Information Warfare, Accelerated Warfare and the Human Endeavour
Abstract
‘Accelerated Warfare’ describes both the operating environment and how the land force must respond. The changing character of war requires a shift in traditional attitudes towards land force operations and an approach that is unhindered by dated frameworks, in particular the belief in the absolutes of ‘war’ and ‘peace’. This is most apparent in the information environment in which the land force is least comfortable yet can most effectively target decision-making and the will of the people. ‘Information warfare’ should be used to describe activities that occur within and through the information environment; however, the Australian Defence Force’s working description of information warfare is inadequate, fails to provide the required foundation for the land force to respond to the challenges of Accelerated Warfare and is not optimised for the enduring nature of war. The land force requires an information warfare campaign plan—a plan that is long term, modernised and adaptable, and that places the appropriate emphasis on the human endeavour.
Introduction
The rules-based global order is under threat from myriad forces, including disruptive technology which changes the character of war, and threat forces with the flexibility and imagination to evolve. ‘Accelerated Warfare’ (AW) describes the corresponding operating environment and the ways in which the land force must respond. While this context has not changed the role of the land force, it raises questions about the functionality of the land force in this environment and provides additional options for the ways in which the land force should evolve in order to perform its role. These include options that require more flexible and evolved thinking, structures and practices than are currently in existence.
The information environment (IE) and information warfare (IW) highlight the limitations of current thinking. For the purpose of this article, IE is defined as the aggregate of individuals, organisations, or systems that collect, process, or disseminate information.1 IW should be seen as those military activities that occur within and through the IE. The Australian Defence Force’s current working description of IW is:
… the contest for the provision and assurance of information to support friendly decision-making, whilst denying and degrading that of adversaries.2
While this description provides the foundations and guidance for land force operations in the IE, it does not permit sufficient conceptual flexibility. Rather it is built on an outdated belief in the absolutes of war and peace and an inaccurate understanding of human decision-making processes.
Clausewitz noted that the role of the military is essentially to act as a means of achieving policy objectives through the application of physical force, using superior strength to compel an enemy by reducing or extinguishing their ‘will’ to fight. In AW, this cannot be achieved: the ‘will’ of the people remains the ultimate military end-state. However, due to the ubiquity of information and technology, ‘will’ no longer resides solely in the physical domain and it continues to exist regardless of the state of the land environment. Therefore, ‘will’ can no longer be extinguished through physical force alone.
What does this mean for a force whose purpose historically has been physical and as a last resort? Can it remain an effective policy tool for compelling the ‘will’ of another? The answer is ‘yes’, but with caveats. While the role of the land force ultimately remains centred on the application of physical force, this must come with an understanding that operations in the physical domain are no longer sufficient to achieve military and policy objectives. This means the role of the military can no longer be to wait for the fighting and then get involved. The war may never be declared; it certainly will not always be recognisable to the more traditional Western military strategist; but that does not mean it is not happening.
While it is beyond the scope of this article, it should be acknowledged that any land force IW campaign plan will need to be nested in the joint force and whole-of-government plan. This does not preclude the land force from developing an IW campaign plan, if only to explore the ways in which land capabilities can contribute to IW across the competition continuum, and develop corresponding adaptable and unconstrained concepts, practices and procedures.
Accelerated Warfare in the Information Environment
In his futures statement Accelerated Warfare, the Chief of Army notes a changing operating environment that is seeing the rules-based global order under pressure from evolving geopolitics, technological disruption at historic levels, and actors who are proving adept at adjusting to this new context. In order to respond, the land force must be creative, unconstrained in its thinking, and proactive in developing new strategies and concepts for the changing character of war,3 thereby ensuring it is better positioned to shape the operating environment. This operating environment includes the IE and must include an understanding of the IE and what it means for military strategy.
The IE is omnipresent and has often existed in an area’s history and culture for centuries.4 It is home to the narrative and long-term context of any physical conflict, be it rooted in political, social or economic exclusion, or in status and power. It is important from the perspectives of history and future plans, and fundamental to influencing the will of the people.5 All actions within an area of operations will be perceived through the lens of the respective cultural IEs. Failure to understand this has consequences, including the narrative of the land force becoming disjointed from the narrative of the population, which ultimately undermines efforts to gain long-term influence, or even victory.
The war in Afghanistan provides a useful example. Despite best efforts at ‘cultural understanding’, in the Australian narrative the war commenced in 2001 and was a war on terror. This is consistent with the Western narrative, and logical in the Western context, but it is inconsistent with the narrative of the population, for whom the war has been going for over 40 years.6 It is difficult to imagine a situation where the land force can win a war by compelling or influencing the will of a population when they are fighting a different war from that being fought by the people they are fighting with and against.
