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Mind Games: a brief history of information warfare by Prof Taylor (2010) 
Mind Games A brief history of information warfare By Philip M. Taylor, Tablet, Oct 7, 2010 7:00 AM CREDIT: Chris Wilkins/AFP/Getty Images Israeli information warriors - both government operatives and the media they work to manipulate - fail to understand global media warfare. Their mishandling of the crises in Lebanon and Gaza and the recent flotilla incident has cast Israel as the villain in the global theater of war and conflict. Israel has not understood the difference between how it sees itself and how others perceive its actions, or if it has, it seems not to care whether the audience dislikes its performance on the Middle Eastern stage. Many Western observers are bemused by the actions of a democratic nation that arguably has the best cause in the world but the worst propaganda, especially on a regional and wider global level. Perhaps, for domestic political purposes, Israel is too preoccupied with domestic opinion - which, in reality, can be relied upon to be largely patriotic given that the Jewish state is bordered by so many hostile neighbors. Yet Israel is hardly alone in failing to grasp the forces that have reshaped the nature of armed conflict in our 21st-century global information society, in which perception is almost as important as - some would say more important than - reality. The term "information warfare" first gained currency at the end of the 1980s as the Cold War was drawing to a close. Indeed the Gulf War of 1991 was labeled by some analysts as the "first information war." Ever since, the phrase has entered popular media parlance, while academic journals [1], international conferences, [2] and even scholarly institutes [3] have been created for its analysis. It is sometimes used interchangeably with "media warfare," but as it also became a military doctrine the relationship of IW with media relations - or military public affairs - can sometimes cause confusion in military parlance, where it has been replaced by the broader term "information operations." Of course, the use of information in warfare has always been a vital component of military strategy. The side with the best intelligence about its adversaries' capabilities, troop sizes, equipment, and disposition, together with an understanding of the terrain, psychology, motivation, and even the weather conditions that were likely to affect the outcome of battles, has always enjoyed a greater likelihood of victory - from Alexander the Great to today's commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan. Information operations, or IO, have increased in military significance as modern conflicts have shifted from conventional war-fighting to counterinsurgency strategies that require greater attention to so-called "hearts and minds." IO as a military doctrine is broadly seen as a toolbox of capabilities consisting of computer network operations, electronic warfare, operational security, psychological operations, and deception. Computer network operations, or CNO, are about defending one's own computer-based military systems - information assurance - as well as attacking adversaries' systems. The attempt by NATO to destroy the broadcasts of Radio Television Serbia during the 1999 Kosovo conflict is often cited as an example of the latter, but that was really media warfare; the attempt to disrupt Serbian command-and-control capabilities is a much better example of electronic warfare. (The Stuxnet [4] worm that has attacked the control systems of the Bushehr nuclear reactor in Iran also comes to mind.) Combined CNO and electronic warfare are what most people think of when talking about information warfare, such as the devastating 2008 cyberattacks on Estonia's financial and other computer services by suspected Russian info-warriors resentful about the move of a memorial to Soviet World War II soldiers. As the military doctrine of information warfare was emerging throughout the 1990s, there was an obsession with the new technology that was increasingly driving a revolution in military affairs - from cameras on the noses of smart missiles navigated by GPS services coordinated by satellites to the widespread take-up of Internet access, email, and cell telephony. The military began to talk of "asymmetric warfare," in which a militarily inferior opponent could inflict significant damage through computer-based technologies using viruses, worms, trojans, and other "info-bombs" in cyber or hacker warfare. The threat most feared was an "electronic Pearl Harbor," not Sept. 11 - an attack that may have been coordinated partly using the Internet, but it was carried out by people who piloted old-fashioned airplanes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon. With the Cold War won, the U.S. government had also downgraded its international information programs, culminating in the closure of the U.S. Information Agency in 1999, creating a space that adversaries were eager and able to fill with a new kind of asymmetric warfare. Especially in places like the Middle East, terrorist groups were able to internationalize themselves quickly and at a very low cost by tapping into the global power of World Wide Web. The Palestinians were among the first to demonstrate how local causes could be internationalized via new media as the so-called "Electronic Intifada" became the most potent force-multiplier in the arsenals of Fatah and Hamas. Terrorist groups like al-Qaida, popularly thought of as struggling for a return to medieval values, embraced new media technologies not just to coordinate their planned violent attacks but also to disseminate their messages and recruit followers from the worldwide Muslim community, the Ummah. The Sept. 11 attacks also demonstrated how sophisticated terrorists are when exploiting the old media to wage their new kind of warfare. Striking at rush hour, when so many TV stations have traffic helicopters patrolling the skies above the cities, helped ensure that the attacks would be captured live (in real time) on television - and it worked. How many people have described watching those terrible scenes on live television that day as like watching a movie? From the terrorists' point of view, that was precisely the point - especially given the importance in Islamic thought of bearing witness