iWar

by Bill Gertz

  The “Hamilton” Project: Similar to the Hollywood project, this Information America program will focus on revitalizing and protecting broader American culture. It will be based on the demonstrated appeal of the wildly popular Broadway musical Hamilton, which premiered in 2015. The musical portrays the life of American Founding Father Alexander Hamilton. Its popularity demonstrates that the liberal left anti-American narrative can be broken and that the greatness of America’s history can be shown and celebrated in a highly artistic musical format.

  The Semantics/Terminology Project: Information America will challenge liberal left language subversion and seek to take back the narrative of constraining language and semantics. Left liberal advocates promote an ideology of political correctness, as shown, that is based on New Left anti-Americanism and must be countered. Language fascists among New Left Marxists and their Long March through the institutions of America, mainly within universities, must be exposed and countered by disseminating accurate and true information. Marxist and false terminologies must be challenged aggressively on a systematic basis, and Information America will use educational tools to inform and correct publics about the threat posed to the American way of life by false and misleading terminology. Clarity of terminology in debate is an urgent requirement. The academic discourse remains captive of the Marxist Left. This program will expose and reject the nomenclature of the anti-American Left and provide a more accurate lexicon that will assist in bringing about honest public debate on issues of critical national importance.

  The Cable News Project: One of the top priorities of Information America will be the creation and operation of a new cable and satellite television news outlet. The broadcasts will be high quality, well funded, and staffed with television professionals in multiple languages, twenty-four hours a day. This is an urgent requirement and needed as an international counterweight to the negative portrayals of all things American by such outlets as Doha-based Arabic cable and satellite station Al Jazeera television, Russia’s Kremlin mouthpiece RT television, and state-run China Central Television (CCTV). This program would not be needed if privately owned American cable networks had devoted more resources to critical issues related to promoting American ideas and values and countering hostile foreign propaganda. Information America television will be a pro-American, truth-providing news, information, and entertainment outlet designed to show the best of America, and when necessary aggressively counter the lies and disinformation about the country. Anticipating critics’ charges that this cable news outlet will lack credibility because it will be regarded as a government propaganda organ can be countered by establishing clear rules and guidelines for broadcasts under fairness principles, and by oversight from a board of experienced journalists.

  The Lawfare Project: Information America will establish domestic and international nongovernmental legal organizations that will be employed to engage enemies on the legal battlefield, using lawfare and similar legal tools and institutions. An example was the July 2016 ruling by the United Nations Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, which ruled against China’s expansive and illegal claims to owning 90 percent of the South China Sea. A concerted network of nongovernmental legal organizations will engage the Chinese directly to counter legal aggression.

  The Democracy Promotion Project/Human Rights Promotion Project: Current government efforts to promote democracy have failed. For example, as a result of pro-China, business-oriented American policies, an antidemocratic “Beijing consensus” was developed by China and is being used to expand Chinese influence and control around the world as part of information warfare operations. Despite the overwhelming desire for democracy and freedom around the world, China’s model of antidemocratic development is gaining ground in the international informational battle space over American and Western efforts to promote democracy. China has attempted to alter and in some cases has subverted foreign governments, mainly in the developing world, by promoting its false version of “socialist democracy”—rule by a single dictatorial party. Additionally, Russia’s neofascist authoritarianism can be turned around and transformed into a democratic system through an effective program of democracy promotion against Putinism. Iran and North Korea also must face the full force of American information operations in promoting peaceful evolution from radical Islamist theocracy in the case of Iran, and totalitarian communism in the case of North Korea, toward less threatening democratic social and political systems in both countries.

  A Democracy Revolution subproject also would build on the prodemocracy movements that emerged during the 2010s across the world. The objective would be to assist future revolutions against dictatorial regimes by preparing now to promote a comprehensive system of transition to democracy programs tailored to each individual country. This program will be designed to avoid a repeat of the Obama administration’s disastrous failure in 2009 to support the aspirations of reformers in Iran—as a result of Obama’s self-centered desire to appease an enemy in pursuit of a dangerous nuclear accord. Even though the reformers backing the Green Revolution may not have been democratic reformers, supporting their Green Revolution would have been an important step in ultimately overthrowing the Islamist mullahs in Tehran who continue to kill Americans or support the killing of Americans by proxies.