Conflict experts including Theodorakis,7 Grynkewich8 and Mattis9 make compelling arguments as to why successful operations in the IE are fundamental to achieving military objectives. It is where decisions are made, where beliefs are held, and where the will of the people resides and is most effectively targeted. As stated by Mattis, when used to their full potential, information environment operations can prepare the battlefield and set the conditions for victory. Information can soften the enemy’s will to fight, deceive them, and pollute their decision-making cycle.10
Missing from these arguments, however, is an explicit statement that successful operations in the IE cannot be limited by outdated frameworks of warfare, in particular the absolutes of ‘war’ and ‘peace’.11 Acknowledging this requires a shift in long-held beliefs and an understanding that clinging to these false absolutes creates artificial barriers that not only prevent the land force from exploiting all opportunities inherent in the IE, but also may result in deploying a force into an unwinnable operating environment. As noted by David Kilcullen, by the time the first tank has rolled, we have already won or lost the war.12
Information Warfare
The purpose of IW is to target the human brain—in other words, the cognitive domain. This involves not only decision-making but also beliefs, perceptions of reality, and acceptance of the narrative being championed. These are the factors that underlie the will of a population, and IW is most effective when conducted through long-term influence campaigns—for example, those conducted by Russia in Crimea and Ukraine13 and during the 2016 United States (US) elections.14
Western military institutional recognition of the importance of the IE is underscored by the 2017 decision of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to elevate information to its current position as the seventh joint function in US doctrine. This move recognises the power of information to support military operations, particularly in the wake of modern technology and social media.15 The Australian Defence Force (ADF) similarly recognised the importance of the IE in 2017 with the establishment of the Information Warfare Division.
A useful starting point for understanding IE is the ADF’s current working description stated above. However, this description is limited to friendly and adversary decision-making, and is built on the idea that war and peace are absolutes.16 This does not provide the opportunity for the land force to harness the full power of information and the IE. It discounts the application of IW outside physical conflict and fails to consider the influence of those who do not fall neatly into either an ‘adversary’ or ‘friendly’ category. Accelerated Warfare requires the land force to evolve beyond this working description.
In 1997, academic YuLin Whitehead wrote a paper discussing two schools of thought on information and war: ‘information in warfare’ and ‘information warfare’.17 The former refers to the use of information in support of friendly or adversary decision-making, while the latter refers to the idea of information as a weapon. These definitions provide a useful mechanism to evolve the land force’s understanding of IW.
In contrast, the ADF’s working description appears to be most aligned with the concept of information in warfare. While this is not unimportant, it is too narrow to meet the demands of an accelerated operating environment. It can also lead to the unfortunate conflation of IW and cyber electronic warfare (CEW), restraining thinking and inhibiting creativity in the development of response options beyond the electromagnetic spectrum (EMS). Information as a weapon is no less important, particularly at the tactical level. This is evident in the way Daesh took advantage of social media platforms and the hashtag #AllEyesOnISIS to set the conditions for the 2014 fall of Mosul. While tactically effective, it was operationally and strategically unsustainable in the long term.
The US describes the IE military challenge as the way to integrate physical and informational power to:
… change or maintain the perceptions, attitudes, and other elements that drive desired behaviours of relevant actors in an increasingly pervasive and connected IE, to produce enduring strategic outcomes.18
Progressing from the idea of ‘information in war’ and moving through and beyond the idea of information as a weapon, the land force should move to a position where it views IW as those activities that occur within and through the IE. This is a more flexible concept, encouraging creative and uninhibited thinking at an accelerated rate, incorporating the ideas of information in warfare and information as a weapon, and aligning with the growing understanding that IE must be conducted across the ‘competition continuum’.19 The competition continuum, although an ancient concept, is gaining popularity in the US to describe the world in which we now live, one where the absolutes of war and peace are outdated and irrelevant. This is a world of enduring competition conducted through a mixture of cooperation, competition below armed conflict, and armed conflict.
Accelerated Warfare and Information Warfare
The recently released ‘Army in Motion: Army’s Contribution to Defence Strategy’20 describes the land force’s central idea to meet the demands of AW by contributing to the achievement of a safe, secure and prosperous Australia in an operating environment which is experiencing the challenges of the changing character of warfare. It notes that pressures on the rules-based global order are driving these changes at a rate faster than Army practices, procedures and structures can adapt to. Two themes from a February 2019 presentation on AW by the Director General Future Land Warfare highlight the importance of IW. The first is an evolved framework for how Army personnel might think about the contemporary spectrum of conflict and competition, similar to the US concept of the competition continuum. The second is the idea of winning without fighting.
