Irregular Warfare Podcast - Information Operations for the Information Age: IO in Irregular Warfare

Episode Date: September 24, 2021

When information can travel globally at the tap of a finger, irregular warfare professionals must contend with an ever-changing environment. How does strategic messaging tie into operations on the battlefield? How can we build a more information-savvy force? And how can information act as both weapon and warfighting space? Raphael Cohen and Brent Colburn join this episode to discuss these vital questions and more. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

The sort of often quoted anecdote is, you know, I know what the release authority is for JDAM. I don't know the release authority for Tweet. We like to project this idea that if you can come up with the magic slogan or the magic message, you're going to just change things overnight. The reality of our work, particularly in today's environment, is that it's repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition. Welcome to episode 36 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. I'm Laura Jones, and I'll be your host today, along with Shauna Sinnott. Today's episode explores information operations and how the DOD and U.S. government are postured to conduct and defend

against activity in the information space. We start today's episode by introducing the disparate views and entities surrounding information operations and discuss how crowding in that field does not necessarily equate to adequate understanding of the space or how best to utilize information professionals. Our guests argue that the information space is not well understood, under-resourced, and poorly utilized at a strategic level. And in order to grow within this space, irregular warfare professionals must think into the future and drive the narrative instead of reacting to adversary narratives. Dr. Raphael Rafi-Cohen is the Acting Director of the Strategy and Doctrine Program of RAND Project Air Force and a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation.

He works on a broad range of defense and foreign policy issues, including defense strategy and force planning, Middle East and European security, and civil military relations. He previously held research fellowships at the Brookings Institution, the American Enterprise Institute, and National Defense University's Center for Complex Operations. Mr. Brent Colburn is the Senior Vice President of External Relations and Communications for the University of California, Office of the President. Prior to this, he was Vice President of Communications and Public Affairs for Princeton University. He has held a variety of leadership roles both in the public and private sectors, including serving as the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs at the U.S. Department of Defense and Chief of Staff

for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. 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. Here's our conversation with Rafi Cohen and Brent Colburn. Dr. Rafael Cohen, Mr. Brent Colburn, welcome to the Irregular Warfare podcast. We're happy to have you here. Laura Shana, thanks so much for having me. Yeah, no, thank you, Laura Shana. Looking forward to the conversation.

operations, how public affairs fits into that, how there's differences in definitions within that space and help us identify gaps and overlaps within that structure? I think particularly across the Defense Department, there's a lot of emphasis on the importance of information and a lot of time and resources being sunk into it. The problem really is one of coordination. I mean, even if you look inside an institution like the Air Force, and the problem is, is that you have so many actors in the space, challenge really is coordination between them. And I think you also begin to see a blurring of traditional ways that we've had to deconflict, you know, who does what, you know, be it the increasingly murky line between what is public affairs, what is more psychological operations.

increasingly murky line between what is public affairs, what is more psychological operations. And so in some ways, it's a very crowded space. There's a lot of money and resources being thrown to it. It's not necessarily always as coherent as we would like or perhaps as it should be. You know, look, I come at this from more of a public affairs background and not just within the DOD space, but public affairs in a number of different sectors. And what I'm going to say is true across those sectors. And I think it applies as well to kind of the IO spaces. You know, in some ways, the most important thing in the step I don't think DOD has taken and policymakers have taken is to take a step back and look at how much this space has changed, how rapidly in such a short amount of time. So I would argue it's hard to imagine a space that's changed more rapidly and more dramatically in the last 20 years than

how individuals interact with, create, digest, and encounter information in their daily life. On the conservative side, 85% of American adults have a smartphone in their pocket. So that's not just the ability to email each other, but that's basically walking around with an entire TV studio and the ability to broadcast the product that you make in real time to anyone else who has a smartphone anywhere else in the world. And that's not just true. I mean, I think when we think traditionally about advances in technology, we tend to think of nations like the United States as being on the leading edge of those technological changes. The smartphone revolution and the mobile revolution actually has flipped some of that on its head, where in many places around the world where we have defense interests or foreign policy interests, it has

actually allowed countries that were lagging in technology to take a huge leap forward and go past kind of a hard infrastructure step to a mobile step. So I think understanding it's hard sometimes because, you know, the boiling frog analogy, we've all been part of this change. It's hard sometimes to really stop and think, oh my God, this area has changed so much from 25 years, 20 years ago. It really was somebody standing at the podium in the Pentagon, sharing a message that was then going out through a set of kind of standardized information flow channels for public affairs to this incredibly networked world where information and content is being created all over the world in real time. And I don't think we've taken the very basic step of thinking about, okay, what does that mean for

what we're trying to accomplish and how we can accomplish it in all of these lanes, much less how all of those lanes interact in that environment. I mean, this really is for information warfare, for information operations, for public affairs. This is the horse to the internal combustion moment. And in some ways, I think the U.S. is in danger of being the folks that are still using horse cavalry as we head into a blitzkrieg age, right? So we have to be careful about that. And I think we've kind of let that creep up on us and haven't taken the time and put the resources into having those big conversations about what we need to be doing to meet this moment. You know, unlike blitzkrieg, on us and haven't taken the time and put the resources into having those big conversations about what we need to be doing to meet this moment.

