Phil Taylor's papers
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BACK TO : INFORMATION WARFARE (IW) & INFORMATION OPERATIONS (IO) - see also PSYOPS
Information warfare and camouflage, concealment and deception by A N Limno & M F Krysanov Information warfare and camouflage, concealment and deception. Military Thought, March-April, 2003, by A.N. Limno, M.F. Krysanov In the last decade, a number of advanced world countries have increasingly focused on creating effective assets and methods of information warfare, which enjoys a steadily growing role in efforts to gain success in the course of military operations. Foreign military analysts believe that bringing directed information pressure to bear on public and military administrative centers, the population and the armed forces of an unfriendly country can achieve whatever objectives in hand rapidly, effectively and sometimes even bloodlessly. The grown role of information warfare is due to the rapid penetration of information technologies to all spheres of human activities, the military affairs included. The process is capable of working a profound change in the theory and practice of military art. It can also alter the views on the nature of confrontation between warring sides, along with its assets and methods. That brings to the fore the problem of preservation and protection of information in the RF Armed Forces, something that calls for the development of effective countermeasures capable of thwarting the enemy potential for penetration in our information webs (channels). One way of dealing with this task is to specify the place, the role and development priorities of what is known in Russian as maskirovka--camouflage, concealment and deception (CC & D)--in capacity of a crucial component of a system of information warfare. The Russian definition of CC & D is this: maskirovka is a variety of support of combat operations and everyday activities of troops (forces); a set of interconnected organizational, operational-tactical, and engineer-technical measures, carried out with the purpose of concealing from the adversary the troops (naval forces) and objects and misleading him as to the presence, disposition, composition, state, actions and intentions of the troops (naval forces), as well as the command's plans. (1) By scale (level) of goals tackled it is subdivided into strategic (the state level involving different ministries and agencies, as well as the operations by two or more fronts), operational (the scale of operations of a front, an army, a corps), and tactical (the scale of operations of a combined unit, a unit, a subunit). Whatever is carried out at every level is an independent set of measures and actions, designed to deceive the adversary, each based on a separate plan and yet closely linked with its counterparts, because lower-level CC & D planning is in line with directives and plans of a higher-level staff. But it should be remarked that although the CC & D has been made, in recent years, a comprehensive and all-embracing affair, there is a growing tendency toward what we see as its excessive separation and isolation in the said levels. This is causing a certain lack of coordination in efforts and holding back the conversion of CC & D to a unified, vertically controlled system. In part this state of affairs is explained by the fact that as a variety of operational (combat) support the CC & D took shape only in the 20th century, with serious works in this area appearing only after World War II. For this reason the success in using CC & D methods is often dependent on an individual commander's creative ability, intuition and experience. True enough, the recent-year dynamic advance in CC & D assets and techniques and the broad-scale introduction of computer technologies have led to computers increasingly stepping in where the case in point is decision-making, a big amount of operational calculations, or planning. That enhances the validity of decisions and considerably cuts the time spent on their making, the handing down of missions, and information exchanges between the different levels. To a certain extent it should also assist a closer interaction of command and control elements at different levels. Numerous examples of successful use of deception in local wars warrant the assertion that the role of CC & D, far from declining, tends to grow considerably with the appearance of precision weapons and more powerful munitions, when fortification is no longer capable of providing sufficient protection. In many respects this is connected with advances in material foundation of CC & D, which is going through a substantial overhaul and development. The last 10-15 years alone saw the emergence of such new CC & D technologies as signature control (communication to objects of preset radiating and reflecting characteristics), and highly mobile concealment of moving objects. There are also low-signature