Information Warfare’s Reach: QMN073
Martial Mental Models: The Quartermaster Newsletter, Monday, 16 December
(This week’s report is an 8 minute read)
BLUF: Information warfare has been around since the dawn of mass communication, but the realization of its power and how to apply it is growing by the day with use. Nations like Russia have figured out the “why” and “how” seemly faster than anyone else, and have been running circles around their adversaries because of it. More agile and technologically adept nations like Israel have adapted quickly, and the rest have been trying to catch up. How does information warfare fit into traditional warfare, and where is it headed? Let’s dig a little deeper.
Brady here. Right now a seemingly new feature of modern warfare is is being displayed in eastern Europe. In response to American and allied efforts to support the Baltic states of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia against Russian threats, Russian state actors are attacking the efforts by spreading disinformation intent on political disruption. Last week, Patrick Tucker from Defense One reported that a coordinated campaign of fake press releases, fake emails from journalists and of course social media posts created a narrative where US forces were moving nuclear weapons from Turkey to Lithuania - in order to sway public opinion in the Baltic states against NATO presence there. As with all effective propaganda campaigns, there’s a kernel of truth - the US is reportedly deploying one of 1st Cavalry Division’s Armored Brigade Combat Teams to support Lithuania through 2020. But Russian troll claims of nuclear weapons or NATO soldiers’ desecration of Jewish cemeteries were all false - though well-timed to enflame public opinion and sow distrust against Baltic governments and their allies.
Maj. Aaron Tucker, a civil military operations officer for 1st Infantry Division (Forward) briefs Lithuanian officers on November 2nd, 2019, in Hohenfels Training Area, Germany. Photo by Sgt. 1st Class Maurice Smith
But so what? Everyone now knows that this is what Russia does - it uses media of both the traditional and social sorts to disrupt the governmental processes of its adversaries. It’s been well-covered in the US since 2016. What hasn’t been well communicated is how Russia has worked these methods of information warfare into their larger way of war - often called “hybrid war” - and what it means for the next few decades.
But before we get into how information warfare integrates into hybrid warfare - let’s get to the “why” at hand: What's Russia's aim? In their brief 2017 writeup on the Russo-Ukrainian War, Amos Fox and Andrew Rossow explain it clearly:
“Russia’s version of hybrid warfare is built for limited war in which nations do not pursue strategies of annihilation but instead seek to impose their political will without destroying the political institutions of their adversaries. Russian hybrid warfare is a byproduct of the information age that seeks to operate in multiple domains to find methods to achieve a relative position of advantage in relation to an adversary, or to perpetually conduct operations aimed at weakening the adversary from the inside out. To do so, Russia leverages information, cyber and electronic operations in addition to employing special operations forces to sow the seeds of discontent within the target population.”
“Furthermore, wars of annihilation, or regime change, often create more turmoil for the aggressor, and therefore, the goal of Russian hybrid warfare is not to topple existing regimes. Instead, hybrid warfare, being a limited-war construct, attempts to create frozen conflicts that perpetually suck resources and political power away from an adversary.”
As the US Special Operations Command’s ARIS Studies team explains in its paper “Little Green Men,” Russia has perfected it’s method of hybrid warfare to stay just below the threshold of open conflict as it re-asserts dominance in regions like the Crimea and Eastern Europe. Learning from successes and failures in Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine and elsewhere, Russia has learned that it can most effectively achieve it’s geopolitical goals not through open military confrontation, but through a combination of information, cyberattacks, politics and very discrete and targeted use of special operations. It uses these means to create crises in the areas it wants to influence, and often manufactures a pretext for action, like we saw in the Crimea in 2014.
So knowing that information-war is a means of below-the-threshold warfare that often either gets the results of military action or helps create a reason to take military action, where else have we seen information warfare tied into traditional warfare? In last year’s book LikeWar, authors P.W. Singer and Emerson Brooking outline the uses of social media, and its precedents, in conflict. They say that a very early example is Nazi Germany’s use of radio to broadcast it’s blitzkrieg attacks ahead of its lead tanks in its Invasion of France from 1939-1940, spreading fear and anxiety and causing France to surrender within 9 months. Singer and Brooking go on to say that during the Fall of Mosul in 2014, the Islamic State employed a more modern approach of this strategy with unbelievable success. With no more than 1,500 loyal fighters, ISIS broadcast it’s advance toward Mosul - complete with the mass executions of resisting police - on social media and caused an Iraqi Army and Federal Police force of over 60,000 personnel to flee and abandon over 2,000 US-donated Humvees, which ISIS happily accepted.
And finally, as anyone examining the future of conflict would, Singer and Brooking look at Israel in 2012 and how it used social media in its fight against Hamas in Operation Pillar of Defense. From the start of hostilities, the Israeli Defense Force live-blogged all their operations across platforms like YouTube and Twitter, controlling the narrative about its actions and not only amplifying successes, but affecting global perception of its actions. Daniel Bennett expertly explains the improvements Israel made in its social media approach in his post on Frontline Club with some great examples comparing weak 2009 IDF posts from Operation Cast Lead with the well-funded and well-prepared results from 2012. It seems that Israel learned a lesson that Russia has: using media to shape the global narrative about what’s happening in your conflict has benefits at multiple levels. It magnifies successes at the tactical level, frees up resources at the operational level, and maintains support at the strategic or national level.