  The Military Information Warfare Program: The U.S. defense establishment must take the gloves off and develop comprehensive, modernized, and upgraded programs of information warfare theory and practice for U.S. military forces. These programs must be integrated within every military command and unit, and must become a significant element of all military training. Current military information warfare programs remain hamstrung by political correctness ideology, which has kept the role of information warfare subordinate to traditional conventional warfare. This must change as future wars will be network-centric and nonkinetic and dominated by information warfare. Military conflict using traditional arms and weapons will not disappear. But the value of military conflict as a tool for achieving strategic political objectives will be greatly diminished as new and innovative ways of using cyberwarfare and nontraditional influence and soft power information warfare are developed, refined, deployed, and used. As General MacArthur remarked in his famous West Point farewell address: “The soldier above all other people prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war. But always in our ears ring the ominous words of Plato, that wisest of all philosophers: ‘Only the dead have seen the end of war.’ ”

  Learning and applying information warfare must be made one of the highest priorities of the military. Failure to do so will result in defeat in the next conflict.

  The Intelligence/Covert Action Program: The U.S. government urgently needs to modernize U.S. intelligence agencies’ use of covert action and information warfare as a major tool of statecraft. Intelligence agencies once had formidable information warfare capabilities but as a result of liberal left policies have completely lost this capability in a true intelligence operations sense. As the result of the politicization of American intelligence agencies over the past two decades, the capability of conducting effective intelligence-based information warfare has been diminished to near zero, despite advances in technical cyberwarfare techniques. Cyberwarfare must be closely integrated with content-based information warfare to achieve victory in international conflict, and most important, to bring peace on American terms.

  Information America represents hope for the future. Americans of all walks of life must recognize that this new organization will be an important first step in restoring the greatness of America and expanding the light of liberty and freedom worldwide.

  CONCLUSION

  Solutions for a New Age

  What follows is an outline of the strategic information warfare threats that are the front lines of today’s global information environment, outlined earlier. They include a series of proposals for a new information warfare strategy and operations based on the strategy to mitigat
e the threats. These represent an urgently needed starting point for developing concrete policies and programs for both government and the private sector.

  The central recommendation is the creation of a new institution called Information America, derived from the U.S. Information Agency of the past and adapted to the threats and opportunities of the twenty-first-century Information Age. This new institution must be a hybrid entity combining the best features of government, with funding resources and powerful intelligence capabilities that can be combined or coordinated with the capabilities of the private sector, which generally is more effective at operating in innovative and practical ways. Where the public and private sectors can interact directly, programs and initiatives can be conducted jointly. The overriding requirement is a firm and clear commitment to promoting and defending America’s founding ideals of liberty, democracy, free markets, and traditional concepts of morality.

  SOCIAL MEDIA

  Social media is not an enemy. It is a powerful tool with great potential for information warfare. The center of gravity for social media is technology and the masses of data it produces. Twitter, Facebook, and lesser offshoots rely heavily on proprietary technology, much of it open source, that is targeted by enemies, including China and Russia, who are seeking to exploit social media for nefarious purposes. Social media companies and the technology titans that control them must be enlisted to support programs that confront the growing information warfare threats against America. In information warfare, as in conventional warfare, the most reliable way to keep the peace is to prepare for war. Many of today’s social media companies remain in the dark about the ongoing information war threats and opportunities, and thus remain vulnerable to information attacks and foreign influence operations. Left liberal politicization of social media has produced a neo-anarchist trend among many leaders of America’s robust high-technology sector that must be reversed. As shown in Facebook’s censoring of conservative content and Twitter’s selective banning of conservative users, social media can be misused for antidemocratic and ultimately totalitarian purposes.

  iWar Policy Proposal One: Information America Social Media Program. This effort will begin with a series of nationwide debates on social media, carried out physically and online with the goal of producing private sector, voluntary Information Age guidelines for social media to define the enemies, such as efforts by Russia and China to stifle Internet freedom. Clear guidelines are needed to identify the activities of the Islamic State terrorist group and other violent extremist organizations as enemies that should not be permitted to utilize social media for recruitment, training, fund-raising, and other operations. Communist China and its global information warfare network, and the antidemocratic, neofascist regime of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, also must be clearly identified as enemies to free and open social media. Social media and the Internet that carries it must be enshrined globally under First Amendment principles adapted to the Information Age. Enemies of freedom and democracy must be blocked from using social media through technology and data mining.

  CHINA

  The People’s Republic of China represents the greatest long-term threat to American national interests. China has been engaged in across-the-board information warfare against the United States as its main enemy, while at the same time using strategic deception to play down its true intentions. China has become an enemy because its information aggression threatens America’s peace. The notion of the nuclear-armed communist dictatorship in China rising to become the world’s leading global power must be rejected. Furthermore, the nature of China’s role as an information warfare adversary must be clearly identified and confronted. Government and private sector elites have damaged American national security for decades since the 1980s by following policies designed to redefine China as a nonthreatening, “normal” member of the international community when in reality China remains a revolutionary antidemocratic and proto-totalitarian force that seeks not just regional control but ultimately international expansion beyond Asia.

