iWar

by Bill Gertz

  According to the report:

  The proliferation of the Internet, social media, and personal electronic devices caused the paradigm of communication to shift: it was no longer possible for the military to tightly control and limit information. While the military was slow to adapt to these developments, the enemy was not, developing considerable skill in using these new means of communication to their own ends. In addition, the enemy was frequently unconstrained by the truth: for example, they could feed false information to the media through the use of news stringers on fast-dial from an insurgent/terrorist cell phone. This allowed the enemy to make the first impression, an impression that could be difficult or impossible to overcome, even when false. For example, a premature detonation of an improvised explosive device (IED) in Kandahar City, [Afghanistan] which resulted in many civilian casualties, was quickly (and falsely) reported to be a Predator [drone] strike. Though not true, years later, locals still believed the casualties came from a coalition airstrike.

  The report’s conclusion was a stark admission that for a decade of conflict in the early years of the Information Age, the most powerful military in the world had been unable to grasp the strategic importance of information warfare—how to wage it and how to battle against it.

  The State Department was no better. As mentioned earlier, the disbanding of the U.S. Information Agency in 1999 and its placement within the State Department’s undersecretariat for public diplomacy and public affairs dealt a near-fatal blow to America’s strategic messaging in both the war on terrorism and against other adversaries. The ineffective messaging capability, mainly conducted by the poorly run Voice of America and other quasi-official radio outlets, coincided with the explosion of information technology around the globe.

  American efforts to counter strategic information warfare have been failing for the fundamental reason that current government leaders have ignored a key reality: the United States has been declared an enemy combatant targeted by foreign information operations. The first step in addressing the threat is to clearly understand the nature of these new, unconventional dangers. Once those threat agents engaged in information warfare are clearly identified, they must be designated as enemy combatants in information war. Upon clearly identifying enemies, the next step will be to identify what Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz called each enemy’s “center of gravity,” the strategic pillar upon which the enemy is conducting information operations. As Claremont Institute intelligence specialist Angelo Codevilla noted, “competent regimes make war in ways that bring them peace, above all internally.”

  “[S]ince regimes and circumstances differ,” Codevilla wrote, “so do centers of gravity and the foci of wars. Knowing yours and others’ centers of gravity is the key to understanding the kind of peace you need, the kinds of wars you must and must not fight, and the way you must fight them. Hence, self-preservation’s prerequisite is to shed any sense of entitlement to your peace, to be ever conscious of how your regime might be undone.”

  For war and peace in the Information Age, this is the crucial strategic imperative and one requiring extensive study and understanding.

  Finally, once the enemy’s center of gravity is located, information-based attacks must be used with clear purpose—achieving a victory that results in peace as defined by the United States and the desired end state, where the attacking enemies no longer pose threats.

  The current liberal political agenda has hampered America’s ability to wage information warfare as a result of misguided policies that emphasize total transparency in foreign messaging aimed at countering Islamic terrorism—the only current information warfare operations marginally being conducted. Current government policies also have limited the use of so-called soft power, as opposed to hard military force. Soft power includes public diplomacy tools for information operations. This approach of limiting soft power operations under politically correct restraints has not worked and never will work. The United States must develop a large-scale, comprehensive program of information warfare that uses the full panoply of tools, such as propaganda, political action, psychological warfare, and other means.

  Contrary to conventional wisdom, propaganda and political warfare are not un-American activities used only by dictatorships or authoritarian states. The American Founding Fathers resorted to information warfare in winning independence from Britain. As information warfare expert J. Michael Waller notes, the Founding Fathers employed an array of public diplomacy, propaganda, counterpropaganda, and political warfare as instruments in the struggle for freedom from British rule. “John Adams, Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington recognized that the opinions and perceptions of foreign governments, publics, and armies mattered, and they used information operations as instruments of first resort in the American Revolution,” Waller told me.

  “Hopelessly outmatched against the world’s most formidable military power, the American founders compensated asymmetrically with public diplomacy, propaganda, counterpropaganda, and political warfare,” Waller said. “They never used those terms—all came into vogue as we know them in the twentieth century—but they employed all the measures, integrating them with domestic politics, secret diplomacy, intelligence, and warfare with decisive strategic effect.”

  Public diplomacy is defined by the U.S. government as efforts “to promote the national interest and the national security of the United States through understanding, informing, and influencing foreign publics and broadening dialogue between American citizens and institutions and their counterparts abroad.” Counterpropaganda is the active effort to neutralize enemy propaganda. Political warfare is the use of aggressive and coercive political means to achieve objectives. Psychological operations, or psyops, are military activities to convey information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals. Under liberal politically correct policies, the military was forced to abandon even the term psyops, which was considered too aggressive for the mavens of the Left. Instead, military psyops were transformed into the politically correct term military information support operations, or MISO.