You know, unlike Blitzkrieg, when DOD really controlled the evolution of the tank or the evolution of the aircraft, this is technology that's being driven largely by the private sector, one that DOD doesn't control. I mean, they're not even a handful of media outlets that DOD can actually wrap their heads around. So in some ways, this is moving outside of a previous military revolution where, you know, that technology was developed in-house to something that's being produced, that frankly, the DOD has really very little control over and very little ability, therefore, to shape the information battle space, if that's even the correct term for it.

Well, what seems maybe most striking about the current information space is the scale at which it's been operationalized over the past 20 years with all these dramatic advances in technology and connectivity. So, Brent, from your experience in both the private and the public sectors, how have entities been able to exploit this opportunity to operationalize? And why is it so difficult to respond if you're someone like the US government? Yeah, look, I think that it definitely hasn't been looked at holistically. It definitely hasn't been looked at strategically. And in some ways, you know, I think it's not just a matter of increased scale. The relationships between kind

of content creator and audience have been fundamentally changed forever. And in some ways, if you look at how we train public affairs officers, and this isn't unique to DOD, so that I don't want this to be seen as a criticism of DOD, but we still look at, say, digital technologies very much as ways to amplify traditional ways of doing communication. So what I mean by that is, it still starts with what is the press release and what is the message that we want to see tomorrow in the New York Times when a lot of the people we care about will never read that press release or read the story in the New York Times. So I think that, you know, we need to rethink and rebalance where we put resources, expertise,

training, emphasis on the various types of communications technologies that we have today. It also, you know, to go back to what Rafi was saying, the other thing that's radically different about this is because it is a technology set that was produced outside of DoD, some of the people that are the best at using it actually aren't in the public affairs space and are very junior in the ranks. So this is a huge problem we faced when I was at DOD Public Affairs is, you know, look, the nature of the military means that you move up in authority and have a larger seat at the table based on accruing expertise over time, right? So which makes total sense most of the time in the DOD context. That's a problem, though, when one of the most major

influences on your work is a set of technologies that maybe the 19-year-old, not the colonel, has more experience and expertise using. The reality is it's not a choice, right? It's a must-do at this point for DoD to figure out both internally what the controls are around the use of this, what are a new set of norms, standards. You know, we don't really even have social norms around a lot of this technology yet. So I think it's a huge space that needs more thought and more consideration around it. Do you think part of the problem is we've defined information as both a weapon and a battle space? And do you think that complicates and confuses how we try to operate with information?

Yeah, I mean, I think that's part of it. I think it's also a function of the fact that we actually don't really know how effective it is. We know a lot about inputs, right? We know how many people are on Twitter or Facebook or pick your social media platform or how many people see, well, we'll listen to this podcast, for instance, that we can quantify. When we try to quantify that back into sort of battlefield effects, though, then it becomes a little bit more blurry. I mean, think some of the large-scale election interference stuff that Russia conducted, people change their mind because of it. Now, on a very micro level, we can capture, you know, how information operations interplay with kinetic warfighting and therefore sort of demonstrate measures of effectiveness on the battlefield in that sense. But more largely, you know, the question is, how much does this actually work? In which case, you know, should you invest in X more dollars for information from the DoD's perspective, or should you buy more JDAMs? And I think that's really what gets to the hesitation more so than necessarily the definition of questions of, you know, is it a warfighting domain? Is it a warfighting function? In some ways, those are esoteric. I think when it comes down to it, you know, the people who are deciding defense budget know how much, what buying a new aircraft carrier or a new submarine or what have you, what that actually gets in concrete in terms of combat power.

Buying more information, not necessarily as clear. Rafi, you alluded to Russia. with how U.S. adversaries operationalize information differently, how they might construct this in a way that reflects a different approach to information? So I think you see Russia doing a bunch of different stuff, some very interesting on the tactical level. So, for instance, I did a bunch of fieldwork in Ukraine looking at how they used information in very concrete terms in the war on the Donbass in eastern Ukraine.

