A Theory of Information Warfare: Preparing For 2020 –
Airpower Journal, Spring 1995
By Col Richard Szafranski (BA, Florida State University; MA, Central Michigan University) is the first holder of the Chair of National Military Strategy at the Air War College, Maxwell AFB, Alabama. Colonel Szafranski’s duties have included staff positons in the headquarters of Strategic Air Command, United States Space Command, North American Aerospace Defense Command, and Air Force Space Command. He has commanded B-52 units at the squadron and wing level, most recently as commander of the 7th Bomb Wing, Carswell AFB, Texas, from 1991 to 1993. He was also the base commander of Peterson AFB, Colorado. His writings on military strategy and operational art have appeared previously in Airpower Journal as well as in Parametersand Strategic Review. Colonel Szafranski is a graduate of Air Command and Staff College and Air War College.
Notes
Information as used here means the “content or meaning of a message.”An aim of warfare always has been to affect the enemy’s information systems. In the broadest sense, information systems encompass every means by which an adversary arrives at knowledge or beliefs.
If the moral high ground is lost, a domino effect occurs: public support is lost, the technological high ground is lost, and the armed forces are lost.
Warfare can be undertaken by or against state-controlled, state-sponsored, or nonstate groups. Warfare is hostile activity directed against an adversary or enemy. The aim of warfare is not necessarily to kill the enemy. The aim of warfare is to merely subdue the enemy. In fact, the “acme of skill” is to subdue an adversary without killing him.
In both state and nonstate warfare forms, the decisions made by group leaders define the aims, the methods, and the desired postconflict conditions of the warfare. Even so, it is a fiction, albeit a common and convenient one, to assert that “states” or “groups” wage warfare. The decision to engage in warfare, including the decision to terminate warfare, is made by leaders in the state or group.
Knowledge systems are those systems organized and operated to sense or observe verifiable phenomenological indicators or designators, translate these indicators into perceived realities, and use these perceptions to make decisions and direct actions
Belief systems are those implicit or explicit orientations both to empirical data in the form of verifiable perceptions and to other data or awareness (nightmares, phobias, psychoses, neuroses, and all the other creatures living in the fertile swamp of the subconscious, the collective unconscious, or Jung’s “unconscious psyche”) that are not verifiable or, at least, are less easily verifiable.According to John Boyd, the process or act of orientation (what Boyd calls “the Big O” in the OODA [observation-orientation-decision-action] loop) also is influenced by genetic heritage and cultural traditions… Unlike knowledge systems, belief systems are highly individualized.
it is glib reductionism to think of the enemy as being of “one mind.” The enemy is really many individual enemies, many minds… For example, if the enemy is dispersed, separate minds can be attacked separately, using the fact of isolation to the attacker’s advantage. If the enemy is concentrated (and over half the people on the planet will live in metropolitan complexes by the year 2020 and will be accessible in large numbers by way of information technology), the attack can be prosecuted against large groups. Even so, the aim of warfare is to subdue the hostile will of leaders and decision makers.
What is known, including the methods by which it came to be known, can be tested by its relation to something else and determined to be valid or invalid, true or false, real or unreal. What is believed is not subject to all the same tests.
If an adversary is organized as a coalition of multiple and cooperative centers of gravity, many culturally conditioned belief systems may exist within the coalition. These may be engaged and defeated in detail.
At the strategic level, the aim of a “perfect” information warfare campaign is to influence adversary choices, and hence adversary behavior, without the adversary’s awareness that choices and behavior are being influenced. Even though this aim is difficult to attain, it remains the goal of a perfect information warfare campaign at the strategic level. A successful, although not necessarily perfect, information warfare campaign waged at the strategic level will result in adversary decisions (and hence actions) that consistently mismatch or fail to support the intentions or aims of the adversary leader.
