Information operations – To Inform is to Influence

September 22, 2014

Originally published at http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2014/09/if-there-no-military-solution-iraq-where-non-military-solution/94769/

Secretary of State John Kerry is channeling all his high-octane diplomatic intensity into the effort to consolidate an international coalition to combat the Islamic State (aka ISIS orISIL). But a flurry of consultations in Ankara, Cairo, Jedda and the United Nations General Assembly — not to mention theU.S. senate — does not add up to the non-military effort that many insist is required to “degrade and ultimately destroy”ISIS. It is diplomacy in support of the use of force. For a real strategy, the roles should be reversed: military action should be tailored to support diplomatic efforts and goals.

While it is too late to substantially influence the U.S. government’s approach to this crisis, it provides the opportunity to sketch out what such a strategy might look like.

Above all, it must aim to erode the adversary’s “will to fight.” As Director of National Intelligence James Clapperrecently put it to David Ignatius of the Washington Post, the intelligence community has consistently miscalculated that factor. “We underestimated the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese and overestimated the will of the South Vietnamese. In this case, we underestimated ISIL and overestimated the fighting capability of the Iraqi army…It boils down to predicting the will to fight, which is an imponderable.”

Except that it’s not such an imponderable. Governments run by self-dealing cliques — be they South Vietnam’s or Iraq’s — do not inspire the will to fight.

When a prime minister, whose corrupt and sectarian practices prompted repeated warnings from U.S.commanders, replaces well-trained officers with cronies on the take, the collapse of the security force should be predictable. When a formerly ruling minority is stripped not just of power, but of access to power or resources or the redress of grievances, or even protection from death squads, its willingness to fight for those things should be predictable.

After all, ISIS is not fighting alone in Iraq. Without support from thousands of Sunnis, including community leaders and seasoned military officers, the militants could never have achieved what they have.

So the first element of a strategy must be to assign significant intelligence assets to the task of understanding the motivations and drivers of violent resistance to Baghdad. How was the military being de-structured in the wake of theU.S. withdrawal? What functional roles in the capture of revenue streams were occupied by which members of the Maliki network? How are these changing under Abadi? What grievances or aspirations are motivating most Sunnis?

Then, alongside efforts to dissuade people from joining the violent resistance, must come a parallel effort to modify offensive Iraqi government structures and practices that are driving them into its arms.

President Barack Obama was right to hold off on providingU.S. military support to Baghdad so long as former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki remained in power. But his mere removal will not address Sunni concerns. New Prime Minister Haidar Abadi – a former member of Maliki’s inner circle – has still to identify a defense and an interior minister who are competent and acceptable to both Sunnis and a newly energized radical Shiite fringe. And even if he does come up with some names, the appointment of two individuals still is insufficient. Corrupt and nepotistic regimes from Afghanistan to Syria and beyond typically co-opt a few elite members of the “out-group” elite into the ruling network as a way of buying them off. The aggrieved population – the type of people who join violent movements – remains disgruntled.

The second and main element of the U.S. strategy should be to deploy all of Kerry’s talent and energy on behalf of a serious process to hammer out the framework of a sustainable Iraq political settlement. Issues to be taken up would likely include the distribution of oil revenues, internal boundaries and the makeup and prerogatives of the armed forces. The credibility of that process and the strength of the international coalition that is committed to shepherding it will be more important than the specific outcome it might reach, at least at first.

Instead of focusing exclusively on cajoling allies to join in with military action against ISIS, Kerry should be urging some to sponsor and host such a process. Most of the world’s most talented mediators are not American. U.S. kinetic efforts should be conditional on Abadi’s acceptance of such a process and good faith participation. Gen. John Allen, who knows Sunni leaders better than almost anyone, should be working not only to cobble together anti-ISIS militias but also to identify reasonable concerns and to enlist participants in the process.

As for Iran, its real value isn’t in joining the fight against a Sunni group, no matter how nefarious. Its participation is only likely to further inflame Sunni extremists, stoking their perception of their own beleaguered religious purity. The unique asset Iran brings is its influence over Shiites in both Iraq and Syria. The Iranian leadership must understand that sadistic, maximalist behavior on the part of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the Iraqi government is dangerous not just to local Sunnis and perhaps to the West, but ultimately to Iran itself. And if Iranian leaders want to regain the international stature they believe they deserve, they must make use of their leverage in constructive ways.

The U.S. is poorly positioned to have this conversation with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, let alone with the clerics who hold much of the power in Teheran. But other U.S. allies or individuals may have better channels.

None of these actions seems to be in the cards. And, rather than reducing the motivations for joining ISIS, the U.S. military plan seems bound to add to them. Saudi Arabia – whose regime is detested across the Arab world – is a prized member of the coalition. The ISIS-controlled areas likely to be bombed are in fact largely controlled by non-ISIS Sunnis. As they get killed, their cousins and fathers will be even less likely to shift their allegiance back to Baghdad. Finally, by enlisting a vast international coalition to go all in behind Abadi, Washington has decreased his incentive to compose with Iraqi Sunnis.