The challenges of AW are amplified in IW. Due to the ubiquity of information and its availability across the globe in near-real time, the land force is always in a state of cooperation, competition and conflict in the IE. To be clear, the existence of conflict in the IE does not present the same threat as conflict in the physical domain. It is an inevitable by-product of a diverse and complex world and not in itself cause for alarm. What is important is preventing this threat from manifesting physically: winning without fighting.21
In IW the means through which a force can win without fighting are available to any actor with a little creativity, sufficient understanding of the opportunities inherent in the IE, and an attitude towards winning that goes beyond the physical defeat of an opposing force. General Sir Nick Houghton, former Chief of the Defence Staff of the British Armed Forces, put this eloquently when he lamented the fact that armed forces had come to be viewed through the optic of war. Instead, he advocated for viewing them:
… through the optic of the wars we avoid having to fight; the stability we help assure; the prosperity we help achieve; and the liberty and open society we help preserve.22
Disruptive Forces: The Human Context
Arguably, human nature is the most disruptive force of all. Yet, because it is seen as the reason for war’s enduring nature, it does not always receive the focus it should. IW is effective because humans are social, emotional, predictably irrational and susceptible to influence and manipulation. Emotional contagion,23 the idea that emotions can be spread between humans, is not a novel concept. While it was initially thought to require physical interaction between people, emerging studies indicate that this is not the case and that it is likely that new media, in particular social media, contributes to the spread of emotions.24 The most contagious emotions, the ones that travel furthest fastest, are those that are triggered by extreme, polarising, politically divisive and societally corrosive narratives.25 The idea of ‘population hotspots’ is not a new concept for the land force but, given the ubiquity of information and technology, humans could potentially become more volatile, with extreme emotions spreading at a more accelerated rate than previously observed or experienced.
These factors can complicate and change the operating environment faster than technology or geopolitics, both of which ultimately serve as mere platforms or vectors for the human endeavour. Globally, the warning signs of increased human volatility are growing. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is predicting a slowdown in global economic growth rates,26 geopolitical and geo-economic tensions are rising, extreme weather events are increasingly common, other environmental risks are increasing,27 and the world is in the grips of a pandemic. Understanding the impact these factors have on human behaviour and the human endeavour is as important as understanding how they change the character of warfare. Current trends indicate that global anger is increasing, empathy is decreasing, and loneliness is on the rise in the West.28 In Australia, mental health issues such as depression and anxiety, particularly among teenagers, are trending upwards.29
The implications of this on the human endeavour are twofold. First, humans with mental health issues, or even mental fatigue, suffer from inhibited cognitive resilience. Among other concerns, this affects their ability to make decisions, rational or otherwise,30 and makes them more susceptible to emotional contagion. Statistically, mental health issues are on the rise in the land force, potentially resulting in a force that is more susceptible to malicious or emotionally charged IW, progressively undermining the will of the fighting force.
Second, emotional humans are malleable and primed for manipulation. Identifying them and understanding their triggers is fundamental to the conduct of a successful IW campaign, as well as protecting a population from an IW campaign being conducted by a malicious actor. The 2016 US elections highlighted the relative ease with which a rival state or other external actor can lever technology to exploit underlying social issues and trigger anger, increase polarisation and even change the reality of a target audience. An example is the ‘pizzagate’ conspiracy,31 which saw Russian provocateurs using social media platforms to provoke a minority of disenfranchised individuals into disproportionate behaviours that, although bewildering to an outsider, were completely rational to those involved.32 Importantly for an organisation that believes releasing facts is a sufficient response to counter a false narrative, the underlying conspiracy continues to exist, in the form of ‘QAnon’,33 years after the release of evidence to the contrary.
Information Warfare and Decision-Making
In a 2019 article in Infinity Journal,34 retired Israel Defense Forces Colonel Shay Shabtai noted that, despite the growing understanding of how cognitive bias impacts human decision-making, military theorists have been slow to harness the power inherent in this knowledge. He argues that the time has come for militaries to make the connection between humans, influencing the decision-making of humans in war, and perception management.
Shabtai is not alone. In 2011, British Major-General Andrew Mackay and Lieutenant Commander Stephen Tatham released a book entitled Behavioural Conflict, emphasising that the key lesson they learned from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was the failure of Western forces to understand the people, leading to confusion over their ‘irrational’ decision-making and behaviours. Broadly they conclude that the application of behavioural insights to influence a population would prevent, or limit, similar failures in the future.35
These behavioural insights build on the work of Nobel Prize winning economist Richard H Thaler, who famously ‘incorporated psychologically realistic assumptions into analyses of economic decision-making’.36 Put another way, Thaler understands the ways in which humans are predictably irrational, how heuristics and cognitive bias influence the way information is perceived and decisions are made, and how to present information to generate desirable predictable outcomes. Behavioural insight advances this understanding beyond economic decision-making and applies it to the gamut of human decisions and behaviours.
