Irregular Warfare Podcast - Competing for Influence: Operations in the Information Environment

Episode Date: January 16, 2021

Information in its many forms has become a significant component of national power—the primary medium of competition between the United States and its adversaries. Our guests in this episode tackle that subject. Lt. Gen. Lori Reynolds is the US Marine Corps’ deputy commandant for information and Dr. Thomas Rid is a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University’ School of Advanced International Studies. Both are experts in their respective fields, each looking at this competition from opposing perspectives—one as a practitioner focused on the employment of military information power toward US national security goals, the other as a political scientist and historian who has investigated the strategic use of disinformation against the United States. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Types of tactics in information operations that democracies should not use. You cannot excel at disinformation and democracy at the same time, because you have to fight with one hand on your back. I mean, it's because of who we are. The point is that we are in a different game now. And what information can do on and off the battlefield is it extends the reach of the adversary. The homeland is no longer a sanctuary. I just think there's a whole new line of work here for all of us.

Welcome to Episode 19 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. I'm Andy Milburn, and I'll be your host today along with Shauna Sennett. Today's episode focuses on operations in the information environment. Our guests today are both experts in their respective fields, one evaluating this problem set from a tactical military perspective, and one from the broad and historical. Through these complementary lenses, our guests articulate the role of information in strategic competition, discuss considerations for offensive and defensive use of the information environment both today and historically, and identify the challenges that the U.S. has in leveraging

information in a manner that is tactically efficient yet still ethically compatible with U.S. has in leveraging information in a manner that is tactically efficient, yet still ethically compatible with U.S. democratic values. Lieutenant General Lori Reynolds is the U.S. Marine Corps' Deputy Commandant for Information. Her responsibilities range from cyber to influence to commander control, encompassing all aspects of what the Marine Corps calls military information power. During a 34-year career, Lorre has commanded at every rank. Dr. Thomas Ridd is a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He has devoted more than a decade to investigating the use of information and disinformation by national powers, most notably Russia. He has been consulted for his

expertise by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, as well as the German Bundestag and the U.K. Parliament. Dr. Ridd is author of the recently published book, Active Measures, The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare. You are listening to the Irregular Warfare Podcast, a joint production of the Princeton Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals.

And here is our conversation with General Laurie Reynolds and Dr. Thomas Redd. General Reynolds and Dr. Redd, welcome to the podcast. It's good to have you on today. Same here. Thank you for having me on. Thanks so much, Andy. I'm really proud of what you all have accomplished with this podcast, so I'm really honored to be part of it. Laurie, I'd like to begin with a question for you. What exactly are operations in the information environment? Yeah, I think it's a fascinating time for us right now because I think, number one, we have a couple of adversaries who we think about moving from a paradigm of sortie generation as a measure of success to long-range precision fires, for example, or mobile and agile command posts or points of presence as opposed to large static CPs that generally don't move very much. Moments of clarity on demand,

as opposed to a persistent cop that we were comfortable with in the desert. So just technologically, there's a lot that has to change in this new competition that we find ourselves in. And I also think that the way that we have parsed the globe militarily, where there are lines of control, if you will, or boundaries that we are very comfortable inside those boundaries. But when you add cyber and space, cyber doesn't respect lines on a map. It just doesn't. You have to think differently about it. I think all of those kinds of things are just changing the character of war that we have to get used to. And information is just part of that. I think, you know, another interesting thing about information is that it really, there's a compression that happens across levels of

command, if you will. Information is information. It's the same, you know, story at the tactical level impacts at the strategic level. And so it just speeds up the pace of battle very quickly. Thomas, you've written about the role that information and disinformation played in the Cold War. So from your perspective, do you think that operations in the information environment as we describe it now are perhaps more important than they were previously? as we describe it now, are perhaps more important than they were previously? I'm always, as a historian, wary to sort of ascribe more importance or impact or a bigger role to something in the present than it had in the past, because active measures were, in fact, an extraordinarily important part of Cold War, of the superpower competition during the Cold War.