At the operational level, the leaders responsible for prosecuting the “grand tactics” also need the answers to some questions. Will there be any withheld targets or prohibited weapons in the information warfare attacks? Is the epistemological endstate to be reached all at once, everywhere, or are there interim states that need to be reached in specific geographical areas, in a specific sequence, or in specific sectors of information activity?
information weapons, depending on the weapons used, may cause collateral damage to the attacker’s knowledge and belief systems.In the worst case, the adversary’s response could include counterattacks against
“friendly” information systems that are somehow indistinguishable from collateral damage caused by the information analog of “friendly fire.”
information attacks have stochastic effects and that unless these are considered and evaluated in advance, an information attack may not have the effect ultimately desired.
In the case of advanced societies or groups, attacks against telecommunications systems can wreak havoc with an adversary’s ability to make effective decisions in warfare. Yet… Totems and taboos might function equally as well as the targets or the tools of information warfare against a primitive group. Thus, vulnerability to information warfare is nearly universal, the differences being only a matter of degree.
The Sepoy Mutiny of 1857-58 provides an example of the complexity. The mutiny reportedly was triggered by a rumor that the British were coating rifle cartridges in animal fat. It was the sepoy leaders who started the rumor, and in so doing attacked the belief systems of both Hindu and Muslim sepoys to spur them to rebel against their British masters.
The higher its technomic capability and the greater the number of its interactions with other groups (including internal groups) or states, the greater the state or group’s potential vulnerability to information warfare. The vulnerability may increase as network size increases, dependence on the information transacted increases, or the number or volume of transactions increases. Consequently, a state or group “engaged” worldwide may be exposed or vulnerable worldwide.
A cautionary note: because an information warfare campaign at the strategic level aims to subdue hostile will by affecting the knowledge and beliefs of the adversary, it cannot discriminate between combatants and noncombatants.
As outsourcing and contractingout initiatives increase, the Congress also can be expected to act to prevent some commercial enterprise from developing such weapons. (Have not news stories and “exposés” produced by commercial news enterprises proven to be contrived, aimed at influencing our knowledge and beliefs? Have not subliminal messages been used in the past in attempts to influence our purchasing behavior? Have not hackers entered and affected–or infected–databases already? We need to consider that there may be only a slim difference between a hacker and a terrorist in the information age.
When they come, the attacks will be prosecuted against both knowledge systems and belief systems, aimed at influencing leadership choices. The knowledge and beliefs of leaders will be attacked both directly and indirectly. Noncombatants, those upon whom leaders depend for support and action, will be targets. This is what we have to look forward to in 2020 or sooner.
Notes
1. Information warfare sometimes is erroneously referred to as command and control warfare, or C2W. The aim of C2W is to use physical and radioelectronic combat attacks against enemy information systems to separate enemy forces from enemy leadership. In theory, information warfare actually is a much larger set of activities aimed at the mind and will of the enemy.
2. Chris Mader, Information Systems: Technology, Economics, Applications (Chicago: Science Research Associates, Inc., 1974), 3.
3. The “waves” of societies are described by Alvin Toffler in The Third Wave (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1980). See also Alvin and Heidi Toffler, War and AntiWar: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1993). A seminal work on institutional forms is forthcoming from David Ronfeldt.
4. John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, “Cyberwar is Coming!” Comparative Strategy 2 (April-June 1993): 141-65.
5.Martin van Creveld, The Transformation of War (New York: Free Press, 1991), 196-205. Words like warand the lately contrived warfighter confuse the warriors in a democracy by misuse. In the United States, War (with a big W ) is declared by the Congress: the people representing all the people. Executive War Powers are really warfare powers. The days of Clausewitzian, trinitarian W ars may very well be over, as van Creveld suggests. The days of warfare, however, are not over.
6. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, trans. Samuel B. Griffith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 77.
7. Richard Szafranski, “Toward a Theory of Neocortical Warfare: Pursuing the Acme of Skill,” Military Review, November 1994; and idem, “When Waves Collide: Conflict in the Next Century,” JFQ: Joint Force Quarterly, Winter 1994-95.
8. Joseph A. Engelbrecht, “War Termination: Why Does a State Decide to Stop Fighting?” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1992). Colonel Engelbrecht is a colleague at the Air University’s Air War College.