And there you see a whole bunch of sort of fake text messages to light up Ukrainian soldiers' phones such that they can target them with artillery fire. So very concrete, very sort of tactical type operations. And then you also see the kind of information operations that we see directed against us, along with a number of our Western allies, where you have places like the Internet Research Agency putting out a variety of different false narratives spread through a variety of different platforms. Hopefully, some of that sticks from Russia's standpoint. At the very least, it causes confusion, it causes doubt. In some cases,

it reinforces people's prior beliefs, such that it's not actually creating new sentiments, but reinforcing people's existing beliefs in ways that they view as helpful, and working in that way. In fact, I've ran colleagues of mine who produced a sort of short piece on the fire hood of falsehoods model, which is basically Russia's approach to information operations on the sort of grand strategic level is we're going to throw out a whole bunch of falsehoods, hopefully some of it sticks. At the very of grand strategic level is we're going to throw out a whole bunch of falsehoods. Hopefully some of it sticks. At the very least, it causes chaos.

And that's a net win for Russia. And that, in some ways, I think contrasts their approach. It's in our interest. I mean, if you are the world's superpower and you want to try to create a stable international order, you can't adopt a firehud of falsehoods model because that's really not, chaos is not in our national interest. And that makes it somewhat a harder operational challenge or a harder strategic challenge as well. How does social media play into all this when it's so widely available and can be used to generate tactical level effects? as I mentioned. It's prolific in some places like the Philippines. The internet is synonymous with Facebook. I mean, the two, basically all Filipinos are on Facebook. This is how they get their primary source of information. Unlike other more traditional means of information, there is no one curating this information. So there's not an editor or a publisher that says, well, this is good

content and this is bad content. Everyone's free to post it. Everyone's free to share it. And it's in some ways much less controlled than that. Somewhat distinct to this is that certain platforms thrive on having high quality content and some, you know, particularly the 4chans and the 8chans as well, thrive on having less high quality content on it. And so disinformation, provided it gets shared, is actually in the sort of business interest as well.

And that in turn leads to some very sophisticated means to target both American service members and then trying to provoke interactions with the grandest strategic interests as well. Brett, what has your experience with social media been from the public affairs side of DOD? And do we really have a good handle on it? You know, when you think about social media, and we talk about adversaries, or potential adversaries like Russia, in many ways, they know their strategic goal, right? So even if that strategic goal is just to create chaos, they then have a set of tactics that can flow from that. And I think that's one of the gaps that we have is we don't really know what we're trying to accomplish. So we have

lots of tools in the defense toolbox that we use for many different tasks. We should start with, what is the goal that we're trying to move forward? What's the strategic imperative we're trying to meet within the information space? And then work backwards and figure out how do you use all of these various tools in the toolbox, many of which are social media, to forward that goal. But who should be leading that, Brent? I mean, isn't that part of the issue? Who's in charge? No, I think it's a huge issue. But some of it is I think we need to stop thinking about it as a vertical and start thinking about it as a set of tools, right? I also think we do need to professionalize and elevate the folks. And again, I'm thinking in

the public affairs realm. I mean, again, I'm thinking in the public affairs realm. I mean, particularly as I do interviews around the space, there's a lot of Russia admiration in particular among the information community of like, oh, you know, we should have our center that puts out false tweets. It's like, maybe, but, or, you know, you know, we are not Russia and we don't really want to be Russia, and we have a grander strategic aim in that space. And so having a grand capability to put out a whole bunch of fake tweets and sow chaos around the world is not necessarily, a priori, it's not necessarily clear that that's what we should be aiming for. And I think that's, particularly at the lower level, a lot of real admiration for a capability that's not necessarily aligned with the granted U.S. strategic interest, at least as I understand. Okay, well then, how do you fight fire with fire, if not learning from where adversaries have had success?

Sure. I mean, so if you want to talk about fighting Russian disinformation, the best people to look at are Bellingcat and Alexei Navalny, right? So both of them have really gotten under Putin's skin. And if you need a proof of that, it's the fact that Alexei Navalny is sitting in prison and is still being a major thorn in Putin's side. That's showing that, you know, he's really gotten underneath them. Ditto with Bellingcat's sort of very methodical unmasking of Russian disinformation. We see it resonate inside Russia. It's all truthful information. Now, there's a time and a place for disinformation and masking operational details. That's not, you know, I'll bracket that. We don't necessarily always want to be truthful. But the vast bulk of how you go after Russia is with truthful information, because the truth hits home. You don't need to make up a