specimens of WME (Stealth technology, etc.), complexes (systems) protecting objects from precision weapons, etc. As a result, this country now has a range of about 100 types of CC & D assets, ones differing as to their effect, which ensure both the concealment and simulation of troops and objects in more than 20 enemy reconnaissance channels (see the table). While considering the main trends in and priorities of operational (tactical) CC & D system in the RF Armed Forces, it would be well to compare our principal approaches and concepts with the foreign views on the same problem. The NATO term for CC & D is military deception. Similarly with the Russian classification the relevant measures are divided into tactical, operational (in TO), and strategic (the national level). But the RF Armed Forces treat CC & D as an independent type of operational (combat) support, whereas for NATO military deception is a sub-system in the Command and Control Warfare (C2W) system, which also includes reconnaissance, physical demolition, psychological operations, electronic warfare and security operations. They are designed to avert information leaks, to bring about negative impacts, distortions or disruptions, impairing the adversary's command and control capability, and to protect one's own command and control system from identical enemy impacts. Foreign specialists believe the C2W system is the best organizational structure for so-called information warfare (IW), for which reason all IW-related investigations in the United States and a number of other NATO countries are precisely within the C2W framework. As for the term itself, "information warfare," it was first used in a December 2, 1992 U.S. DOD directive to denote open and/or concealed purposeful information pressure, which parties to a confrontation brought to bear on each other in order to gain a certain advantage in the material sphere. The fundamental JCOS document, Joint Vision 2010, calls information and technological supremacy the main factor in the radical enhancement of combat capabilities of the U.S. Armed Forces till the year 2010, with the supremacy due to be in the nature of all-embracing (universal, global) domination. Certain foreign specialists hold that information warfare (confrontation) is part and parcel of the information war, which, apart from the military aspect, includes financial, trade, psychological, legal and other aspects. Moreover, the main focus of offensive information impacts in IW shifts from automatic systems and weapons to the human being, to wit, the decision-maker. The United States accepts these as the basic IW categories: defensive IW; offensive IW; IW in local cases of threats and conflicts; IW in periods of tensions and in transit to a conflict. Defensive IW has the aim of providing information security, to wit, protecting one's own information system from enemy or criminal penetration. Offensive IW comprises practically the entire C2W spectrum, impacting on the military information infrastructure engaged in command and control; information and management structures of banks and other enterprises; the mass media. As of today, all the leading DOD agencies have specialized units conducting research into IW matters. The three services of the U.S. Armed Forces run IW centers, information warfare is on the military training curricula as an academic discipline in its own right. It is included in plans of military exercises and career personnel training programs. Given the growing role of IW, a number of modern States are engaged in a reallocation of efforts and, accordingly, appropriations on different kinds of combat support. Thus, foreign countries are speedily drafting an acceptable IW strategy. They also are keen to find an answer to this important question: How do they reorganize, restructure and reequip for the new-generation war? After all, information superiority will be the main condition of victory in 21st-century wars, like air supremacy and massive employment of armor were in the 20th century. So, what should be the main aims of CC & D in present-day and subsequent operations against the background of the growing importance of information warfare? In the first place, we believe it necessary to specify the current wisdom that CC & D is aimed at deceiving foreign (enemy) intelligence services. The domestic experience of organizing and carrying out CC & D measures as well as the guideline documents on military deception accepted in foreign armies show that in modern conditions the enemy reconnaissance systems should not be a separate aim (target) for deception. Within information confrontation, reconnaissance should be regarded as only a connection, a channel for passing the necessary (misleading) information to someone in position for decision-making. In many respects this is due to the fact that army reconnaissance elements normally are not in the business of interpreting the data