And we still have far more hearings and documentations of cases, impact of Cold War active measures than of active measures in the digital era. And if we indeed take a longer view, and also if we look at concrete operations more recently, then I would just question something that Laurie just mentioned, and that is that the adversary is so far ahead of us. Obviously, we need to be specific here and ask which adversary. So let's be specific. The adversaries that are most aggressive and arguably also sophisticated in the information operations space are in that order, probably the Russian

Federation today, Iran, North Korea, and then China in a different way. And let's focus on Russia for a moment. Their most discussed operation, of course, is the 2016 election interference in the United States. But one thing that is often lost in that conversation is that they ramped up their info operations in Ukraine, especially immediately after the revolution there and the invasion of Crimea. In that context, many of GRU's info ops there were actually in the military, in a tactical environment. And then only they branched out or escalated against US strategic political targets relatively late in that game. And if we look at their operations, they're actually not that impressive.

They have been blown out of proportion in their effect in the conversation in the United States. But on their merits, these operations are not as impressive as is generally assumed. And you could argue, and I'm just going to make a provocative counter argument, that the Department of Justice and FBI indictments, independent research into GRU operations, open source and sometimes investigative nonprofit research, Bellingcat or just the InfoSec community, CrowdStrike, FireEye, others. IRI, others. GRU today is the most embarrassed, the most exposed. And really, I mean, in some ways, it's the laughingstock of the global intelligence community, because you could write an entire book about GRU opsec mistake, tick books. So, you know, are they really that far ahead of us in InfoOps? I mean, obviously, I'm being provocative here. But I think we shouldn't underestimate some of the here, but I think we shouldn't underestimate some of the quiet, not so quiet innovations that we've seen in the United States and the UK and in other countries when it comes to attribution, when it comes to exposing operations, sometimes in a semi-covert way.

I think what I would just offer coming back, right, Probably this idea of United States thinking about doing things at the scale, at the state level. What's interesting about the adversaries that we find ourselves against today, and let's just talk China and Russia, is that they're, you know, from a gray zone perspective, they're just a lot more willing, I think, to put themselves out there than the United States has been. And call it, you know, willingness to impose friction. I think from a gray zone perspective, they have done a lot more provocative things. And you bring up what seems to be an enduring theme here, that perhaps the U.S. sees the concept of information and how it can be leveraged differently from our peers, competitors or adversaries. So could you scope that for us? So we have a common baseline

of how the U.S. looks at operations in the information environment from the perspective of the Department of Defense, for example. One of the things that I know the DOD is working on is getting the language around information right. So we have a lot of terms that we use in this space, information operations, information warfare, operations in the information environment. And I think as we kind of settle on how we're going to organize and work together in the future, and now I'm just talking inside DOD, and as we think about information as a warfighting function, which is that first step inside the Marine Corps at elevating the role of information for commanders, we think about our ability to command and control, our ability to provide battle space awareness, so think intelligence functions, provide battle space awareness, so think intelligence functions, and all of the ways to do that,

including open source intelligence and social media and publicly available information. So those new kind of areas. We think about the information function or, again, strategic communications, influencing, deceiving, and then actually controlling all of those as a whole, the comprehensive way of bringing those things together. So that's how we think about operations in the information environment. I think what's different now as compared to kind of the days of information operations is that for OIE or operations in the information environment, we really want to think globally. We really want to think 24-7. We want to elevate the role of operational security in all the things that we do from

the service level down to the tactical level, just understanding that we have adversaries that are always interested and taking advantage of the freeness with which we have shared information in the past. And it's interesting you mentioned that freeness aspect that may be reflective of US liberal democratic culture. So on that, I turn to you, Thomas, because you tend to look at this more broadly, considering some of these same tactical factors that we discussed, but also making distinctions about how democracies define and employ this environment versus non democratic states. What are some of the most significant distinctions you see in characterization of the information environment and how it should be leveraged? Yeah, so I think again here the