whole bunch of false tweets to show that. Yeah, I think that's 100% right. I would say not only do we have a different role to play, and these are connected, but, you know, we come at this with a different set of values, which some see as constraints. I mean, I think we need to be honest about that. But they are traditionally part of who we are and how we approach the world and how we approach the idea of information, right? So, you know, if you walk down the public affairs hallway in the Pentagon, right there on the wall is written a set of principles of information that are enshrined in DOD policy that are supposed to govern how the public affairs office and public affairs officers interact with the public, interact with Congress, interact with other

stakeholders. And it basically says you have a duty to report, right? You have that part of what we do is to share information. It's hard to think of these other nations that we're engaging with having anything that looks like that. That reflects an important value and should be one of the inputs into how we think about this space. We're also just organized differently as a society than many of these other nations and other countries and other non-nation actors that we're dealing with, right? So we have very clear definitions or delineations between what the public sector does, what a private sector company does, what their responsibilities and protections are. And I think that we need to come up with a strategy

and an approach that fits our constraints and our context. But I still think we need to have that conversation, right? We still need to figure out within that system, you know, how do we use the tools of information to fight disinformation? And I actually think it's also a resource problem, right? So, you know, Shauna, to go back to something that I think you were saying about scale earlier, you know, if you look at the number of people that are working in the public affairs space, I would venture to guess, I don't have data, but it's not that much larger than it was, say, 20, 30 years ago. But there is not a part of the defense apparatus that now doesn't take place in the public sphere, right? Everything touches public affairs and the public information space. And I think we need to recognize that as we think about

where we're putting our resources, where we're putting bodies, where we're putting the time and effort to do some thinking around these issues. Well, we've talked a lot about this in the context of government, but Brent, you've also seen this within higher education and private sector. So what is the role for these non-government entities? And should that be coordinated with government efforts to counter disinformation or manage the information environment? Yeah, I would say, look, I think it's impossible. I think you need to think about them as partnerships. Coordination is very difficult. Those of us on this call have spoken in other forums about how, you know, say private sector entities have a huge role to play in this, but the federal

government can't and shouldn't be able to control what they do and when they do it. We can talk a bit more about that. But I do think that this is an area where the Defense Department and government writ large is on the back end of the curve of figuring the space out. And if we want to get to the front end of the curve, we have to work with academics, we have to work with private sector entities, we have to look to experts who because of their bottom line or the different incentives in their spaces, have had to figure this stuff out faster than the DOD and other government entities have. So I think there's a partnership role. But you know, coordination is, you know, maybe if you can get the partnership part, right, you can move towards coordination. But coordination is difficult in this space because of the different interests that people bring to the table.

Yeah, I mean, I'd like to jump in here if I could. Because I think, you know, the thing that sort of sets the United States apart from what our adversary is up to is, well, on one hand, we have all these constraints, but we also have tremendous resources as well. I mean, in those private sectors, they may not want to coordinate with DOD, but they also have an interest in not having their platforms, which is a handful of ones that specialize in the swamp. The major ones also have an interest in keeping disinformation off their platform, if nothing else, because it's a reputational cost for them, and that can translate into a financial cost for them. There's can translate into a financial cost for them. There's also a huge NGO space here too. So if you think about all the different antibodies that Russian disinformation has produced, you find these NGOs everywhere across Eastern Europe that are solely devoted to finding Russian disinformation quite effectively. So it's not

necessarily clear to me that when we think about operationalizing information for a DoD warfight, that we necessarily want to bring that capability in-house to DoD, as much as we want to make sure that we all at least have our fingers on the pulse of what these NGOs are up to. For interest issues, it may actually make them less effective because they're seen as proxies of the United States, but give them space to do their job. And they're doing it quite effectively in many parts of the world, in some ways more effectively than had we had service members actually take the lead on that. Rafi, I've heard you and other forums talk about how even within government, you know, I mean, it's not a new idea. You go back to the evolution of Voice of America, right? In other environments and other times, we've employed this idea that there should be parts of the US government that are kind of the truth-telling parts of the US government. So I think separating that from DOD is something worth exploring. I would love to see more universities and NGOs have centers of excellence around this the same way we have centers of excellence around climate and fighting climate change. It's hard to get funding right now. And it's hard to

carve that space out without looking, quote unquote, political because of the larger political conversation that's going on in the U.S. right now. And I hope we can get past that because it's a problem that needs to be solved. And we need the smartest people we have trying to solve it. No, I completely agree, Brent. And, you know, I'll put it in a plug for my own institution, Rand Corporation. So we've made a big point on pushing what our CEO has termed truth decay, which I think is an apt name for it, is the diminishing role of facts and objective analysis in the public sphere. And a variety of other academics have written about this as well, but completely agree that this is one of the more pressing problems facing the United States. problems facing the United States. The other thing I think we highly under-resource, not just within DOD, but across the federal family, is the need to be able to do all of these things simultaneously in a number of different languages. So the amount that we continue to be English-centric, especially