  China’s center of gravity is the dictatorial Communist Party, whose membership numbers 88.76 million. Information warfare waged openly and covertly against the ruling party will aim to produce a free and democratic China, or at a minimum a reformist and noncommunist system that poses less of a threat to the United States.

  iWar Policy Proposal Two: Free China. China’s communist rulers recognized in the early 1980s that the economics of Marxist-Leninist ideology were false and thus began initiating quasi-capitalist reforms. The Marxist-Leninist sociopolitical system remains, however. It is a collective dictatorship by the leaders of the ruling Communist Party and a military force loyal not to the nation but to the party. The contradiction between the economic reforms and the Leninist nature of the system is inherently destabilizing and has resulted in the emergence of the current neofascist state. Unless altered, Chinese internal contradictions will increase over the next several decades and produce extreme dangers that range from regional military conflicts to the risk of global thermonuclear war. The United States must use information warfare against China with the end state of producing a noncommunist, democratic-oriented political and social system—democracy with Chinese characteristics would suffice. This program will require attacking and defeating China’s Three Warfares—legal, psychological, and media—by exposing the programs and counterattacking with truthful information. Under current Chinese information attacks, the United States is facing eventual defeat in the new conflict from an onslaught of Chinese cyber and influence warfare schemes and programs. The democracy transformation project will create a democratic Chinese government in exile, as well as a program of information and influence from overseas Chinese in ways that will produce democratic political reform inside China. This democratization program must be among the highest priorities of both the U.S. government and the private sector since China represents the gravest long-term danger to America.

  A Chinese government in exile was first proposed by the late Constantine Menges, a senior official within the Reagan administration, as outlined in his 2005 book, China: The Gathering Threat.

  A concrete program was developed by Michael Pillsbury, a former Reagan administration defense policy maker and longtime Pentagon consultant on China. Pillsbury’s formula for Information Age policies toward China includes uniting Americans in understanding the threat; building a virtual coalition of nations opposed to China; influencing debates within China between hawks and reformers; and, most important, providing concrete support to prodemocracy reformers—unlike the failure to do so by the George H. W. Bush administration and its successors after the party crackdown on prodemocracy protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989.I

  RUSSIA

  Russia emerged from the collapse of the enemy state of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the victory of the West in the Cold War as a potential democratic state aligned with the West. Unfortunately, Russia today has become an enemy that threatens American peace. Misguided policies under successive U.S. administrations resulted in Russia turning into a hostile revanchist state run by a former officer of the KGB, Vladimir Putin. Under Putin, Russia has been aggressively building up its nuclear forces and poses the greatest strategic nuclear threat to the United States. Putin and other Russian leaders have adopted a dangerous and destabilizing new military doctrine to go along with the modernized nuclear force that seeks to use nuclear weapons and conflict as a way to win a future conflict. Known as “escalate to deescalate,” the Kremlin doctrine has increased the danger of global thermonuclear war.

  iWar Policy Proposal Three: Russia Democratic Transformation Program: As with China, the United States must employ aggressive and sophisticated information warfare techniques to counter Russian information warfare, by aiming at the center of gravity of the revanchist regime: Putin and the network of cronies in government and the commercial sector. The Russian leader and the military and political officials he has placed in power speak openly of the United States a
s the main enemy in this information conflict. The enemy in Russian information warfare must be clearly identified and a plan of action developed and implemented that, using advanced information warfare techniques, will produce a peaceful transition from a Putin administration to a democratic reformist regime. A central element of the program will be an aggressive counter-cyberwarfare program directed against Russia’s formidable cyberwarfare networks.

  ISLAMIC STATE

  The center of gravity for the Islamic State terrorist group is its alien and abhorrent Islamic ideology, as promulgated in the doctrine and teachings of the so-called caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Islamic State terrorists and their supporters are America’s most immediate enemy. The United States must alter its policy and recognize that killing Islamic State leaders, choking off funds, and slowing the recruitment of Islamic fighters, while important measures, will never lead to the defeat of the Islamic State, and thus will never produce peace and an end to terrorist attacks. The purpose of war is to inflict such heavy costs on enemies they no longer maintain the will to fight. This can be accomplished only by attacking and destroying Islamic State ideology. That alone will produce defeat for the group.

  Instead of the current efforts to counter the Islamic State ideology by relying on foreign Muslim-majority governments, the United States must take the lead in first clearly understanding the ideology and then developing specific programs to defeat it, by discrediting it as un-Islamic. “It is easier to kill radical Islamic jihadists than to eliminate their Islamist ideology,” says Patrick Sookhdeo, one of Britain’s leading experts on jihadist ideology. “It is ideology that gathers resources and recruits new fighters to replace those who have been killed. Kill the ideology, and the terrorism-inspiring movement withers and dies.”