9. Arquilla and Ronfeldt, note 9, 162. According to this definition, a message with no discernible “meaning” is still “information.” This definition is useful when contemplating the tactics of information warfare.
10.Ibid.
11. Phenomenology can be defined as “the theory of the appearances fundamental to all empirical knowledge.” Dorion Cairns, in Dagobert D. Runes, ed., Dictionary of Philosophy (Totowa, N.J.: Littlefield, Adams & Co., Ltd., 1962), 231-34.
12. C. G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self (New York: The New American Library, Mentor Book, 1958), 102.
13. Information warfare requires that philosophers, cultural anthropologists, area specialists, linguists, and semanticists join the “operations” staff. The days have passed when war colleges or staff colleges could neglect these other disciplines.
14. John R. Boyd, briefing slides, subject: A Discourse On Winning and Losing, August 1987. Maxwell AFB, Alabama.
15. Ibid.
16. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), book 6, chapter 6, 372-76.
17. Ledger Wood, in Runes, 94-96.
18. The effects to which I refer are more complicated than the inability to prevent your own jamming from interfering with your own communications systems. These unconfinable, spillover effects of stray electrons can be modeled and some compensation can be made for their effects. The weapons and effects of information warfare are not so easily confinable or controllable. In warfare it is common to both demonize and ridicule the enemy. Ridicule often takes the form of jokes. If these jokes ridicule an enemy from a different ethnic group, these jokes become officially sanctioned racist jokes. If the ethnic group is part of our own citizenry, such attacks can cause collateral damage. The collateral damage to the armed forces may have effects as farreaching as the appearance of officially condoned racism. If one accepts that weapons and attacks have stochastic effects, then some consequences are unpredictable.
19. Van Creveld, 35.
20. Grant T. Hammond, “Paradoxes of War,” JFQ: Joint Forces Quarterly, Spring 1994. Dr Hammond is a colleague on Air University’s Air War College faculty.
21. George C. Kohn, Dictionary of Wars (New York: Facts On File Publications, 1986), 214. 22.Technomic is a word coined by Col Joseph A. Engelbrecht. He defines it to mean “of or relating to progress in the development of the application of scientific principle (technology), and in the development of wealth (economics), and in the interrelationship between advances in science and the spread and increase of economic wealth. Technomic vitality. Technomic proliferation.”
23. Gerald R. Hurst, “Taking down Telecommunications” (Thesis, School of Advanced Airpower Studies, Air University, Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala., 28 May 1993).
24.Ibid.
25. Iran provides a good example. The Majles investigation into the Iranian department of “Voice and Vision” illuminates Iran’s sensitivity to the content and meaning of pictorial messages. Consider these comments from the investigation:
A basic criticism of the pictorial programs of the Voice and Vision is lack of attention to full veiling of women, lack of attention to the chador, and spreading of the culture of the “manteau” and scarves of the immoral kind.
The grand leader on occasions has given opinions and directives to the Voice and Vision organization or its director. Unfortunately, the instructions and directives of his honor were not implemented. For example: . . . . From 1368 [21 March 198920 March 1990] to 1370 [21 March 199020 March 1991], he made reminders to the Voice and Vision on 14 occasions, the most important of which concern: A) Misinformation. B) The low level of quality of the beyondtheborder programs and failure to propagate and spread Islamic views in them. C) The broadcast of blasphemous sentences concerning the Sire of the Pious. . . . E) Showing actual persons in the role of the infallible imams.
See “Majles Investigates Activities of Voice and Vision,” 3, 4, 15 November 1993, 5-6, in Foreign Broadcast Information Service Report: Near East and South Asia (FBISNES94016S), 25 January 1994, 6-8. I am grateful to Dr George Stein of the Air University’s Air War College faculty for pointing out this example of what simultaneously might be internal information warfare and potential vulnerability to external information warfare. Saudi Arabia recently joined China as the most recent nation to outlaw satellite television receivers. One can easily appreciate the effects that Music Television (MTV) might have on such cultures.
26. A telecommunications executive speaking in an Air University forum under the promise of nonattribution disclosed these estimated figures.