when we think of the public affairs space, but to some degree in the IO and other spaces, is a huge handicap. The fact that we're not putting out information regularly to our own citizenry in multiple languages, including Spanish, is a problem, and I think feeds into the disinformation environment. And the fact that we're not focusing on bringing in more foreign language speakers into the public affairs space is a huge issue. I mean, the countries that we operate in are not English-speaking nations, and we need to be able to get the messages we want out in those spaces in an effective way. I completely agree, Brent. I mean, and this actually gets into a broader question of, you know, to what extent should this space be occupied by service members, given all the hurdles that comes with bringing those types of talents into the force and

maintaining their language proficiency? I think that's right. And look, I'm not an information warfare specialist. I would not pretend to be one. But I think that's right. And look, I'm not an information warfare specialist. I would not pretend to be one. But I think part of what's important to pick up on a thread that Rafi was getting at right at the end there is to think of it as two separate problem sets you're trying to solve. So the first problem set is,

how are you using these tools in an offensive or a defensive way to interact with your adversary? We need people who are experts in that at the tactical level, and that needs to be built into the special operations community. And, you know, smarter people than I will figure out the how and the limits of how to do that. I think the second side, though, and one that we're getting a little better at, but we're still not consistent about is, okay, we know we're going to go do this thing. There's no way it's not going to become public. Like we just have to accept that even the most secret of secret operations, at some level, there's going to be somebody standing around the corner with a smartphone who's going to take video of that

raid. And it's going to be on Twitter, you know, faster than we can report back how successful the raid was. And so we need to, we need to recognize that fact. And that needs to be part of our planning around operations. So there needs to be planning before the operation takes place. So we're not always being reactive on, okay, what is going to happen when that tweet goes viral or that video goes viral? That happens to some degree now, though it's very dependent on how sophisticated the public affairs officer or the public affairs apparatus happens to be that is attached to that command or that unit and if it gets escalated or not. There's no consistency, I think, around that right now. And I think it's a huge blind spot for us that we need to address in the training of public affairs officers and in the training of combat arms

officers so they understand the same way they wouldn't do something that might have legal implications without checking with a lawyer. They need to be trained to not do something that might have public affairs implications without checking with their public affairs teams. So what then does that actually look like to an irregular warfare professional? Would they operate just as an extension of a broader truth-telling strategic communications effort to bolster American legitimacy? Or they integrate tactical level campaigns to delegitimize our adversaries and fight disinformation that way?

So there's always a need for some sort of tactical level information warfare capability. I mean, it's not realistic for State Department or Voice of America to give the deception campaign for, you know, maneuvering a special operations unit around some battlefield in some country. I mean, it the New Orleans, that's what those institutions are designed to do. At the same part of it is, you know, this is, the tactics have to nest at some point into the grander strategy

of the United States. So I think it's a mistake to view tactical operations somewhat separate entirely from the strategic level as well. They have to, in some ways, play. And then particularly, for some of the reasons that Brent mentioned earlier

when he was talking about the growth of social media, is that stuff in the tactical level can very well have strategic level impacts because there is no clear delineation between what is tactics and what is strategy, particularly in the information space. You know, any tweet can go viral. Well, on that, with the way that information transmits so easily now,

everything comes out eventually. Should we be thinking about the way we use truth versus deception differently? Is there more space for truth to be effective? Yeah, I agree with that 100%. And not to sound Pollyannish, but my sense is that disinformation often wins in the short term. But if you're willing to play the long game, that being on the side of truth or information will eventually win out. At least maybe that's my hope more than my conclusion. But it does mean, I think the lesson that we've all learned in the last 10 years, especially, is that it doesn't just happen.

I think there was this idea for a long time that the truth will just come out some way. It has to be a concerted effort across multiple platforms and a sustained effort to get the truth out there. And that's one of the other things that I think is going to be difficult for the public affairs community to wrestle with is the public affairs shadow of an operation can live beyond the operational window itself. And I think we need to just be willing to accept that and plan for that and adapt to that. Doesn't matter how the U.S. describes its own efforts? Like, does it help or hurt to use terms like strategic communications or does that just blur the lines?

