Information Operations

The modern means of communication have turned the world into an information fishbowl and, in terms of foreign policy and national security in post-Cold War power politics, helped transform international power politics. Information operations (IO), in which time zones are as important as national boundaries, is the use of modern technology to deliver critical information and influential content in an effort to shape perceptions, manage opinions, and control behavior. Contemporary IO differs from traditional psychological operations practiced by nation-states, because the availability of low-cost high technology permits nongovernmental organizations and rogue elements, such as terrorist groups, to deliver influential content of their own as well as facilitates damaging cyber-attacks ("hactivism") on computer networks and infrastructure. As current vice president Dick Cheney once said, such technology has turned third-class powers into first-class threats. Conceived as a textbook by instructors at the Joint Command, Control, and Information Warfare School of the U.S. Joint Forces Staff College and involving IO experts from several countries, this book fills an important gap in the literature by analyzing under one cover the military, technological, and psychological aspects of information operations. The general reader will appreciate the examples taken from recent history that reflect the impact of IO on U.S. foreign policy, military operations, and government organization.

Introduced in 1998 by the Department of Defense, the concept of information operations (IO) proposed to revolutionize the ways in which warfare, diplomacy, and business were conducted. However, this transformation has not come to fruition. Two large gaps remain: between policy and theory, and between the funding needs of IO initiatives and the actual funds the federal bureaucracy is willing to provide to support these operations. These two discrepancies are central to the overall discussions of Information Operations Matters. Leigh Armistead explains why these gaps exist and suggests ways to close them. Also in discussing best practices in IO, he clarifies how the key agencies of the U.S. government can use the inherent power of information to better conduct future strategic communication campaigns. Information Operations Matters presents a more pragmatic approach to IO, recommending that IO policy be made surrounding usable concepts, definitions, theories, and capabilities that are attainable with the resources available. To meet the threats of the future as well as those facing us today, Armistead argues, it is necessary to use this new area of operations to the greatest extent possible.

Information operations involve the use of military information and how it is gathered, manipulated, and fused. It includes such critical functions as intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, command and control, communications, and precision navigation. Separating myth from reality, this authoritative resource provides military professionals with a current and comprehensive understanding of information warfare operations planning, including offensive, defensive, and influence operations. The book identifies the features of information operations that differ from traditional military operations and reveals why this discipline is more important now than ever before. Professionals discover new planning tools that have been brought together under a single platform to become the next Information Operations Planning Tool for the U.S. Department of Defence. Additionally, the book defines and identifies new threats and opportunities, and explains why the U.S. is not yet winning the war for the minds.

A no-nonsense treatment of information operations, this handbook makes clear what does and does not fall under information operations, how the military plans and executes such efforts, and what the role of IO ought to be in the war of ideas. Paul provides detailed accounts of the doctrine and practice of the five core information operations capabilities (psychological operations, military deception, operations security, electronic warfare, and computer network operations) and the three related capabilities (public affairs, civil-military operations, and military support to public diplomacy). The discussion of each capability includes historical examples, explanations of tools and forces available, and current challenges faced by that community. An appendix of selected excerpts from military doctrine ties the work firmly to the military theory behind information operations. Paul argues that contemporary IO's mixing of capabilities focused on information content with those focused on information systems conflates apples with the apple carts. This important study concludes that information operations would be better poised to contribute to the war of ideas if IO were reorganized, separating content capabilities from systems capabilities and separating the employment of black (deceptive or falsely attributed) information from white (wholly truthful and correctly attributed) information.

Russian Information Warfare: Assault on Democracies in the Cyber Wild West examines how Moscow tries to trample the very principles on which democracies are founded and what we can do to stop it. In particular, the book analyzes how the Russian government uses cyber operations, disinformation, protests, assassinations, coup d'états, and perhaps even explosions to destroy democracies from within, and what the United States and other NATO countries can do to defend themselves from Russia's onslaught. The Kremlin has been using cyber operations as a tool of foreign policy against the political infrastructure of NATO member states for over a decade. Alongside these cyber operations, the Russian government has launched a diverse and devious set of activities which at first glance may appear chaotic. Russian military scholars and doctrine elegantly categorizes these activities as components of a single strategic playbook —information warfare. This concept breaks down the binary boundaries of war and peace and views war as a continuous sliding scale of conflict, vacillating between the two extremes of peace and war but never quite reaching either. The Russian government has applied information warfare activities across NATO members to achieve various objectives. What are these objectives? What are the factors that most likely influence Russia's decision to launch certain types of cyber operations against political infrastructure and how are they integrated with the Kremlin's other information warfare activities? To what extent are these cyber operations and information warfare campaigns effective in achieving Moscow's purported goals? Dr. Bilyana Lilly addresses these questions and uses her findings to recommend improvements in the design of U.S. policy to counter Russian adversarial behavior in cyberspace by understanding under what conditions, against what election components, and for what purposes within broader information warfare campaigns Russia uses specific types of cyber operations against political infrastructure.

"There are immediate benefits to both national security and national prosperity of creating a government-wide open source intelligence program--preferably not managed by the intelligence specialists, who have repeatedly demonstrated their complete disdain for open sources of information. Those benefits would include the provision of an insurance policy for intelligence coverage of Third World security issues; an immediate increase in the timeliness, coverage and political utility of overtly available information; an immediate increase in open source information sharing across the departments and with the private sector; and finally, the provision of a foundation for a web-based OSINT exchange with allies, other nations and international groups" -- p.33

Cyber security is concerned with the identification, avoidance, management and mitigation of risk in, or from, cyber space. The risk concerns harm and damage that might occur as the result of everything from individual carelessness, to organised criminality, to industrial and national security espionage and, at the extreme end of the scale, to disabling attacks against a country's critical national infrastructure. However, there is much more to cyber space than vulnerability, risk, and threat. Cyber space security is an issue of strategy, both commercial and technological, and whose breadth spans the international, regional, national, and personal. It is a matter of hazard and vulnerability, as much as an opportunity for social, economic and cultural growth. Consistent with this outlook, The Oxford Handbook of Cyber Security takes a comprehensive and rounded approach to the still evolving topic of cyber security. The structure of the Handbook is intended to demonstrate how the scope of cyber security is beyond threat, vulnerability, and conflict and how it manifests on many levels of human interaction. An understanding of cyber security requires us to think not just in terms of policy and strategy, but also in terms of technology, economy, sociology, criminology, trade, and morality. Accordingly, contributors to the Handbook include experts in cyber security from around the world, offering a wide range of perspectives: former government officials, private sector executives, technologists, political scientists, strategists, lawyers, criminologists, ethicists, security consultants, and policy analysts.

This book provides a systems-level introduction of the means by which information technology is changing conflict and warfare. This book is for war fighters, as well as the policy makers, commanders, and systems engineers who will implement the transition for strategy and concept to system design and implementation.