by BG Huba Wass de Czege, US Army, Retired, Small Wars Journal
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We are in a period of unprecedented and rapid change, and this realization should make us skeptics of wisdoms revealed as recently as a decade and a half ago when the problems the military faced were very different. Paradigms that might have seemed sensible then confuse more than clarify today.
In the years just prior to September 11, 2001, a new American Way of War emerged to replace Cold War paradigms -- those underlying unthinking ways of thinking embedded in our doctrines. The April 2000 Defense Planning Guidance tasked U.S. Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) to develop "... new Joint warfighting concepts and capabilities that will improve the ability of future Joint force commanders to rapidly and decisively conduct particularly challenging and important operational missions, such as ... coercing an adversary to undertake certain actions or denying the adversary the ability to coerce or attack its neighbors ..." The object of these operations were to be rogue states such as Iraq, North Korea, Libya, and Panama were or had been. What emerged was dubbed the "Rapid Decisive Operations (RDO)" concept. It rested on four pillars. An Air Force and Navy capable of controlling air, space, and sea domains from which to coerce enemies with a hail of precise air and naval missile power; increasingly more capable special operating forces to penetrate enemy territory and provide targets; and a new core capability called "Information Operations" to "influence, disrupt, corrupt or usurp adversarial human and automated decisionmaking, while protecting our own." In this "domain," as in the others, the term most used in the late 1990's to describe the product of American technological superiority was not just superiority, but dominance. RDO asserted that leveraging these asymmetric superiorities in the air, space, naval, and information domains would not only conserve scarce ground forces and reduce casualties, but they would also achieve rapid and decisive results. As we saw versions of RDO applied in Kosovo in 2000, in Afghanistan in 2002, and in Iraq in 2003, it became clear to most professionals that this new paradigm oversimplified complexities then not well understood. In fact the chief failing of RDO was an utter lack of respect for the difficulty of what it set out to do: either to achieve relevant dominance in any sense; or to coerce any determined adversary to undertake any actions what-so-ever. Even denying an adversary the ability to coerce or attack its neighbors has to be approached with humility today. However, thinking about the Information Operations component of this package has been most resistant to revision, especially two prized and related tenets. One is that "the integrated employment of the core capabilities of electronic warfare, computer network operations, psychological operations, military deception, and operations security, in concert with specified supporting and related capabilities" is the best way to gain the maximum benefit of so-called IO core, supporting, and related capabilities. Another is that when these capabilities are thus integrated, an independent IO "logical line of operations" can influence the behaviors of adversaries and the publics that support them with so-called "information effects" alone. This is an amateurish outlook, and not shared by all IO practitioners, especially those who have been in the trenches, and working closely with the Brigade Combat Teams most involved in the real challenges of trying to "influence" the behaviors of real people under stress. While progress is being made on other fronts of "Defense Transformation," IO is stuck in a late 20th Century time warp. Future Shock author Alvin Toffler, in a passage from a 1996 book, makes this relevant point: "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn." In this case a Pentagon bureaucracy, the tyranny of a slow-to- change, lowest-common-denominator and top-down-biased Joint Doctrine, plus engrained habits of thought stand in the way of learning, unlearning, and relearning.
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This article provides a very useful distilled compendium of opinions/observations that have been widely debated for years in the Pentagon and elsewhere since 9/11 and before. It would be very useful as a primer to those unfamiliar with the extensive debate that has been waged inside and outside of government over the subject of information operations, influence operations, and strategic communications. But it is a primer with a potentially poison pill attached. First, it really adds nothing to the debate or literature per se on Information Operations, or even the debate on the underlying dynamics/values associated with IO, though it seems to imply that it does so. In fact, there is practically nothing that is really new in the article that has not already been suggested or debated extensively elsewhere -- and in clearer and less convoluted language. Moreover, it is painfully long on abstract "oughta/shoulda" and very short on specific useful recommendations. The article would be much more useful if the author rewrote it with specific recommended measures that he would have introduced to resolve the deficiencies he asserts he has identified. For example, what specific measures does the author suggest the Pentagon implement to keep support of the American people in a function he describes as Military Public Relations? Especially since the main impediment to "public relations" activities -- presumedly the author intends somekind of coordinated effort to influence the opinion of the American people -- is specifically prohibited, not by bureacuratic reluctance in the Pentagon, but by law? Should the laws change? If so, how? Under whatever new laws he would suggest, what would be permissible? And what not permissible? And who should provided both oversight and content to such public relations activities? Moreover, what safeguards would he put in place to ensure the government (and the Pentagon) -- during periods of great stress -- not abuse the prerogative of authority to influence the American people. For example, the recent Pat Tilman case underscores that many leaders in the military of very senior rank at a very recent date were not above attempting to manipulate and hide the truth of the circumstances of his deat for a host of reasons, all of which they thought justifiable at the time. Does a license to bend truth in such a manner to promote the creation of heroes for public consumption really serve the common cause? Moreover, in truth, a close reading of the manuscript reveals that what the author is really suggesting is that the Army cannot succeed in the information domain of modern wars without being politicized in partisan support for whatever given war it is called upon to fight. How else could a military without cynicism legitimately engage in efforts to promote public support for a given conflict? If nothing else, the article provokes thought. However, those reading it would be well advised to think deeper before swallowing the assumptions and assertions.