historical perspective can be very helpful. And in order to tease out, to bring into relief a difference between adversarial I.O. and our own information operations. Let's make an example. One of the examples that I'm discussing in my book is a 1959-1960s operation that was executed by KGB in West Germany. They spotted that Germany had a lingering problem with antisemitism. Obviously, this was only 14 years after the Holocaust, and many countries still today have a problem with antisemitism. So they thought, OK, if we commit fake acts of antisemitic hate crimes, like smearing swastikas and Jews out at synagogues and cemeteries, then there will be most likely actual antisemites joining in and we will create a wave of antisemitic activity that will tarnish and damage West Germany's reputation, which is exactly what happened. And a couple of things that are interesting about this operation for today, because ask this question, would it be ethically, morally acceptable for a Western country to do

the same then or indeed today? In other words, where are the lines, the ethical lines that democracies should not or really cannot cross in their own operations? Would it be acceptable for us, for the United States, to run a covert operation in Russia or China that exacerbates the ethnic tensions in these countries or anti-Semitic feelings in Russia, for example? Would that be acceptable? I'm not sure the answer is yes. I'm quite sure the answer is it would not be acceptable. Not even Stasi participated in this German operation because the head of Stasi foreign intelligence was of Jewish extraction, and he said this is a step too far. So another question here, let's bring this a little closer to home.

home. There was a leak in October 2016 that exposed private emails and information of Vladimir Khrushchev, one of Putin's confidants, including passport information, numbers and pictures of his children. Now, was this operation a Western intelligence operation? We don't know the answer to that question. But it also raises that question, is it okay to expose the children of a leadership individual of your adversary in an operation or not? Tough question, more complex than the anti-Semitic one, but still a gray zone question, if you like. So what I'm driving towards with these examples is that there are types of tactics in information operations that democracies should not use. And I have this punchline in my book that you cannot excel at disinformation and democracy at the same time, because you have to fight with one hand on your back. I mean, it's because of who we are. And so that is the role of strategic communications

and operations in the information environment. So it's just that point, right? So we should not think that it is a burden to be a democracy. Actually, we're the good guys. And if you believe that truth is strength, then we should use that truth in a whole of government way, very powerfully. And I would suggest that we struggle with this in the United States because we sometimes don't want to share the intelligence in a way that would just powerfully either expose malign behavior because we think the intelligence is more important than the truth here. And I just think in this fight that we have here in countering disinformation or in this competition that we find ourselves in, it's increasingly going to be more important to expose the truth than to hold from an intelligence perspective, just for this reason. So do you think there are situations where it is acceptable for any part of the U.S. government that is engaged in these operations to forge, to create forgeries and false information? No, I think there are going to be tactical situations where we may have to use the power of influence operations to accomplish the mission. But I

think at the strategic level, and I got to stay in my lane here inside the military instrument of power. But I think as a democracy, to your earlier point, Tom, it's not okay to get caught doing things like that. I think the distinction that Laurie just made between tactical and strategic is crucial in this context, because of course, there will be tactical deception or, you know, I don't want to call it disinformation, also in an intelligence context, sometimes you just have to pretend you are somebody that you're not in order to recruit somebody to work for you. I mean, tactically, deception is baked into some of these institutions. But the question is, whether strategic disinformation sort of active measures writ

large should deploy forgeries and false information in a big picture, permanent, persistent, over years campaign style way. And there I think the risk, and again, here we can learn from history, the risk is that if you have a large bureaucracy that is systematically engaged in deceiving its adversaries, especially in this media environment

that doesn't clearly draw a line between domestic and foreign, then you risk, and it's not just a risk, it's almost inevitable, you will start disinforming yourself. You will start believing your own lies. There are multiple organizational dynamics for why that is the case. One of them is it's very easy to exaggerate impact of these operations, because if your goal is to exacerbate organic fissures and frictions, then, of course, some of those are already existent before your operation. So you can always claim you created them because it's really hard to prove that you didn't. It's really hard to prove that you didn't. So we see that in the Soviet Union playing out, that KGB believed in its own exaggerated operational assessments again and again. And of course, and that's the last thing I would say here,

is for people like me who use intelligence estimates and press statements from various government agencies as primary sources in our research, I mean, I have to believe these institutions, these bureaucracies and these people. And in some cases, I absolutely do. In other cases, I'm a little more cautious. But would I still believe CIA, for example, if they had invested millions of billions