There is no doubt the land force understands the importance of influencing human decision-making. However, land force doctrine is more focused on the mechanics and processes of land warfare and its support functions than on human behaviour in warfare. Furthermore, when human behaviour is considered, the land force tends to use a rational (and Western) lens to predict how a target audience is going to react to a particular stimulus. This is in stark contrast to the Royal Netherlands Army, for example, for whom ‘the human influence chain’ is considered more effective than ‘the kill chain’ and whose land operation doctrine requires commanders to operationalise mission goals in terms of the behavioural changes desired of actors.37
Operationally and strategically, AW can be unforgiving of failures to understand human perception, decision-making and corresponding behaviours. Tactically, the land force is trained to respond rapidly to unpredictable (and unpredicted) behaviours. This is not the case at the operational and strategic levels. Misunderstood land force actions can be communicated regionally and globally in near-real time, and the associated undesirable narrative remains the ‘truth’ long after the battle is over.
A successful IW campaign is one that is founded on an understanding of the predictably irrational ways in which humans perceive information and make decisions. It then applies this knowledge to develop a culturally appropriate narrative, including military options for achieving or maintaining desired behaviours along the competition continuum. Additionally, IW can build the resilience of the audience to changes in the character of warfare and reduce their (or our) susceptibility to undesirable alternative narratives.
Conclusion
Current structures, practices and procedures are unable to adapt fast enough to provide the land force with the flexibility to respond creatively to the challenges of AW. This is particularly apparent in IW, where the current working description is not aligned to the reality of the global competition continuum. Threat actors such as China, Russia and Daesh have been using IW in conflict and in operations short of conflict for years, thus evolving their practices and procedures, and limited only by their imaginations. While the ADF has recognised the importance of ‘information in warfare’, it is yet to develop corresponding military strategies in the form of IW campaign plans for application across the competition continuum, particularly one built on an understanding of human behaviours and decision-making.
Endnotes
1 Adapted from US Department of Defense, 2016 (2010), Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms (DoD JP 1-02), at: https://fas.org/irp/doddir/dod/jp1_02. pdf
2 Edward Morgan and Marcus Thompson, 2018, Building Allied Interoperability in the Indo- Pacific Region— Discussion Paper 3, Information Warfare: An Emergent Australian Defence Force Capability (Center for Strategic and International Studies), 10, at: https://csis-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/publication/181023_Infor…. pdf?HDgpzxVHrQayYNZb7t5sJQPlRw9MJCsw
3 Chief of Army, 2018, Futures Statement: Accelerated Warfare (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia), at: https://www.army.gov.au/our-work/from-the-chief-of-army/accelerated-war…
4 Lt Col Jon Herrmann and Lt Col Brian Steed, ‘Understanding Information as a Weapon’, Military Review, 1 January 2018, at: https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military- Review/Online-Exclusive/2018-OLE/Understanding-Information/
5 World Economic Forum Annual Summit (Davos), 2019, ‘Peace and Reconciliation in a Multipolar World’ (panel, 22 January 2019).
6 Ibid., Chief Executive of Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, Abdullah Abdullah.
7 Chief of Army Land Forces Seminar 2018 (CALFS18), Session 2, ‘Land Power and Countering Violent Extremism’.
8 Brigadier General Alexus G Grynkewich, ‘Introducing Information as a Joint Function’, Joint Force Quarterly 89: 6–7, at: https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/1056964.pdf
9 Nick Brunetti-Lihach, ‘Information Warfare Past, Present, and Future’, RealClear Defense, 14 November 2018, at: https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2018/11/14/ information_warfare_past_present_and_future_113955.html
10 Brunetti-Lihach, 2018.
11 Legal arguments are beyond the scope of this article; however, it should be noted that laws do not change unless there is a recognition they need to do so.