This is just my personal opinion. I'm sure I'll annoy some people by this, but I was always struck in my time at DOD and at DHS with, I have a colleague who in politics who used to talk about things that were black hole words. So they're things that were black hole words. So they're words that were black holes because they could mean so many things to so many people. They had no actual definition. I would put strategic communications in the black hole category. Look, if you go back to the history of it, a lot of it comes out of kind of the mid early 2000s where, you know, commanders basically wanted more capability to try to,

not to be offensive to anybody, but basically to do PR. So I think if that's how you're using the term strategic communication, just bringing on more people to do PR for you, that's not what we're talking about. I think what you're really talking about is a strategic approach to public affairs and communications, then that is good. But I don't think that's often when you dig into these strategic communications teams, what they're actually doing? You know, I think the default should be to truth and open rather than covert and false, partly because, you know, as Brent said, it's the question of when, not if, most campaigns will go public. And so eventually this is going to be out in the open press. If it does, once it gets out in the open press, it's a whole lot better for you if it's truthful rather than not.

And I think this actually gets into a mindset shift that actually needs to happen, particularly at parts of the information operations enterprise. You know, particularly when you talk to folks, particularly in the special operations community, there's a real love of the classified and love of the covert. We think it's cool, but that may not necessarily be the best tool necessarily. Sometimes the truth is a powerful weapon. I think though, getting back to the question of kind of how do we get ahead of this, there's a couple pieces of it that I would like to see. One, I think we need to look at across the force how we do training in these spaces. So, you know, some of that is very just simple. How do we set social norms for your rank and file member of the services on what they should, shouldn't be doing, what they should, shouldn't be looking for on social media? I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about that and

reinforcing it. I don't think it can be one-time training. So that's on the very specific level. I also think we should take a hard look at DINFOS, the Defense Information School, which does great work, but refreshing some of their curriculum, thinking about, you know, what are they training for and what is the skill set that they're trying to instill into public affairs officers across the force. I think we need some sort of investment and maybe it's through Rand or through a partner into some sort of seller group that is thinking about what is next in this space. So, you know, the reality is that domestically, at least we're talking about Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, you know, TikTok, right? There's another thing coming, right? There is the Facebook of tomorrow. There's some kid in a basement inventing something right now.

And if we all knew what that was, we would probably be able to invest early and be able to, you guys could do this podcast full time and I could afford a house here in the Bay Area. But, you know, we need people who are thinking in two ways, thinking ahead. One is what is the next set of technologies that we're going to be ready for? And then I think at a broader level, how do we teach and how do we strategize not to the specific technology, but to the information space that we live in now, right? So I think we often get caught in the conversation of how can we use Twitter better versus how do we reorientate ourselves so we're not just a media affairs first enterprise. We also recognize that most people will never read a story in the New York Times, but they're very apt to get a tweet or something forwarded to them or something showing up on

their smartphone. So I think there's that larger thought project that needs to take place. How can we work to get ahead of the conversation before it happens? Does that mean inoculating a force against disinformation? Or does that mean speeding up bureaucracy so that policy can try to keep pace with technology? Or is it more than that? I think there's a couple of different things here to unpack. I mean, I think there is an authorities question here. I mean, the sort of often quoted anecdote is, you know, I know what the release authority is for JDAM. I don't know the release authority for Tweet. There's also a question of knowing what's out there and what is actually a disinformation campaign and making sure that the troops down to the lowest level know what they're getting targeted with.

I mean, so you had the example of the counter-ISIS. Well, what seemingly was ISIS propaganda directed against members of an Air Force bomber unit engaged in the OIR campaign. unit engaged in the OIR campaign. It turns out that those were Russians. And knowing what the Russians are playing at and what they're going after is, I think, the first step in being a somewhat more savvy consumer of information down at that sort of level. And then part of that is, I think, what Brent was saying, is that you have to build in the information angle into every campaign of like, how are you going to message this internally to American audiences? How are you going to message an operation externally to whatever the target country is? How do you message this to the adversary as well? And that's, you know, I think

that's just a function of good strategy and good strategy making. This is really about defining what the project is, right? So if the project that we're talking about is trying to win a contest of ideas with an authoritarian China, then there are parts of the government and NGOs, as we've already discussed, that exist outside DOD, that should be their project. That's not DOD's project. DOD shouldn't be trying to win the grand battle of ideas, right? And I think that's an important thing to say, because I think sometimes, you know, DOD is full of type A leaders that step into spaces, right? And there's some spaces they shouldn't be stepping into. But I do think to go

back to Rafi's point, which is incredibly important about understanding the various areas where we might have potential conflicts is what we can do is think and plan around, okay, if we are engaged in a military combat in Taiwan, what are the information platforms that are there? Once we've already tripped that wire of escalation, you know, do we have the staff? Do we have the plans? Do we have the capabilities to get onto those platforms and make sure that we're not just totally seeding that space? We know where these things are going to happen. Let's think about having the expertise before they occur. Well, Rafi, what about in these spaces where we can't get the information to them? So in these authoritarian states where we don't have,