into organized deception? Not sure. Yeah, I think, you know, this is part of the work that we have to think about, I think, as we harden our own forces against this kind of idea of disinformation, whether it's coming from outside the country in a persistent kind of way, as Dr. Ridd is talking about here, or just hardening families, for example, very tactically, you know, the example of, you know, families receiving Facebook posts from far away saying that their son or daughter was killed or something like that. You know, there's some examples out there. So I think the point is that we are in a different game now. And we, you know, what information can do on and off the battlefield is extends the reach of the adversary. The homeland is no longer a sanctuary. The areas that we used to think, you know, once we deployed, for example,

as military persons that, you know, we left our families behind safe. And now you have to worry about whether or not they can be reached in a different way, psychological warfare, those kinds of things. And so, you know, I just think there's a whole new line of work here for all of us to think about how we create resilience in this kind of operational environment. And we've got a lot of work to do to make sure that we can maneuver in this environment. Can I jump in here with an interesting, I think, at least for me, fascinating observation, because it's a problem for me. The situation that I think we're facing in the open conversation about info, in the unclassified conversation about info ops right now, is take the Snowden NSA revelations as an example. We learned of many, many NSA and GCHQ operations only through these leaks, meaning these operations were so well done, so disciplined and so well

executed that we just missed them, open source researchers. Now, a similar thing is likely to happen in the info ops space, because we see a number of events that look like operations, really like Western intelligence operations that are completely unattributed and unacknowledged by anybody today. So we have this small universe of cases that is beginning to get bigger, where something like a Western info op likely happened, but possibly American, possibly Israeli, possibly British, or something else, maybe. And so we are having our conversation like the one we're having right now, but we don't, and we have also case studies, but we can't connect the two because the attribution isn't there. And this is an interesting epistemological problem in the conversation

about InfoOps. They're happening,. They're sometimes probably quite effective if I have a few in mind here, but we can't really talk about them. Thomas, that's an intriguing comment. And if your observations are correct, it highlights the level of sophistication of friendly operations in the information environment. And so to your point earlier, Laurie, about how wide ranging these operations have also become, who within DOD should take the lead? Because surely there needs to be some coordinating authority. IO advisor at the departmental level speaks to the role of information, I think, in the future. And I think this growing need for being able to align the joint force to think about it together, doing a lot of thinking about our warfighting concepts, and one of them is an information advantage warfighting concept. So yeah, I think it is hard. I think in some cases we have been very successful and ANSOCOM has always done this kind of good work. But now I think the conventional force has to expand its game.

and this really restrictive discussion about roles and who does what. So when we're looking at the Department of Defense right now, is this something that falls within one domain or entity? Is there a certain role for special operations forces versus conventional forces or some of our other capabilities? So in the department right now, we have SOCOM, for example, is the coordinating authority for information operations. Cyber Command is a coordinating authority globally for cybers information operations. Cyber Command is a coordinating authority globally for cyberspace operations. And I think what we're finding in these coordinating authority roles is

that it's really difficult to bring it all together on a global scale, right? So it's easier to do inside, again, inside the confines of a geographical combatant commander, we're very comfortable there. But when you're talking about a global adversary, it gets a little bit more complex. And so that's what you see the department starting to sort through is how do we do this? I think inside the services, all of the services understand that when you bring space and cyber and more maneuver space in the electromagnetic spectrum. These are all kind of new maneuver areas for all of the services to kind of figure out, number one, we know we're going to be contested in these areas. And how do we make sure we bring those to bear at the tactical level?