to so-called acts of martyrdom. Terrorists also understand that their acts of violence are unlikely to succeed in a military victory - they are acts of theater designed to strike fear into their opponents and instill pride in their supporters. The audience is their main target, not the victims of their violence, although the target audience is more likely to be the chattering classes who are most likely to express horror and disgust. So, the declaration of a "global war on terror," fought primarily with kinetic weaponry - guns, bombs, and drones - played into the terrorists' hands. Acts of violence might repulse most sensible people, and the waging of a kinetic war, first in Afghanistan, then in Iraq, and again in Afghanistan, did precisely that, especially among the Islamic Ummah. Anti-Americanism, even in non-Islamic countries, grew to unprecedented levels as the war on terror dragged on to twice the length of World War II. The Internet became the primary battle space for anti-American and anti-Western propaganda about a renewed crusade against Islam, a clash of civilizations and a Zionist-Christian plot to subordinate Muslims everywhere. It is impossible not to conclude that the war on terror completely missed the point about what Sept. 11 was all about. Although the ongoing fighting has been re-branded by the Obama Administration into the "struggle against violent extremism" - which is better than the use of the word "war" - the realization that a war of ideas is what's really happening has come far too late in a conflict in which words and images matter and the primary battle spaces are Google, YouTube, and Facebook. For good or ill, the citizen information warriors who fight these conflicts are the bloggers, the citizen journalists, and digital eyewitnesses who disseminate images from Abu Ghraib or Afghan weddings to a global audience. It is in this virtual theater that the real war is now being fought. From just a handful of extreme jihadist websites in 2001, there are now thousands. We are in the era of Web 2.0 [5], in which interactivity rather than just the passive receipt of information is the norm: This is a space in which it is impossible, to use military jargon again, to take command and control or achieve full-spectrum dominance. It is also a strategic space, in which military doctrines like information operations have real limitations. IO embraces the use of military deception, and whereas terrorist organizations don't play by the same rules when it comes to information and disinformation, democratic military organizations do have a degree of accountability. If they lie deliberately, they will get found out in an era characterized by the near-impossibility of keeping secrets. And if that happens, the credibility of any truthful messaging that may be disseminated will be irreparably damaged. IO has proved useful, to varying degrees of success, in the real war theaters of Iraq and Afghanistan but only really at the tactical and operational levels of command. For al-Qaida, it is the main tool at the strategic level of communication. Although the United States and its allies are now in the process of developing strategic communications capabilities for conducting "global engagement" (another rebranding by the Obama Administration), early hopes for a return to non-military information strategies created by the president's 2009 Cairo speech [6] are as yet unfulfilled. As long as the war in Afghanistan continues in its current kinetic surge there is little likelihood of short-term success in the information domain. Many in the audience will continue to think they are watching a tragedy, and no matter how well the military actors perform, war is no laughing matter. Philip M. Taylor is a professor of international communications at the University of Leeds, U.K. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Article printed from Tablet Magazine:
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Theater of War Israel beats its enemies on the battlefield, but it loses the more important fight, for PR supremacy, to savvier operators like Hezbollah By Amy Zalman Tablet, Oct 7, 2010 7:00 AM Whatever hopes some had to the contrary, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made it fairly clear in the days before the end of the West Bank building freeze last month that he intended to let building resume. He had no intention of heeding American calls for an extension, nor did he pay mind to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' threat to withdraw from peace negotiations. Yet Netanyahu also called on West Bank settlers to mute their celebrations as the expiration moment approached. Given the evident intention to build and continue building, what could it possibly matter if settlers wanted to exult? Because, as Netanyahu must know, while dancing and singing might not make much of a difference to anyone but the celebrants themselves, images of a celebration could matter a great deal if they spread in the regional media. Because facts on the ground can be recorded, manipulated, reproduced, and distributed globally within minutes. And because, once they are let loose, these images have the potential to sway world opinion and reshape government agendas and options. An austere and relatively unremarked end to the building freeze would be less antagonizing to already hostile audiences than what did appear in regional news outlets the next day: thousands of Israelis triumphantly celebrating [1] in a scene made festive by balloons in Israel's national colors, blue and white, and Israeli and American flags. Such galling images [2] could only serve to make it more difficult for a Palestinian delegation to accept Netanyahu's reasoning that settlement building has never before stopped peace negotiations from taking place. The settlers' disregard for their leadership's plea also highlighted the increasingly circumscribed ability of any government to control the messages not only of outside groups but of their own citizens. For governments, which once held nearly absolute power over a limited number of centralized media outlets - a few newspapers, one or two television stations - this loss of control is a hard pill to swallow. In moments of crisis, governments must now race against both professional and citizen journalists to win early control of the unfolding story, and they must win it not