In the end, in order for the intelligence community, the secretary of state and others to devise the kind of alternate approach outlined above and throw themselves into it, the president needs to demand it and then lay it out for the American people. But in spite of his own recognition that absent “a strategy that reduces the wellsprings of extremism, a perpetual war…will prove self-defeating,” Obama has yet to do so.

Filed under: Information operations, Information Warfare, Iraq, Public Diplomacy, U.S. strategic communication

Originally posted at http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=260

Americans have never really understood ideological warfare. Our gut-level assumption is that everybody in the world really wants the same comfortable material success we have. We use “extremist” as a negative epithet. Even the few fanatics and revolutionary idealists we have, whatever their political flavor, expect everybody else to behave like a bourgeois.

We don’t expect ideas to matter — or, when they do, we expect them to matter only because people have been flipped into a vulnerable mode by repression or poverty. Thus all our divagation about the “root causes” of Islamic terrorism, as if the terrorists’ very clear and very ideological account of their own theory and motivations is somehow not to be believed.

By contrast, ideological and memetic warfare has been a favored tactic for all of America’s three great adversaries of the last hundred years — Nazis, Communists, and Islamists. All three put substantial effort into cultivating American proxies to influence U.S. domestic policy and foreign policy in favorable directions. Yes, the Nazis did this, through organizations like the “German-American Bund” that was outlawed when World War II went hot. Today, the Islamists are having some success at manipulating our politics through fairly transparent front organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

But it was the Soviet Union, in its day, that was the master of this game. They made dezinformatsiya(disinformation) a central weapon of their war against “the main adversary”, the U.S. They conducted memetic subversion against the U.S. on many levels at a scale that is only now becoming clear as historians burrow through their archives and ex-KGB officers sell their memoirs.

The Soviets had an entire “active measures” department devoted to churning out anti-American dezinformatsiya. A classic example is the rumor that AIDS was the result of research aimed at building a ‘race bomb’ that would selectively kill black people.

On a different level, in the 1930s members of CPUSA (the Communist Party of the USA) got instructions from Moscow to promote non-representational art so that the US’s public spaces would become arid and ugly.

Americans hearing that last one tend to laugh. But the Soviets, following the lead of Marxist theoreticians like Antonio Gramsci, took very seriously the idea that by blighting the U.S.’s intellectual and esthetic life, they could sap Americans’ will to resist Communist ideology and an eventual Communist takeover. The explicit goal was to erode the confidence of America’s ruling class and create an ideological vacuum to be filled by Marxism-Leninism.

Accordingly, the Soviet espionage apparat actually ran two different kinds of network: one of spies, and one of agents of influence. The agents of influence had the minor function of recruiting spies (as, for example, when Kim Philby was brought in by one of his tutors at Cambridge), but their major function was to spread dezinformatsiya, to launch memetic weapons that would damage and weaken the West.

Continued at http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=260

Here is something beyond notable. As you read through it, contemplate these memes used against us. They are hauntingly familiar.

In a previous post on Suicidalism, I identified some of the most important of the Soviet Union’s memetic weapons. Here is that list again:

There is no truth, only competing agendas.

All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.

There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.

The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.

Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal. Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.

The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying with poor people and criminals.)

For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself. But ‘oppressed’ people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.

When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions.

“There is no truth, only competing agendas.” This is how MH17’s story was enabled. Thinking internationally, this is how Putin can say such horrible lies without cracking a smile. Lavrov as well. My information warfare counterparts in Russia have obviously bought into the same memetic themes.

Format	File Size	Notes
PDF file	0.7 MB	Technical Details »

Format	File Size	Notes
PDF file	0.1 MB	Technical Details »

Abstract

With the establishment of U.S. Cyber Command in 2010, the cyber force is gaining visibility and authority, but challenges remain, particularly in the areas of acquisition and personnel recruitment and career progression. A review of commonalities, similarities, and differences between the still-nascent U.S. cyber force and early U.S. special operations forces, conducted in 2010, offers salient lessons for the future direction of U.S. cyber forces. Although U.S. special operations forces (SOF) have a long and storied history and now represent a mature, long-standing capability, they struggled in the 1970s and 1980s before winning an institutional champion and joint home in the form of U.S. Special Operations Command. U.S. cyber forces similarly represent a new but critical set of military capabilities. Both SOF and cyber forces are, at their operating core, small teams of highly skilled specialists, and both communities value skilled personnel above all else. Irregular warfare and SOF doctrine lagged operational activities, and the same is true of the cyber force. Early SOF, like the contemporary cyber force, lacked organizational cohesion, a unified development strategy, and institutionalized training. Perhaps most importantly, the capabilities of both forces have traditionally been inadequate to meet demand. The analogy holds for issues of acquisition, the two forces’ relationship with the conventional military, their applicability across the spectrum of combat, and their historic need for a strong advocate for reform. The analogy is not perfect, however. In terms of core capabilities, force accession, and tradition, the forces are also very different. But even these differences offer fundamental lessons for both the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Army with regard to the future and potential of the cyber force.