And we are coordinated at the COCOM level to be able to execute tasks in those areas. I'll just say that the you know, the way that I have tried very hard to, inside the Marine Corps, to kind of explain the role of information to our ground commanders is really when you distill how we think about this, including the role of what we would call traditional IO operations, which is, you know, the disinformation and influence and deception is for me, the way that I pack this up in a way that I can get people to understand is it's understanding adversary kill chains and OODA loops and also protecting our kill chains and OODA loops, sometimes using these new capability areas. capability areas, right? So it's the cognitive and it's the kinetic. And how do you package those so that we are causing the adversary's ability to command and control to get lengthier and lengthier, to confuse them, to sow disinformation? And maybe that disinformation at the tactical level is I want him to think I'm here, not there. I want him to throw multiple signatures out on the battlefield so he

doesn't know which one is mine. That's deception. That's military deception. And so kill chains, OODA loops, red and blue. And that helps, I think, Marines and commanders to begin to better package what we're really talking about so that we can put the plans in place, bring the authorities to bear, and in a comprehensive way. Hopefully that helps to make it make sense. It does, but is DOD currently organized to conduct operations in this way? When we think about the scope of these operations in the information environment, and we think about some of the current boundaries that exist within DOD between both functional and geographic combatant commanders. Has there been talk about perhaps reorganizing DOD to better align with

operations in the information environment? Yeah, this is something that I think that Joint Force really has been struggling with a little bit is if you accept, for example, do we think that a dust-up with China or Russia will be constrained to those geographic combatant commands? And if we don't, then how do we organize for that? If something happens in space, for example, who's the supported commander if the impact is inside Indo-PACOM or UCOM. So how do you even begin to think about coordinating those kinds of responses when the impact is really across multiple domains of warfare, right? But going to, I guess I'm just going to give you my personal opinion here is I believe that the more that we can infuse this thinking of multi-domain warfare inside our traditional way that we command.

That would be my preference. I think another stovepipe commander is not necessarily helpful in this area. I think it doesn't make things faster. So another coordinating agency, that would not be my personal vote. I would say we have to infuse this thinking and figure out how we do this at Echelon inside the commands that we have today. information as a form of maneuver is going to perhaps require significant changes in doctrine and in force structure and deed and mindset. Wouldn't you say that's the case? One of the things I think that's really interesting about where we find ourselves now, and the Marine Corps is going through a force redesign, as many people know, our commandant today, General Berger, has really thought long and hard about what the Marine Corps of the future needs to be able to do in an Indo-PACOM scenario.

And really, it's part of the naval force. And if you think of where we are inside the weapons engagement zone of China, we are the inside or stand-in force. And so think about the role that the Marine Corps could play as a sensing force, as a maneuver force inside that area. And so, yeah, as we think about modernizing our intelligence capability, it does. It includes all sources of information, lots of signals in this environment, tremendous opportunity for us to think differently and modernize how we, to get faster at understanding the environment that we find ourselves in. So yeah, there's a lot of work to do, but I would just also add that we're spending also a lot of time at the service level understanding, you know, how much information

we're giving away in programs of record and things like that. And so it really, again, at every echelon of the service, you have to think differently. A lot of that sounds very tactical and almost self-contained, particularly when we discuss hypotheticals like this, when we're in a stage of conflict and the Marine Corps is at the forward edge of that conflict. But really, this is integrated within a more cohesive national strategy, right? So how does this military-specific concept of employment fit within our national level plan, not just in conflict, but in competition as well?

We have to play our role inside the military. And there are lines that shall not be crossed as a military person. Certainly from the American people's perspective, they need to know that we're playing our role, I think. But we have been thinking about this idea of military information power and how it can contribute to the big I in DIME. So right now it's the State Department that owns the big I. It is their job to run that lever of national power. But we've been thinking in the Marine Corps, how can we contribute to that at the tactical level and perhaps at the operational level through this idea of inform, influence, deceive. Again, deceive at the tactical level, really for force preservation or to sow confusion, to lengthen the adversary's OODA loop, if you will.