the U.S. doesn't have the ability to get the information to them, how do you either counter disinformation or get the information you want to those populations? I mean, so some of that was what we were just talking about, talking about the authorities' angles. Some of that was talking about the strategy, integrating it into strategy in a more deliberate fashion. Some of that is also talking a little bit more appreciation of what information can and cannot buy you. Because I think, you know, we've talked a lot about the growing importance of information. At the same time, though, I think we also see a tendency by some commanders, some senior officers, to sort of make this the be-all and end-all of future conflict. It's not. And knowing what information warfare can and cannot achieve on the battlefield, I think,

is as important to understanding how it sort of fits into the broader strategic picture as, you know, understanding where the gaps are and on the sort of tactical and operational level. I think for a special operator, you know, understanding that we live in the world we live in, not the world we want to live in, and gone are the days that a good spokesperson talking to a reporter can keep an operation out of the New York Times, right? We are just in a world where, again, you're going to always be walking into a situation no matter what remote corner of the world you're operating in, where somebody is probably going to be taking video, somebody is probably going to be immediately

telling the world what it is you and your teammates are doing. That's not a bad thing, but it's a real thing. And we need to recognize that, right? And think through the implications of that. I would then just say at the larger level, the other implications of this conversation are at the policy and resource level. And this is a big, hairy problem that I don't think is being wrestled with in a very thoughtful or consistent way by the DOD or the government at large. So there's a resourcing problem. And then I think policymakers have to change their mindset and recognize that when we talk about the information space, and even when we talk about public affairs and the quote unquote public information space, we're not just talking about PR, we're not just talking about media relations, we really are

talking about this new world that we all live in, where we're constantly, constantly being berated by information, messages, data in a way that we couldn't have imagined when most policymakers and operators of my age were in high school. I mean, we literally couldn't have imagined the world that we all live in today. And I think that they need to do a little bit of a reset around this as well. Yeah, I would just like to add to what Brent said, because I think it's exactly right. But is, you know, in some cases, it's not the Facebook of tomorrow. It's we know where the next fight is going to be. I mean, we know that we and China and us do not see eye to eye over Taiwan. We know what Taiwanese will use in terms of media information and how they consume it.

And it's not necessarily Facebook and Twitter. It's, you know, platforms like PTT and the like. We know that it's VK and OK for parts of Eastern Europe. So, I mean, in some ways, we have the information there. We in the DoD are not necessarily as savvy about looking at what the current platforms are, let alone the future ones. How effective are information and disinformation campaigns? and do we overestimate their effects? But I think this gets to the core of what is and is not plausible here. I mean,

if you think about this sort of political analogy, which I think is apt here, you know, a really good communicator and a really good communication strategy will be able to shift a congressional district a couple of points one way or the other, if it's a battlefield district. And only if it's a battlefield district. You're never going to turn a deep red state deep blue or vice versa, certainly not without some sort of major demographic shift. And the important thing with that is those are Americans communicating with other Americans. When we think about that for the DoD, we're talking about Americans communicating in a foreign country, since presumably this is a way game for us, where we may or may not speak the language, where we may or may not have any sort of meaningful cultural expertise. I mean, even if you are dealing with an expat, and one of the great strengths of the United States is that we have a diverse group of talent that we can draw on for military operations.

But even so, that cultural expertise has a shelf life, because if you're outside of a place like Afghanistan for five years or 10 years, you lose some of that. But given all those challenges, how many percentage points on any given issue are you realistically going to be able to change? You know, there's only so many hearts and minds you're actually going to be able to influence. And I think it's important for military commanders to realize that, you know, your trade space is in the single digits often, not in double digits. And the idea that you're going to be, you know, through a carefully crafted information campaign, be able to produce these massive effects on the battlefield is just not probably within the bound of operational feasibility. I agree with that. And I think

the point, Rafi, about the margins is dead on. I would add two nuances to it. One is the margin, the slight increases if only one side is telling their story, right? So there is a little bit, not to misuse a military analogy or a foreign policy analogy here, there's a little bit of mutually assured destruction here, right? It's like, it's super effective. If I'm out there and I'm the only one on these platforms, I can move that from two to 4%, which could be a lot, right? But if you're telling your story and I'm telling my story, the amount we're going to move people

is minimal. So I think that's number one. I think number two, we like to project this idea that if you can come up with the magic slogan or the magic message, you're going to just change things overnight, right? Going back to Rafi's point, the reality of our work, particularly in today's environment, is that it's repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition. So yes, getting the messaging right is important, but you have to be willing to figure out where people are encountering that information. So I think we need to recognize that from a tactical perspective as well. It's not just one great speech or one great, great line. It's how do you get information in front of people over and over and over and over again. What are the implications for practitioners,