What the Israeli example also shows is that western nations have a more difficult path in information warfare than their adversaries. Israel’s Pillar of Defense Twitter approach gained itself criticism from western media for its aggressive coverage. Russia doesn’t have to worry very much what western media outlets think of its campaigns - only that they might expose their motives too quickly for the messages to have an effect.
So back to the Baltics, present day. What’s being done about the Russian information attacks on American support? The New York Times reported this summer that the EU’s efforts at coordinating responses to Russian disinformation attacks is marginal at best. It’s tough to get every nation’s online defenses to work together. The US military is certainly talking about doing something. Zachery Tyson Brown correctly identified that the US military is just now realizing that information warfare isn’t just about the security of information systems - it’s about the transmissions on the systems themselves. Singer and Brooking in their book note that the most successful modern information warfare campaigns today don’t so much hack into accounts as they hack the minds and thumbs of information consumers to spread misinformation and doubt. The US military has proven it has the means to thwart information attacks and we might just see the next chapter in the story to unfold over the next US election. Let’s hope we learn our lessons quickly. (BJM)
*****
INTELLIGENCE ROOTS: The Curious Case of the U.S. Government’s Influence on 20th-Century Design (10 min) “But while the O.S.S. is known for its intelligence-gathering operations and its dissemination of propaganda in enemy territory, its perhaps least heralded legacy is in the field of design. Crucially, the organization had its own dedicated design branch — renamed the Presentation Branch in 1944 — that oversaw the creation of graphics, maps, slides and short films about the war effort. (The design historian Barry Katz outlined this history in a groundbreaking 1996 article in the journal Design Issues.) These served various purposes, as requested by members of the military and Department of State. The Presentation team, often working with Research & Analysis and other O.S.S. divisions, explained the diet and nutrition of German city dwellers in order to help the United States government better understand the enemy; illustrated the correct use of weapons, like knives and grenades, and created models of weapons; detailed Japanese “superstitions” for the purposes of psychological warfare; and sent cartoonists to Indonesia to make studies of local iconography that could serve as anti-Japanese propaganda. For these efforts, the O.S.S. would draw on the expertise of an astonishing number of designers from across disciplines: Raymond Loewy, Henry Dreyfuss and Walter Dorwin Teague, who had all recently worked on the 1939 New York World’s Fair, with its focus on “The World of Tomorrow”; Walt Disney, the most powerful creator of animated myths in the 20th century; Lewis Mumford, an architecture writer for The New Yorker and an unsparing critic of modern technology; Orson Welles’s assistant on “Citizen Kane”; the designer of the Q-Tip box, who also — in his capacity at the O.S.S. — led the team that designed the logo for the United Nations.” (BJM)
GATHERING DATA: Special Operations Command Made a Mind-Reading Kit For Elite Troops (4 min) “Earlier this month, SOFWERX tested a “physiological analysis tool” designed to help troops understand, in real time, how foreigners are receiving or interpreting their messaging, information, and psychological operations. “We pulled together quite a few sensors, Andrews said. “Through radars, through video, you can tell heart-rate variability. You can get temperature from the subject’s body. You can do voice analysis” to detect how, for instance, a conversational partner feels about the information an operator is giving them. SOCOM and 15 partners “pulled it together in about a week but we were fairly successful,” he said. “We put a test guy up there and asked him some questions that made him fairly uncomfortable. Now, getting ‘intent’ is hard; but we could tell: ‘Hey, this person is nervous when you ask this question. Their countenance changed.’ Micro-expressions is another way to look at this.” (BJM)
INFLUENCE CONTINUED: Three Models of Social Influence (3 min) “Third model of social influence is algorithmic personalization. TikTok, Netflix, or Spotify all use it to deliver content that we are going to like — and that we are going to like more of. These platforms themselves create popular trends, ideas, and aesthetics. Most popular songs on Spotify all bring their thunder in the first 30 seconds, because that’s how long a song needs to be played for in order to count as a “listen.” Instagram aesthetic shapes design of fashion items, retail stores, hotel lobbies, and product packaging. TikTok’s “challenges,” where people are prompted to recreate specific dances or routines, seeped into our culture, where brands react to each others’ popular styles, and then reactions to reactions create trends (expect to see a lot more brands making Bottega Venetta’s cloud bag or Jacquemus’ le chiquito) and a lot more Hollywood franchises and sequels. Mimicry is elevated to the level of a trend. To know what’s in, we don’t need to follow anybody; we also don’t need to be susceptible to a social mood. Brands don’t need to hire an existing influencer or to tap into a sub-community. By following the platforms’ logic, they can exert their own social influence.” (BJM)
Remarks Complete. Nothing Follows.
KS Anthony (KSA) & Brady Moore (BJM)