Phil Taylor's papers
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BACK TO : INFORMATION WARFARE (IW) & INFORMATION OPERATIONS (IO) - see also PSYOPS
Help for Karen Hughes - Codename of the Week: Global Harvest by Wm Arkin William M. Arkin on National and Homeland Security Posted at 09:45 AM ET, 09/30/2005 Help for Karen Hughes Codename of the Week: Global Harvest As Under Secretary of State Karen Hughes begins her monumental campaign to improve the world's opinion of the United States, not to worry, military information warriors are poised to jump in as soon as the FEMA of public diplomacy falters. Certainly one of the fastest growing military sectors is that of information operations (IO). And in IO, there is no aspect of the military effort to make friends and influence people overseas that is hotter right now than one most people have never even heard of: human factors analysis. According to an internal Defense Department document, Director of Central Intelligence Directive (DCID) 7/3, "Information Operations and Intelligence Community Related Activities," defines human factors analysis as: "The psychological, cultural, behavioral, and other human attributes that influence decision-making, the flow of information, and the interpretation of information by individuals and groups at any level in any state or organization." If you are wondering what really happened to the early "data mining" and "link analysis" projects associated with Able Danger and other programs, look no further. It is now resident in new compartmented and secret programs like that of the Global Harvest office at the Joint Information Operations Center (JIOC) in San Antonio, Texas. A wide variety of human factors analysis work has been done in the intelligence and information warfare communities since the 1990's, just not necessary under that name, and not in one place. The fledgling Land Information Warfare Activity (LIWA) of the Army that supported Able Danger, the Joint Warfare Analysis Center (JWAC), the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and CIA, as well as a huge cadre of Air Force information warfare specialists in the San Antonio area were all studying foreign leaders' decision-making, "belief systems," and the communications and information environment they operated in. They produced social network analyses of leaders and their associates, particularly to support operations in Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, and North Korea. The culmination of this early work occurred in Kosovo in 1999, with a full fledged "crony targeting" campaign against Slobodan Milosevic. By the time the Y2K threat loomed, poised to bring life as we know it to a screeching halt, information warfare (IW) had become such a huge cottage industry that one friend remarked that even the toilet paper in the Pentagon was being labeled IW-related. As is often the case with these new (or not so new) disciplines, soon enough everything from tactical leaflet drops and loudspeaker operations, to national-level computer network attack and covert operations were being stuffed into IW (and its big brother, Information Operations). There was a need to separate the varsity from the junior varsity, the pedestrian from the boutique. So the JIOC stood up in September 1999, redesignated from the Joint Command and Control Warfare Center, which was itself formed from the nucleus of the former Joint Electronic Warfare Center (JEWC). In 2000, the DIA established its own Human Factors Analysis Center, and NSA followed with an Electronic Space Analysis Center (nothing to do with space, up there, that is), while the CIA and NSA established a jointly managed Information Operations Technology Center. Soon we were winning the information war! It was way too much entrepreneurial energy, the shadow warrior types say. Others say it was duplicative, undirected, unfocused. As one expert as the time wrote, the Defense Department's definition of information operations was "so broad" that "IO is everything and it is nothing." The Pentagon stepped in to harness all of the disparate resources and exert greater control. On January 10, 2003, President Bush signed "change 2" to the Unified Command Plan (UCP) 2002, designating U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), the grand-daddy of very old fashioned nuclear targeting, as the lead command for the worldwide information operations mission. STRATCOM took control of the JIOC, which provides "comprehensive operational and technical support on the information operations (IO) aspects of military operations." (The JIOC was authorized 271 positions as of December 2004, including 100 contractors and three allied officers--Australia, Canada and UK). Secretary Rumsfeld then signed the classified October 30, 2003 Information Operations Roadmap, a comprehensive plan containing 57 recommendations in order to make information operations a "core military competency." One of the recommendations was giving STRATCOM operational tasking authority over DIA's Human Factors Analysis Center as well as the NSA's Electronic Space Analysis Center. With tasking authority over the JIOC and these two other centers (and with its sights set on control of JWAC as well -- JWAC is responsible for the "physical" space) -- the uber information warrior would surely win the information war! The task of integrating STRATCOM and the various intelligence agencies falls to Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Warfighting Support. Boykin, famous for his lets-win-the-battle-for-hearts-and-minds remarks about Islam and his own Christian faith, has directed that the DOD improve its intelligence support to information operations. In particular, he has directed the strengthening of human factors analysis, methodologies, and products to ensure "actionable" information for planners and operators. Meanwhile, the Joint Chief of Staff is working to solve the definitional problem that information operations are everything and thus nothing. Its 5 July 2005 draft update of the information operations doctrine, revealed here for the first time, contains a new definition for information operations: "The integrated employment of electronic warfare (EW), computer network operations (CNO), psychological operations (PSYOP), military deception (MILDEC), and operations security (OPSEC), in concert with specified supporting and related capabilities, to influence, disrupt, or deny human [my emphasis] and automated decision-making, while protecting our own." The draft doctrine breaks down the "information environment" into information, physical and cognitive dimensions. The cognitive is called "the most important of the three," and "the mind of the "decision maker" and the "target audience (TA)," formerly called the populace, is called the objective of all information information. Oh yeah, I almost forgot: Global Harvest. It and other secret projects of these various commands and centers are using dozens of different software programs to integrate all of the "human factors" data, to, you guessed it, win the information war! By William M. Arkin 
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