12 Max Blenkin, ‘Australia Could Lose the Next War’, Australian Defence Magazine, 12 April 2019, at: http://www.australiandefence.com.au/defence/general/australia-could-los…
13 Jeff Edmonds and Samuel Bendett, ‘Russian Battlefield Awareness and Information Dominance: Improved Capabilities and Future Challenges’, The Bridge, 26 February 2019, at: https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2019/2/26/russian-battlefield-…
14 ‘The Mueller Report, Annotated’, 2019, The Washington Post, at: https://www. washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/politics/read-the-mueller-report/
15 Brunetti-Lihach, 2018.
16 Morgan and Thompson, 2018. 45
17 YuLin G Whitehead, 1999, Information as a Weapon: Reality versus Promises (Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama: Air University), at: https://media.defense.gov/2018/ Jan/02/2001862442/-1/-1/0/T_WHITEHEAD_INFORMATION_AS_WEAPON.PDF
18 US Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2018, Joint Concept for Operating in the Information Environment, at: https://www.jcs.mil/Portals/36/Documents/Doctrine/concepts/joint_concep…. pdf?ver=2018-08-01-142119-830
19 US Joint Chiefs Of Staff, 2019, Joint Doctrine Note 1-19: The Competition Continuum, at: https://www.jcs.mil/Portals/36/Documents/Doctrine/jdn_jg/jdn1_19. pdf?ver=2019-06-10-113311-233. This document describes a world of enduring competition conducted through a mixture of cooperation, competition below armed conflict, and armed conflict—a world which is neither at peace nor at war.
20 Australian Army, 2019, Army in Motion: Army’s Contribution to Defence Strategy, at: https://www.army.gov.au/our-work/from-the-chief-of-army/armys-contribut…
21 Lee Hayward, 2019, ‘Part 1: Winning without Fighting—Information Environment Operations and Accelerated Warfare’, Land Power Forum (Australian Army Research Centre), at: https://researchcentre.army.gov.au/library/land-power-forum/part-1-winn…
22 General Sir Nick Houghton, ‘Building a British Military Fit for Future Challenges Rather than Past Conflicts’ [speech], Chatham House, 15 September 2015, at: https://www. chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/field/field_document/20150901-Chatham%20 House%20Speech-O.pdf
23 Agneta H Fischer, ‘Emotional Contagion’, in Roy F Baumeister and Kathleen D Vohs, 2007, Encyclopedia of Social Psychology, at: https://sk.sagepub.com/reference/ socialpsychology/n176.xml
24 Adam DI Kramer, Jamie E Guillory and Jeffrey T Hancock, ‘Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion through Social Networks’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 17 June 2014, at: https://www. pnas.org/content/111/24/8788
25 William J Brady, Julian A Wills, John T Jost, Joshua A Tucker and Jay J Van Bavel, ‘Emotion Shapes the Diffusion of Moralised Content in Social Networks’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 11 July 2017, at: https://www.pnas.org/content/114/28/7313
26 International Monetary Fund, 2018, World Economic Outlook, October 2018: Challenges to Steady Growth, at: https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/Issues/2018/09/24/world-economi…
27 World Economic Forum, The Global Risks Report 2019, 14th Edition, at: https://www. weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2019
28 Ibid.
29 Mission Australia, 2017, Youth Mental Health Report: Youth Survey 2012–16 (Black Dog Institute), at: https://blackdoginstitute.org.au/docs/default-source/research/evidence-…. pdf?sfvrsn=6 46
30 Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, 2013, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much (New York: Henry Holt and Company), 13.
31 Brandy Zadrozny, ‘Fire at “Pizzagate” Shop Reignites Conspiracy Theorists Who Find a Home on Facebook’, NBC News [website], 2 February 2019, at: https://www.nbcnews. com/tech/social-media/fire-pizzagate-shop-reignites-conspiracy-theorists-who-find-home-facebook-n965956
32 Usha Sahay and Clint Watts, ‘A Conversation with Clint Watts on Influence and Information in the Social Media Era’, War on the Rocks [podcast], 19 June 2018.
33 Julia Carrie Wong, ‘What is QAnon? Explaining the Bizarre Rightwing Conspiracy Theory, The Guardian [website], 31 July 2018, at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/ jul/30/qanon-4chan-rightwing-conspiracy-theory-explained-trump
34 Shay Shabtai, ‘War, Cognitive Biases and Perception Management: The Time Has Come’, Infinity Journal 6, no. 4: 28–33.
35 Andrew Mackay and Steve Tatham, 2011, Behavioural Conflict: Why Understanding People and Their Motives Will Prove Decisive in Future Conflict (Saffron Waldon, UK: Military Studies).
36 The Nobel Prize, ‘Press Release: The Prize in Economic Sciences 2017’, 9 October 2017, at: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2017/press-release/
37 Lt Col RAE van der Boor et al., ‘Behavioural Change as the Core of Warfighting’, Militaire Spectator, 25 October 2017, at: https://www.militairespectator.nl/thema/operaties/artikel/ behavioural-change-core-warfighting
