It’s All Info Ops To Me

The Defense Department has issued a new pub­li­ca­tion out­lin­ing joint doc­trine on the use of “infor­ma­tion oper­a­tions,” accord­ing to Secrecy News. Which might make you think the Pentagon has some new rules for keep­ing com­put­ers safe. But Information oper­a­tions is used for a wide range of mil­i­tary oper­a­tions designed “to influ­ence, dis­rupt, cor­rupt, or usurp adver­sar­ial human and auto­mated deci­sion mak­ing while pro­tect­ing our own,” accord­ing to the doc­u­ment, offi­cially known as Joint Publication 3–13. The doc­trine doc­u­ment fol­lows the 2003 pub­li­ca­tion of a DOD “Information Operations Roadmap”, which out­lined plans for devel­op­ing capa­bil­i­ties needed to achieve infor­ma­tion dom­i­nance. Microwave blasts, pro­pa­ganda cam­paigns, radio jams, and hack attacks are all part of the plan. In fact, the range of tac­tics that are part of “infor­ma­tion oper­a­tions” is so wide that the term risks con­fus­ing the unini­ti­ated. So heres a primer.

First of all, the term “infor­ma­tion war­fare,” which in the past has been widely used as a syn­onym for infor­ma­tion oper­a­tions and some of its var­i­ous com­po­nent dis­ci­plines, is now defunct. The new doc­trine removes it as a term “from joint IO doc­trine.” So purge it from your vocab­u­lary if you want to be doc­tri­nally correct.

What kind of oper­a­tions can be clas­si­fied as infor­ma­tion oper­a­tions? Joint Publication 3–13 lists “elec­tronic war­fare (EW), com­puter net­work oper­a­tions (CNO), psy­cho­log­i­cal oper­a­tions (PSYOP), mil­i­tary decep­tion (MILDEC), and oper­a­tions secu­rity (OPSEC)” as part of IO. In other words, jam­ming enemy radios (EW), hack­ing into adver­sary com­puter net­works (CNO), broad­cast­ing radio mes­sages into enemy ter­ri­tory to encour­age sur­ren­der (PSYOP), deceiv­ing foes about where and when an attack is com­ing (MILDEC) and pro­tect­ing friendly com­mu­ni­ca­tions from spy­ing (OPSEC) are all infor­ma­tion operations.

At first, all this seems almost to make sense. The dis­ci­plines in ques­tion all seem to bear some ten­u­ous rela­tion to the use or com­mu­ni­ca­tion of infor­ma­tion. But the more one exam­ines IOs sub­sidiary dis­ci­plines, the more it becomes clear that infor­ma­tion oper­a­tions is a bewil­der­ingly big umbrella.

For exam­ple, the doc­u­ment defines elec­tronic war­fare as “any mil­i­tary action involv­ing the use of elec­tro­mag­netic (EM) and directed energy to con­trol the EM spec­trum or to attack the adver­sary.” Directed energy includes, among other things, lasers. So zap­ping a tar­get with a laser (sure to be more com­mon in years to come) is infor­ma­tion oper­a­tions. At the same time, a PSYOPs cam­paign to place ghost-​​written op-​​eds in news­pa­pers la DOD con­trac­tor the Lincoln Group is also infor­ma­tion oper­a­tions. Installing virus pro­tec­tion soft­ware on a DOD com­puter? You guessed it: infor­ma­tion oper­a­tions. Heck, even putting those weird OPSEC posters on the walls of the Pentagon is infor­ma­tion operations.

Confused yet? No need to be. Just remem­ber this: infor­ma­tion oper­a­tions is a catch-​​all term for a vari­ety of mil­i­tary oper­a­tions, most of which are some­how related to infor­ma­tion, com­put­ers or the elec­tro­mag­netic spec­trum, and which don?t eas­ily fit into any doc­tri­nal box. Meanwhile, stay tuned for a future update to Joint Publication 3–13, in which the term infor­ma­tion oper­a­tions is sure to be sum­mar­ily ban­ished from joint doctrine.

–Hampton Stephens

April 5th, 2006 | Info War | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.