But there is this idea of we do a lot of theater security cooperation events every year. a lot of theater security cooperation events every year. Some of those are there to assure our allies and partners to make sure that they know that we're going to honor alliances that we have. Those kinds of things that as the military instrument, we're actually reinforcing the big I, the big information instrument. And so those are the kinds of things that we're trying to elevate the thinking around is how can we more fully contribute as military information power. Thomas, we've been talking about military information power, strategic communications, in terms of getting the truth out as a preemptive measure of counter disinformation. But can you talk about some of the best practices

that you have seen emerging in your recent investigations that you would attribute perhaps to the US and allies in their efforts to counter disinformation? Yeah, so some of the trends that we've seen here in the US recently are quite fascinating, I think. So at Cybercom, there's this tactic that they developed to expose adversarial cyber operations by posting indicators of compromise and sample information on VirusTotal and then pushing it out through a Twitter feed

and their website, which that's getting a little technical, but it basically burns adversary operations without naming the adversary. So it's a really great piece of fascinating innovation that we see there. And I understand that some Marine officers had a role in this also. And what can we take away from this type of innovation? we've seen the most sophisticated forms of attribution, attributing adversary covert operations, naming and shaming them, or sometimes semi-covert disinformation operations, exposing them as they happen. We've seen that happen again and again and again. And the US has taken a lead, the UK as well, other countries have joined in. It's notable that neither the

Russian government, nor the Chinese government, nor the Iranian government, and of course not the North Koreans, have ever done credible attribution in a comparable fashion. So while they are aggressive on the operational side, they're not aggressive on the attribution side, on the exposure side. So what does that mean, for example, for the Marine Corps? does that mean, for example, for the Marine Corps? I mean, I would find it fascinating if we are in a hot conflict, a war, to see a U.S. force expose the adversary's covert attempts to meddle in an ongoing conflict. Basically, take a lesson from the, if you like, from the National Security Division and the Department of Justice and from the FBI, from the NSA, and apply that on the battlefield. I think that could make a real difference in terms of exposing operations. And Thomas, I appreciate you bringing that up because I think something that's really

interesting here is what methodologies everyone is using within the space. So what's the best way to action the information environment? And are there specific methodologies that we think are effective or not effective, not just for the US, but for any player in this space? One recent operation that had a lot of people nervous, even freaked out to a degree, is known as the shadow brokers, which is a major leak of NSA exploits and vulnerabilities. But the shadow brokers, and we still don't know

who was behind that operation. As far as I know, not even the US government precisely knows who was behind it. So it could be an insider, it could be... It's not necessarily an adversarial operation, but it was an operation. So what I'm trying to say with this is that the shadow brokers showed in a way the art of the possible. It showed what you can achieve by

putting information out there and forcing an entity to make a move in response. Adversarial operations are getting exposed by naming operators, by dumping their tools into the public domain, by burning operations in a way that is not clearly visible to the wider public, that will not get picked up in the press coverage, but has still significant tactical operational effects. I think these kinds of operations we're already seeing an uptick in, I have a feeling, that's sort of where the trend is pointing. That's what I mentioned earlier. These operations are happening, but we can't talk about them

because they're so difficult to attribute. So just name one or two examples. One of them is Intrusion Truth, this blog that popped up and suddenly exposed Chinese hacking campaigns in excruciating detail. And some of the details were later picked up in DOJ indictments. So what was intrusion truth? Was it an intelligence operation? Somebody going rogue? Whatever it was, it was extremely interesting. The other examples like it in Iran is that expose Iranian operations as well. And so watch this space, I would say. So if I can just build on that, Shana, you asked how do we action the IE, right? So I think,

number one, I would say that in conflict, the information environment looks a lot like systems confrontation. There's cyber versus cyber and EW versus EW. And we understand that space fairly well inside the military. We do. We know how to package these kinds of things and plan for them and execute them, get the authorities. I think the challenge is in the competition space. How do you action the information environment in great power competition? And then to me, I think it starts with define the measurable objectives that you want to get after. Define what success looks like in competition in the information environment. So if we want to action the IE in competition, what does that look like? Steady state? How do we know we're winning? And then you have to plan for it. Keeping my military

hat on here and staying in my lane, we know how to do conflict. We know how to plan for that. We know what that O plan looks like. We know what that con plan looks like. It's very different for competition, right? And so how do you plan for the competition so that you can organize across combatant commands, across the joint force, everybody knows what they're doing, and then you can maneuver in space or cyber and come up with these tools against which you would measure your objectives and your success. I would say we're still working through that right now. I have not seen that happen yet. But do we even know when we're in the competition phase? At times, isn't that almost a struggle in and of itself to