only on television, radio, and in other traditional news outlets but across a widening range of social media, from YouTube to Facebook to the "blogosphere," and now to the "microblogosphere" of Twitter. Israel seems to be having an especially difficult time accommodating to the evolving media environment. Take its summer 2006 war with Hezbollah. Although experts waffled for months over the military consequences of the war, there was universal consensus that the Lebanese Shiite group was its true victor, primarily because of its commanding media exploitation. Hezbollah showed itself to be skilled in the foundational craft of information warfare: Later scrutiny of the war's events indicated an advanced ability to intercept Israeli signals and sustain its own communication networks even while under attack. The Israeli military looked clumsy and old-fashioned in comparison to Hezbollah, which adeptly wove words, images, and song to create a globally resonant narrative of both triumph and victimhood. Indeed, images of the conflict may have been more powerful, the further they were from their source, and from the local political dynamics that surrounded the conflict. It worked to Hezbollah's benefit to have their own war with Israel framed in terms of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has become global shorthand for an asymmetrical battle between a heartless bully and a courageous and long-suffering victim. This framework overwhelms the specifics; pro-Israeli responses to widespread charges in the United States and Europe of the "disproportionate use of force" against Gaza in 2008 missed a larger point that the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians is viewed a priori as disproportional. The simplicity and appeal of this narrative does not fully explain the vitriolic protests that the 2008 war with Hamas inspired all over the world, in places as far afield as Argentina and Thailand, Norway and Tunisia. Pro-Israel commentators claimed that the protests reflected anti-Semitism; pro-Palestinian observers argued they confirmed the justice of the Palestinian cause. Both claims have truth, of course, but the protests also drew demonstrators who do not care deeply about either Jews or Palestinians in their everyday lives. If anything, the flare-ups were reminiscent of riots responding to caricatures of Muhammad in a Swedish newspaper [3] the year before. These epidemic flash mobs are a new kind of protest, in which globally transmitted events and powerful symbols collide to channel an overdetermined assortment of discontents. Israel-Palestine, the Holocaust, and Nazism are such symbols. Until these become a part of normal history, they are likely to continue to be a touchstone for the angry and dispossessed everywhere. To address some of its communication shortfalls, Israel created [4] a National Information Directorate in 2008. The agency is attached to the Office of the Prime Minister, and it serves to coordinate the country's public diplomacy, or hasbara (literally, explanation, in Hebrew). The new Information Directorate garnered praise [5] from media watchers and international Jewish groups for its ability to conduct this complex coordination in the short war with Hamas in December 2008. Having centralized its communication activities in one office, Israel could communicate its objectives and defend its actions with one unified voice. Over the course of the conflict, the civilian agency and the Israeli Defense Forces worked to generate similar or complementary messages, and did so using a wide variety of new media tools, such as text messaging and YouTube. Yet, even swift message coordination and wide technological reach cannot make up for the challenges posed by the new media environment. Many analysts have concluded that the new media conditions are tilted in favor of non-state actors, such as insurgent militias or terrorist groups. There is a universal expectation that governments and traditional media should function transparently and permit information to flow freely. Once upon a time, a government seeking to control the flow of information during wartime could destroy physical infrastructure or impose media blackouts or other forms of censorship. While these are still options, it is increasingly apparent that the reputational cost of heavy-handed government or military actions can outweigh the benefits. When information is restricted, the remaining void is quickly filled with conspiracy theories and distorted facts. These theories balloon and proliferate with startling speed, because it is so cheap and easy for most of us to access the means of digital communication. This phenomenon occurred in 2002, when Israel's decision to prevent journalists from reporting directly from Jenin refugee camp during Operation Defensive Shield [6] during the Second Intifada generated claims that a civilian massacre was being kept from public view. Although reports later absolved the IDF of any acts of large-scale murder, the reputational damage was done. *** The Sept. 11 attacks generated intense scrutiny of the communications capacities of al-Qaida, Hezbollah, and other non-state militant groups, much of it carried out in the same spirit of bewildered shock and awe that led Richard Holbrooke to ask, "How can a man in a cave outcommunicate the world's leading communications society?" In his 2001 Washington Post editorial [7], Holbrooke explained the United States' own tone-deaf communications [8] as a function of outmoded technology and counterproductive bureaucracy. These are much the same terms in which Israel's failure in 2006 would later be examined. As many analyses have since documented, non-state groups face neither of these hindrances. Having never had access to mainstream media, or control of the official means of communication in the first place, they have always relied on alternative technologies. Hamas and Hezbollah were both early adopters of new technologies. Hezbollah has had an impressively well-orchestrated and highly controlled communication structure since at least the 1980s, with bureaus directing regional communications, external relations, military communications, and artistic production. There is also a more deeply rooted issue that hinders states like Israel and the United States from more effective communications. In the United States, information warfare developed