  Massachusetts’s colonial statesman Sam Adams was a master at political warfare. Adams was a follower of English philosopher John Locke and mounted relentless negative political or ideological attacks that would be followed up by offering positive alternative solutions—all designed to keep the enemy on the defensive. “Adams strategically integrated the negative and the positive with political action both at home and, when necessary and possible, abroad,” Waller explains.

  It is these kinds of lessons that must be learned from the founders and applied to our Information Age foes.

  To achieve victory for America, the comprehensive strategic plan for Information America must be able to reach all levels of society, government, and the private sector with truthful information.

  The first step in restoring America’s unique greatness and bringing unity to the homeland is to create dedicated organizations—public, private, and joint public-private endeavors—that will be used to aggressively dispel the widespread lies and disinformation about America, its history, and its contemporary activities. Again, I call this new program Information America and envision the effort as an upgrade to the disbanded U.S. Information Agency. This is an Information Age system of organizations and groups, both governmental and nongovernmental, devoted to promoting the United States of America and to countering information warfare against the country, which is spread with electron speed due to advances in information technology.

  Robert R. Reilly, a former USIA official and senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, correctly identified the disbanding of USIA and its absorption by the State Department as a setback in U.S. efforts to wage a war of ideas. “The State Department should not have been expected to do diplomacy and public diplomacy, as they sometimes
conflict,” Reilly told me. Public diplomacy often seeks to reach foreign audiences over the head of their governments and this can complicate diplomatic relations. The two functions should not be colocated in the same agency. “In short, since the disbanding of USIA, there has been no central U.S. government institution within which policy, personnel, and budget could be deployed coherently to implement a multifaceted strategy to win the war of ideas over an extended period of time,” Reilly says. “As a result, as Secretary [of State Hillary] Clinton said, the U.S. is largely absent from the field.” The broadcasting arms, led by VOA, are run by part-time employees with little experience, and its programming has been dumbed down from American promotion to entertainment featuring pop music that does little to influence Arab publics and in fact encourages anti-Americanism.

  The objective of Information America is to promote the best that America has to offer, both to the American people and to the world. It will be driven by fundamental concepts that the blessings of liberty and prosperity America enjoys should not be limited to America, but shared with the world. The guiding principle for the narrative of Information America is that the most effective weapon in the war of ideas is truth. Information America will be structured into two components, based on new media and old media, corresponding to today’s media environment.

  Currently, the U.S. government is unable to conduct this function effectively, its bureaucracy having been highly politicized by decades of liberal ideologues who have inculcated those in its ranks under a dominant political culture that prevents portraying America fairly or accurately. Details on how best to construct this new organization will be crowdsourced among private sector and government experts and specialists—the best and brightest—to produce the best ideas and concrete plans of action. If Information America is made one of the U.S. government’s highest national security priorities, the program will be funded and staffed at robust levels. A key requirement is presidential leadership.

  With the Obama administration soon to be relegated to the dustbin of history, the damage done to American prestige and power under Obama’s leadership must be reversed. No more apologizing for America’s past or present. America must be held up to the world as the last, best hope for humankind.

  Given the current disarray within the federal government, two lines of effort will be required: government and private sector, nonprofit and for-profit. American business and industry leaders and other philanthropists must be educated to understand the urgent need to support and invest in this vitally needed project. The simple truth is that new weapons of information warfare are needed on the digital battlefield to preserve and defend the nation. The message to American leaders both public and private is simple: support Information America programs because the nation is engaged in an existential fight that requires action to defend and support the American ideal.

  This project is an urgent priority. America’s enemies have carefully gauged the weakness of the current leadership in the country and see America as a dying empire, along with what many view as the decline of Western civilization in Europe. Decades of lies and distortions about America are reshaping perceptions.

  INFORMATION AMERICA PROJECTS

  To prevent America’s defeat in the ongoing and accelerating global information conflict, what follows are a number of proposed programs and projects to be carried out under Information America.

  The New Active Measures Working Group: As sought by the Senate Intelligence Committee, Information America will reestablish and modernize the Active Measures Working Group, but for use beyond just Russian information warfare. The new Active Measures Working Group will also conduct counter-disinformation activities against an array of enemies, notably China. Information America, while strictly adhering to a charter of telling the truth, will seek to learn from our adversaries by adapting similar programs used by enemies and retooling them according to American values and guidelines. Research and analysis on information warfare programs and activities by Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and other adversaries will inform its programs and activities, such as China’s use of the Three Warfares: legal, psychological, and media.