identify the start point of that competition? Well, no. Everything about the force development enterprise in the United States Marine Corps is built for conflict. Everything about it, right? So we struggle sometimes, even as we think about what to buy, when to buy it, how to buy it, how to use it, we go right to conflict because that's what we do. That's what our force is built for, right? But now we find ourselves in a different challenge. And when we think about these other tools that are available to us, right, you got to plan for it. You got to think differently. You got to get organized. You got to do all those things that you would do for conflict, but you have to do it for competition as well. And that's where we, I think, a little bit more work to do. And then these actions that we're talking about,

whether it's exposing, General Nakasone in Cyber Command calls it defend forward. He's in competition. And sometimes he's in conflict, but he is defending forward, finding malware, exposing it. There you go. Everything that you've described makes perfect sense, but it seems as though what is lacking is a global campaign plan, because what you're talking about is a campaign. And we have campaign plans for everything, right? But we don't have one for competition. And it's more than information. If we called it a global campaign plan for information, everyone would dismiss it as being IO. But that seems to me

what you're talking about. Do you think that's on track? Is that something we need? Yep, spot on. And that's why we just released a document called campaigning. So how do we think about campaigning within which you can build this element of information where I think very clearly, I think the information environment can lead in the competition in a campaigning kind of construct. We got to wrap our brain around it, Andy. It's just different. So taking all of this in context and thinking about how we can continue to understand the role of information, you know, both practically and academically. Thomas, I turn to you. What are the implications of the research with which you've been involved

that's helpful for practitioners and policymakers who are approaching this problem set? involved that's helpful for practitioners and policymakers who are approaching this problem set? I think understanding information operations in the 21st century is impossible without first understanding information operations in the 20th century, although they happen on a different technological environment. The logic and sometimes the dynamics that we can observe have not changed. So, for example, the temptation to overstate effect is an old one and arguably has gotten not less problematic, but more problematic as a result of the availability of more data that lead you to assume that all these clicks and impressions and unique views actually changed minds. So I think really what my research shows in one sort of big bumper sticker is that history,

especially in this field where so many people think history has nothing to tell us because it's the internet, is even more important than in others. And from the perspective of DCI military practitioner lens, what would you recommend are the implications for academics of the types of topics they could study that would help practitioners better understand how to employ the information environment? Yeah, I'll tell you what we struggle with right now. And I think speaks a little bit to what Tom was talking about. And it's this idea of assessments. How do you know if what you're doing, if the things that you were trying to do in this space are actually having the desired impact? I think that's really essential because we'll spend a lot of brainpower on this and without

really understanding whether it's worth some of the specific effort that we're given. So I think assessments, I think on the technical side, there's a whole laundry list of things that you could lay down AI and quantum and the role of data and how to, you know, so there's all kinds of study areas there. But then really, finally, Sean, I would just say this, the integration of all these things in a way that how do you control all of these elements of information, disinformation. Can you control disinformation once it's out there? I mean, there's so much there. And certainly as a democracy, it's the ethical pieces of this. What should the military do? Where should we just not pass? How do we contribute to strategic efforts? Those kinds of things I think would be ripe for study.

General Reynolds and Dr. Ritt, thank you very much for coming on today. You're welcome. I enjoyed it. Thank you. Thank you, Laurie, General Reynolds, and thanks, Andy and Shauna for having me on. Very nice to meet you. Thank you for listening to episode 19 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks. In our next episode, Daphne and Nick will discuss the FARC peace process in Colombia with Ambassador Kevin Whitaker and Karen Hollis.

Following that, Kyle and Andy will discuss contemporary concepts of irregular warfare in Australia with David Kilcullen and Andrew Marr. Please subscribe to the Irregular Warfare podcast so you don't miss an episode. You can also follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. One last note, what you hear in this episode are the views of the participants and don't represent those of West Point or any other agency of the U.S. government. Thanks again. We'll see you next time.