than ours; terrorism is in the broad sense an IW tactic. Combined with the rest of their IW strategy, it is intended to convince us to abandon the fight — in effect to surrender. They use their media, the internet, messages by terrorist leaders, and speeches by national leaders to spread direct propaganda. They manipulate our media through techniques that range from faked photos and staged photo-ops to granting direct access, manufacturing false stories, and inserting friendly sources into the news gathering process. They have even manufactured atrocities. They stage Islamic protests (with signs conveniently written in English for our benefit), videotape the savage murder of hostages, encourage and sometimes financially support antiwar and anti-American groups, and they manipulate the UN. All these are a direct assault on our national will.
In contrast, our IW is of the maneuver variety. We use a much broader spectrum of approaches because our circumstances do not afford the luxury of the simple and direct approach. For example, our diplomatic efforts, seen from an IW perspective, work simultaneously on multiple levels. At one level, we pursue diplomatic options because they might yield some direct result. On another level, our pursuit of diplomatic options prepares the ground, both internationally and domestically, for what is to come. On a third level it obscures our real intentions, buys time, sends mixed messages to our enemies about our intentions, and provides useful misdirection.
In a similar manner, our reaction to the Jihadis’ IW efforts is in itself a kind of IW response. When the Jihadis get their desired viewpoint on the war into our media, which they have been very successful in doing, it creates a reaction that is reflected back to them and that they observe to gauge their success. So when opinion makers and the media present doom-and-gloom assessments and presentiments of defeat, the Jihadis are led to believe their IW efforts are succeeding.
But this perception can be just as distorted as the one they insert into major news outlets and wire services. This distortion arises as much from organic stresses within US society as from conscious effort. The Jihadis do not understand how we deal with controversy, they do not understand how different sectors of our society assign credibility to different information sources, and they don’t understand the relationship between public debate and public opinion, or how both ultimately influence government policy. By viewing our society through the same distorting lens that they spiked with false information in the first place, they derive a misleading picture of what we are about. The picture is all the more convincing for not being fake, and it leaves them vulnerable to being blind-sided, as Saddam was twice, and as the Taliban and al Qaeda were in Afghanistan, and again in Iraq.
It may seem nonsensical to characterize largely unconscious reactions as IW, and strictly speaking I suppose it is. But my point is that, whether conscious or not, our reactions have equivalent force and effect. Combined with diplomacy and the IW component of our military and counter-terrorism operations, it does give us a strong overall IW capability that we have used to our advantage in the past, and continue to employ.
My intent in the foregoing is to briefly illustrate the IW nature of this conflict and to partially redress the perception that the information war is going quite as badly for us as many think. That is not to say all is well. As IW is about perception, that perception is still a sign of trouble and the trouble comes as much from us as from the actions of our enemies. So it behooves us to take a closer look at IW and perception.
IW and Perception
It will not take a remarkably astute reader to deduce from the foregoing that IW, especially as applied in the current conflict, is a two-edged sword. Crudely put, to fool the enemy we have to, if not fool ourselves, at least obscure our true plans, as well as our methods, and perhaps even some of our successes. Public statements, diplomatic overtures, even UN agreements all serve more than their stated purpose. Thus, the observables that we, as a society, are used to relying on to make judgements are no longer fully reliable, and this problem is worst with those pundits and professional commentators who believe they have a good bead on things, by virtue of their professional experience.
These people are often poor at interpreting current events not simply because of bias. Bias affects everyone to some degree but I’m discounting commentators from the ideological fringes here. The problem is more that the pundits were not forced to think anew by 9/11 because they bore no direct responsibility for what would come after. As a result relatively few have made the necessary effort to educate themselves about the unprecedented nature of this conflict. Therefore, they cannot educate the public in such important matters as reasonable expectations and signs of actual progress, and a great deal of uninformed debate flourishes, not only between those who support the war and those who oppose it, but among the supporters of the war themselves.
As a result, public perceptions are almost hopelessly muddied, unrealistic expectations flourish, and domestic opponents of the war gain because whatever their arguments may lack in facts and logic, they make up for in conviction and consistency. In this sense, Bush’s political problems are more a result of the unprecedented nature of the conflict than what is often referred to as his failure in leadership. Bush is simply ahead of the country, and our peculiar circumstances are making it more difficult for the country to catch up. In this way IW has, in effect, changed the nature of national leadership.
IW and Leadership
We, in common with most people, yearn for strong, even uncompromising, leadership. Bush’s second-term leadership is derided as tepid by many of his supporters. There is a yearning for clarity; the kind of clarity that would come from abandoning maneuver warfare, in my military analogy, for direct assault. I deeply sympathize with these sentiments, but I think they are misguided because those who hold them do not fully appreciate crucial facts.
In this new type of war, every action Bush takes, every speech or comment, even [especially?] inadvertently into an open mike, directly affects the decision making of our enemy. He must act and speak with that in mind and he knows it. He cannot always reassure us, saying what we wish he would say if it does not suit his larger purpose in this conflict.
But more importantly, things have changed. In his first term, Bush could show us that kind of bold, direct, "cowboy" leadership because in it was right thing to do at that time. Aggressively moving into Afghanistan and taking out Saddam were correct not only in the interests on national security but to send the proper message to the our enemies and the rest of the world.
The successes of his first term laid the groundwork for his second term, which has presented different challenges requiring different approaches. So Bush has had to adapt and his public leadership style has changed as a result. If a return to direct leadership is called for, I have no doubt we will see it. So in essence, Bush has not changed — but the war he is fighting does change and will continue to do so. It falls to us to be aware of that and better appreciate the ramifications.
Strategy and IW — Terrorism and Democracy
In the beginning of the IW section, I commented that terrorism is in the broad sense an IW tactic. The same may be said of democracy. The intent behind both is the same. Iraq provides the clearest example of this. The Jihadis use terrorism and their other IW efforts not so much to directly degrade our military but to convince us to withdraw support from our military. We support democracy in Iraq not to directly defeat the Jihadis, but to convince the Iraqis to withdraw their support from the Jihadis, and indeed to actively resist them.
What is true of the conflict in Iraq is true of the greater conflict. Neither we nor the Jihadis stand a good chance of ultimately prevailing purely by military means; they because they lack the military capability, us because it is not consistent with our nature to wage a war of general devastation. The most important thing about our strategy is that it is focused on specific bad actors within Islamic society, and intended not just to capture or kill them, but to isolate them and delegitimize their ideology. The Jihadis have the same goal: to isolate us internationally, to delegitimize us and more broadly to delegitimize Western liberal values as the basis for civilization.
So call it IW or a war of ideas, that is essentially what we have. They have chosen terrorism to underpin their strategy. We have chosen democracy to underpin ours.
Is this realistic? Are there better alternatives?
To answer that requires that we look at more at Islam, the Jihadis, and the paradox of the war they are waging.
In Part III, Owen addresses the role of Islam in the current war and reviews our enemy's goals in this conflict.
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