almost exclusively as a technological discipline, propelled by the country's abiding faith in science as the solution to our human problems. This scientific worldview extends to the military view of information as a kind of digital switch: Information is either true or false, informative or dis-informative. As a result of this legacy, today's information strategists have found themselves grappling not only with the new technological realities but also with the dawning recognition that information is not simply a realm of truth or lies but the place where humans collect to make, refute, and reframe the meaning of our experiences. It has not been easy for U.S. military to gain footing, let alone dominance, on this shifting ground of history, memory, culture, and language. Having no present territory, the insurgent often has nothing left beyond language and memory. The power of ephemera to unify and motivate may be especially true for non-state groups opposing the State of Israel, which holds a uniquely supercharged semiotic status in the annals of modern conflict. *** It is no wonder, then, that Israeli communications compare badly to those of Hezbollah. As researcher Olfa Lamloum has observed [9], the group orchestrates its politics as a form of dramatic pageant, a practice it learned from Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's example in the Iranian Revolution. Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah's Al Quds Day address [10] last month offered a display of just such political dramaturgy. Al Quds Day, or Jerusalem Day, established in 1979 by Khomeini, serves annually as a touchstone linking the Palestinian plight to current events. For the audience, sitting in the early September sun, Nasrallah's comments transformed their experience from commemoration of the past to active participation in an ongoing historical drama. In his speech, Nasrallah suggested that he is speaking of just one short chapter in a longer dramatic encounter between Islam and the Arabs and the United States and Israel. Peering into the news of the day, he predicted Arab triumph and Western failure signaled by the partial U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. Why, Nasrallah asked [11] his audience, did the neoconservatives' plan to remake the Middle East fail? Because of the staying power of the Palestinians, especially in Gaza; the staying power of the resistance in Lebanon and especially in the July [2006] war; and the staying power of political and national desire in Lebanon, and the lack of submission to Western American dictates. Because of the staying power of Syria, and Iran, and the Iraqi people and their popular resistance. Nasrallah's answer has the pithy rhythm of a slogan, but it is much deeper in its effect. Key terms of his discourse have gathered their own symbolic power over many years of association with Palestinian resistance, and his teleological stringing of events suggests the natural course of action is simply to continue on the same unwavering path. In contrast to his characterization of living, ongoing history of the Arabs, Nasrallah portrayed [12] the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations as "stillborn." They were pre-rejected by the Palestinians, and by the Muslims and Arabs, dead before they have even lived. Ultimately, Nasrallah advised, all that is needed to triumph is time, more staying power, the ability to outlast the Israelis and the Americans. It is difficult to imagine any slogan, no matter how carefully targeted, that could effectively combat the historical narrative offered by Hezbollah. Suppressing its most powerful channels will only have temporary effect; bombing will not kill it, and is likely to confirm the themes of victimhood, martyrdom, and triumph through endurance. In the long run, Israel and its allies will be far better served by efforts to grasp Hezbollah's legitimacy and meaning to its listeners, and to find ways to engage it. Cultural narratives can and do change over time. Most communities that endure successfully, like the resolute Palestinians, like the Jewish people, and like the experiment in conglomerate identity that is American democracy, will point to the consistency of their self-narration as the source of their success. Paradoxically, the real source of a people's endurance is its ability to transform to accommodate changing conditions. The religious vision that Hezbollah and other groups use to underwrite their political legitimacy is an invention of the last 30 years, not an ancient artifact of the region. The real task, therefore, is to use various instruments of policy-making to transform the conditions that enable the Hezbollah narrative. Nasrallah's Jerusalem Day speech hinges on the garbled logic that the "endurance" of Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites precipitated the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. This is an impoverished and narcissistic vision, but it is in present conditions a persuasive one. Smart strategists seeking to use information to influence events will do well to understand the mechanics of Nasrallah's logic: It is a freely available form of predictive intelligence that can help them understand how he is likely to frame future events. In the longer term, non-violent coexistence in the region will necessitate a dialogue between different historical visions. In this effort, it is time to go beyond the exhausted stalemate of comparative suffering between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians, and look more practically at what works today and what doesn't. Enlightened Palestinians and those in solidarity with them in the region will hopefully conclude that sweeping conspiracy theories waste much-needed energy more than they empower. Enlightened Israeli Jews and those in solidarity with them will, we can hope, begin to find ways to express Jewish identity and continuity to reflect current conditions: the miracle of not merely surviving, but thriving, and the vanishing need to rely on an identity governed solely by victimhood and existential threat. Amy Zalman is an independent consultant to senior policymakers on the function of culture and narrative in U.S. strategic communication. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Article printed from Tablet Magazine:
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