  The Social Media Development Project: Based on Moore’s law, that technology power is doubling on a regular basis, Information America will seek to study and anticipate new and emerging social media platforms likely to replace dominant current social media like Twitter and Facebook. In fact, research should be conducted by national laboratories aimed at producing new social media platforms designed specifically to support the goals and objectives of Information America—a commitment to the American ideals of freedom, democracy, and free markets—while seeking to protect and defend the country against hostile states that seek to use information attacks against us.

  The Big Data Project: Data mining is emerging as a cutting-edge tool in the Information Age. Tom Reilly, chief executive officer of the Palo Alto, California, firm Cloudera, believes data mining can be an extremely valuable tool in supporting information operations.

  “I think cybersecurity itself is over–written about, but information warfare is not,” Reilly told me. “Big data analytics can play a big role in information warfare by arming the global intelligence community with insights from cyberspace social communications.”

  Big data technology already is widely used in both government and the private sector for a variety of purposes. For example, banks and telecommunications companies are leveraging data-crunching technology to gauge what is called social sentiment. Companies like Coca-Cola and General Motors are closely listening and analyzing the massive amount of communications on the Internet, whether in Facebook or Twitter or in various discussion forums. The practice reveals who is listening, who is talking, and what they are buying.

  The same technology can be applied to listening to America’s information adversaries to identify who are the key influencers. These can be targeted in campaigns of sophisticated information warfare operations to influence the influencers. Big data will be one of the major weapons for operations, targeting, agent penetration, and influence operation in strategic information warfare.

  Through big data, an exquisite picture of foreign information threats will be obtained, a critical first step in understanding the threat.

  China too is aggressively using big data, as the hacks of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management and Anthem health care revealed. Currently in China some 20,000 to 30,000 projects are under way devoted to analyzing big data on the Chinese Internet and exploiting it for both commercial and information warfare purposes.

  “With big data analytics you can learn who the influencers are, what is being said, who is listening, who’s re-communicating, how fast is news propagating, and what is the sentiment of it,” Reilly says. “We can determine who are the enemy instigators and who are the positive and influential responders. Big data analytics can provide unprecedented insight into the online world of social influence and enable authorities to interpret, respond, and counteract potential emerging threats.”

  Big data will prove to be one of the most significant strategic force multipliers in today’s hyperconnected Information Age.

  The Hollywood Project: America since the 1930s has been admired globally in large measure because of the content of its motion pictures that accurately portrayed America as the best the world had to offer. Whatever its past shortcomings, the United States remains a great nation characterized by a people who love freedom, equality, and independence.

  Unfortunately today, as the result of the liberal left cultural subversion, a large portion of American films portray the most negative and base aspects of American life. With cliché-like frequency, American films denigrate the U.S. military, American corporations, American intelligence agencies, and the government writ large as corrupt and evil—all themes in line with the anti-American ideology of the liberal Left. Hollywood, of course, must remain free to produce whatever films it wants. However, a parallel, pro-American, patriotic film industry must
be created to counteract the lies and distortions being promoted by the dominant liberal left film industry. Backed by American philanthropists, wealthy technologists, and others, Information America will seek to create film companies that produce feature-length films and documentaries with the aim of providing a balance to the often extremely negative portrayals of the United States so prevalent in many sectors of Hollywood.

  Additionally, Information America programs will seek to push back against enemy states like China that are seeking to buy into and ultimately control the content of American movies in ways that would support Beijing’s communist information warfare narratives. China already is swaying the movie industry. As part of its information warfare program, China’s Dalian Wanda, a real estate conglomerate, has purchased major U.S. movie studies, including Legendary Entertainment and Paramount studios, along with the AMC, Hoyts, and Carmike theater chains. The takeovers have raised fears that Beijing is seeking to censor topics and exert propaganda control over American movies. In 2011, the American movie company MGM bowed to Chinese government pressure during the remake of the movie Red Dawn, which was initially planned to show a fictional American guerrilla resistance force fighting a Chinese military invasion of the United States. But under pressure from Beijing the company altered the story in the late stages of production by replacing Chinese military forces with North Korean troops. Such rank appeasement must be resisted.

  Adapting the Chinese model but using democratic and free market means of persuasion, Information America advocacy specialists will seek to appeal directly to film industry leaders and producers to get them to realize that in the current international security environment, anti-American portrayals and depictions in movies are not only untruthful but also destructive of America’s peace and long-term survival. For those film companies bent on promoting false and negative stereotypes, a boycott system should be considered that would reinforce the point.