policymakers, and academics within the information space? What I would say is, you know, open up your aperture a bit and look outside of the defense and military space. I think a lot of the most interesting work in this space is being done both by scholars and practitioners, not in a defense context, but it can be applied to a defense context, right? So, you know, looking at what the tech firms are doing, looking at kind of what is the cutting edge in terms of, you know, less marketing and more corporate communications, right? So, you know, less about advertising and more about how companies are navigating this new space in a world where customers can reach out to them directly, and they have to interact with them, right? Look at political campaigns. I worked on a lot of

political campaigns. There's lots of really smart people on political campaigns. They're not necessarily any smarter than anybody else. It's just the immediacy of a political campaign forces you to deal with these things, I think, quicker than a lot of other sectors of society. So look at what people are doing right and are doing wrong in the political space. And that includes looking at political scientists that are researching this in the political space. They won't always be perfectly analogous to what the DoD space is dealing with, but it's a good way to get smart and bring some fresh perspectives to the table on this problem set.

I mean, it's understanding that for regular warfare professionals, information is part of your domain. It is. You are not, however, the only people who play in this domain. And I think this is actually somewhere where DoD needs a little bit of a mindset shift. I mean, because when we usually talk to regular warfare professionals, we're thinking largely about the special operations community. And certainly the special operations community has laid claim to the mantle of information. Information needs to wrap everything we do, not just special operations, not just conventional operations, the whole gamut. And it also needs to be not irregular. It needs to be part and parcel of the community.

So understanding that you are going to be an actor in this space, not the entirety of the actor. as regular warfare professionals in this space has broader implications for the rest of DOD and the rest of USG, as well as have that everything the DOD and the USG does has implications for you, I think is the two big takeaways that I would take from this. The last addition I would make is we often think about learning from our adversaries, but also looking at other nation states that aren't in the adversary bucket. I think Israel is doing a lot of really interesting things in this space. Estonia is doing a lot of really interesting things in this space. So where, you know, look, we got to go everywhere to get smart on this. So where can we look to people that are dealing with this problem in a more immediate way? I don't know, but my guess is Taiwan's

probably doing some interesting things in this space because they have no choice, right? They're dealing with China on a daily basis. So I think looking around the world, but opening the aperture on where around the world we're looking would be really helpful. The only thing I would add to that list is a hard look at the sororities as well. Because, you know, for us to be relevant, you need to be able to move reasonably quickly. And I don't think that's DoD's strong suit. How then do we define clear objectives and end states? And then how do we measure the success of those? I mean, for starters, I wouldn't think about end states for information. I think there are end states for overarching

strategies in which information will have a piece in that. But I think the idea of divorcing information from an overarching strategy for X problem set, be that a defense of Taiwan, be that countering Russian little green men in Ukraine, is not necessarily helpful. And I think once you nest that in terms of the broader strategic objective, then how you measure success, I think, flows directly from that in some ways. Because then you can talk about, well, is the little green men problem in eastern Ukraine going up, going down, or is it mostly staying the same? And then we have some sort of, if we're moving the needle one way or the other, then we've actually shown some sort of success. Look, look everywhere, learn everything.

The one note of caution I would add, or a or grain of salt is that don't trust people who tell you they have this space figured out. Nobody has this space figured out. So I think we are collectively trying to figure out what this all means in this digital information environment. And we're just at the beginning. So look, bring your own ideas to the table. Ask a lot of tough questions and don't think that there's some magic person out there that

has all of the answers because they don't exist. I think looking at outside of DoD is actually a really fertile area for research. The only people I would add to Brent's already pretty comprehensive list is looking at the NGO community at large. They're doing some of the most cutting edge work. And if you want to really talk about who's putting the screws on Russia, it's not DOD, it's, you know, the Alexa Navalny's and the Bellingcat's world. Understanding that and understanding what they do and how they do it, I think it's really, really important. Dr. Raphael Cohen, Mr. Brent Colburn, thank you so much for being with the

Irregular Warfare podcast today. We really enjoyed the conversation. Yeah, no, this has been great. Thank you, Rafi. And thank you to everybody who listens. If there's anybody out there that wants to talk more about this, please feel free to track us down. This is fascinating stuff.

And hopefully somebody out there will hear this and can help us all figure it out. Well, Shana, it's been fun talking to you. And Brent, it's always a lively conversation. So thank you so much for having me. Thanks again for listening to episode 36 of the Irregular Warfare podcast.

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