they obtain, passing them to staffs (commanders), which receive all available info about the adversary, friendly forces, and terrain. Therefore, counteraction to enemy reconnaissance cannot and should not be total. Rather it should be flexible and predominantly selective. The main thing is to make (induce, provoke, etc.) the adversary engage (or keep from engaging) in definite actions benefiting our own forces. In the final analysis, CC & D may he characterized as a system of deceitful measures and controlling impacts as applied to the enemy command and control centers with the purpose of inducing them to make decisions benefiting our own forces. At the same time, the use of CC & D assets and techniques provides for counteraction not only to reconnaissance but also to different precision weapons guidance systems. It may be assumed, therefore, that the system of CC & D measures is already today a real, functioning sub-system in the context of information warfare. The comparative analysis indicates that, unlike the command and control system the U.S. Armed Forces use in information wars, our own CC & D arrangement actually does not include only the sub-systems of psychological operations and mathematical programming impact. What it does include is a sub-system of counteraction to technical reconnaissance (CTR), which protects data transmission and processing equipment and may be adapted to both defensive and offensive uses. By integrating CC & D and other above-mentioned sub-systems we may create a functioning information warfare system in the RF Armed Forces, which will include the following main sub-systems: CC & D (the nucleus), psychological operations, reconnaissance, electronic warfare, and mathematical programming impact. For this to happen, CC & D should develop in a preemptive fashion. We believe the priorities in this sense are the following: integrating CC & D measures performed by the engineers, RCBP, EW, signals and other troops into a unified sub-system of technical measures; organizing good interaction with psychological warfare and mathematical programming impact; creating a centralized command and control system for CC & D forces and assets; improving CC & D assets and methods with the purpose of protecting troops and objects from automatic reconnaissance systems and PW guidance systems; removing duplication of CC & D and CTR; converting CC & D as a set of measures designed to deceive the adversary to a permanently functioning system of measures and actions designed to bring the controlling pressure to bear on the adversary; specifying the role and place of signature-reducing measures within the CC & D system. As we see it, the said system at first ought to be tested at the lowest (tactical) level by creating some experimental tactical-echelon army units and command and control elements and subsequently running them through their paces during joint tactical drills and exercises. Later on it makes sense to steadily strengthen (build up) interaction between the components (army units) and gradually integrate them into a unified TOE structure. Possible Methods (Channels) Whereby the Adversary Can Obtain Reconnaissance Information about Mobile Objects of the Land Forces Reconnaissance Reconnaissance Wave Methods Channels (Frequency) Band Optical Visual-optical: (optical- in daytime 0.38-0.76 [micro]m electronic) through night vision devices 0.38-2 [micro]m Photography: black-and-white and color photographs 0.38-0.9 [micro]m spectrum zone photographs 0.1-1.5 [micro]m Observation in the spectrum's ultraviolet zone 0.1-0.38 [micro]m Television 0.38-2.0 [micro]m Laser 0.38-10.6 [micro]m Heat Heat 2-15 [micro]m Radar Radar: millimetric waves 1-10 mm centimetric waves 1-10 cm decimetric waves 10-100 cm Thermo-microwave 0.3-21 cm Specialized Radio 0.01-100 m Radio engineering 0.01-100 m Sound 20-20000 Hz Seismic acoustics, reconnais- sance signaling equipment 0-4000 Hz Magnetometric -- Radiation -- Rhinological (by smell) -- Reconnaissance Reconnaissance Equipment Methods Channels Acquisition Range, km Optical Visual-optical: (optical- in daytime 6-8 electronic) through night vision devices Up to 3 Photography: black-and-white and color On 1:5000 photographs photographs and Larger spectrum zone photographs Ditto Observation in the spectrum's ultraviolet zone Ditto Television Up to 6 Laser Up to 20 Heat Heat Up to 3-5 Radar Radar: millimetric waves Up to 20 centimetric waves Up to 200 decimetric waves Up to 200 Thermo-microwave Up to 20 Specialized Radio Over 250 Radio engineering Over 250 Sound Up to 20 Seismic acoustics, reconnais- sance signaling equipment Up to 1 Magnetometric Up to 1 Radiation -- Rhinological (by smell) -- NOTE: (1.) Voennaia entsiklopedia, Vol. 5, Voenizdat Publishers, Moscow, 2001, p. 23. COPYRIGHT 2003 East View Publications in association with The Gale Group and LookSmart. COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group |