Information Warfare: The Lost Tradecraft

Information Warfare: The Lost Tradecraft

By Dr. Howard Gambrill Clark, Ph.D.

Edited by Dr. Ajit Maan, Ph.D.; Paul Cobaugh; and Emma Moore

Published by Narrative Strategies, LLC

https://www.narrative-strategies.com/

Narrative Strategies comprises a coalition of scholars and military professionals involved in the non-kinetic aspects of counter-terrorism, defeating violent extremism, irregular warfare, large-scale conflict mediation, and peace-building.

The views expressed in this publication are the author’s alone. They do not represent the views of Narrative Strategies, LLC or its editors. The views and findings do not imply endorsement by any government or private entity. Nothing in this book represents the views of any government or government-affiliated organization, private corporation, university, college, school, institution, or other entity foreign or domestic, private or public.

Copyright 2017 by Howard Gambrill Clark, Ph.D. and Narrative Strategies, LLC

All rights reserved.

No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system without prior written permission from the publisher.

U.S. Library of Congress U.S. Copyright Office registration number: TXu 2-036-751

Clark Ph.D., Howard Gambrill, 1978-

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN-13: 978-0-692-96822-2

1. Cyberwarfare 2. Cybersecurity. 3. Influence. 4. Narrative. 5. Counterterrorism. 6 Guerrilla Warfare.

In memory of...

Captain John W. Maloney (U.S. Marine Corps), Lieutenant General William E. Odom (U.S. Army), Professor H. Bradford Westerfield, Watkins R. Reckless

A special thanks to…

Dr. Ajit Maan, Ph.D., Paul Cobaugh, the Narrative Strategies team, The Honorable Charles E. Allen, Master Sergeant Jason Dale Epperson (U.S. Air Force, Retired)

Table of Contents

Overview

Intended Audiences

How to Use This Book

A Note on Style and Structure

Chapter 1 – The Foundation of Civilization

1.1 Shared Narrative

1.2 Limits of Violence

1.3 When State Narratives Fail

1.4 Information as an Instrument of State Power

1.5 Information Strategy

Chapter 2 – Strategic Intelligence

2.1 Information / Data

2.2 Intelligence

2.3 Foci

2.4 Estimative Probability

2.5 Center of Gravity / Critical Vulnerability

2.6 Future Adversary Courses of Action

2.7 High Value Target

2.8 Intelligence Cycle

2.9 Espionage

2.10 On Interrogation

2.11 Other Collection Terms

2.12 Other Helpful Terms

2.13 Red Teams

2.14 Analytic Techniques

2.15 Writing / Briefing Intelligence

2.16 Information / Intelligence Sharing

2.17 Final Thought—Mitigating Risk

Chapter 3 – Narrative

3.1 Defining Narrative

3.2 Effective Narratives for Statecraft

3.3 Transcendence

3.4 Platform Mastery

3.5 Viral Amplification

3.6 The Power of the Unexpected

3.7 Analyzing Narratives

3.8 Uses of Narrative Analysis

3.9 Narrative Structure

Chapter 4 – Strategic Influence

4.1 Hybrid Warfare

4.2 Political Warfare

4.3 Commitment in Strategic Influence

4.4 Why Choose Strategic Influence?

4.5 What Influence is Not

4.6 Consonance Theory

4.7 Resonance Theory

4.8 Will

4.9 Potency

4.10 Audiences of Strategic Influence

4.11 Checkmate and Fear

4.12 On Subversion

4.13 On Propaganda

4.14 Strategic Deception

4.15 Military Deception

4.16 Institutional Sabotage

4.17 Szalámitaktika (exacerbating adversary schisms)

4.18 Success

4.19 Unpredictability

4.20 Wildly Changing Strategies

4.21 Do Exactly What You Say

4.22 The Exhaustion of Victory

4.23 Unconventional Warfare

4.24 Foreign Internal Defense

4.25 Guerrilla Warfare

4.26 Security Force Assistance

4.27 Narcotics Trade

4.28 Water and Food

4.29 Private Investment

4.30 Foreign Political Campaigns

4.31 Kompromat (compromise)

4.32 Confusion

4.33 Glasnost (openness)

4.34 First and Flood

4.35 Mirror Enemy Misassumptions

4.36 Dietrologia (conspiracy)

4.37 Leadership and Group Demobilization

4.38 Keep Enemy Leaders Alive and in Place

4.39 Bait War

4.40 Do Nothing

4.41 Visa Programs

4.42 Do Not Muddy the Waters

4.43 Wrath

Chapter 5 – Cyberwarfare and Cybersecurity

5.1 Data Collection, Fusion, Transmission, and Storage

5.2 Cybersecurity

5.3 Recommended Approaches to Cybersecurity

5.4 On Artificial Intelligence

Annex – Thoughts from Information Warriors

Author Biography

Overview

This book is a primer for the statesman, strategist, citizen, soldier, student, and civil activist.

- Offers a fully realized method to study / teach information warfare at the strategic level from the perspective of security.

- Introduces the inception of information warfare 70 millennia ago and surveys 26 centuries of claimed best practices.

- Posits that information warfare was the foundation for civilization—predating armies and states—and remains the center of power and strategy writ large.

- Concludes that the invisible hand of influence ‘wins’ conflicts before they begin and has the potential to defeat current adversaries through methods unseen.

- Proposes revolutionary theories.

- Draws from literature in the social sciences, humanities, fine arts, and neuroscience; historical examples and observations; and personal experience.

Intended Audiences

- Military academies, schools, colleges, universities, and libraries worldwide. It may inform curricula, be a prerequisite for courses on cyber and information warfare and security, or be used as a text book. In this way, the endnotes can inform learner and teacher alike to dive deeper into specific areas of interest.

- Military and law-enforcement professionals.

- Universities and colleges that focus on strategy, business, security and/or peace studies.

- Intelligence communities.

- Counterterrorism communities.

- Political and social campaigns worldwide.

- Advocacy groups.

- Non-governmental organizations.

- Communications / marketing / branding professionals.

- Concerned citizens and general public.

How to Use This Book

This book is a primer. It is meant as a fully realized introduction to information strategy in the security realm.

For governments, campaigns, and movements, this book is a guide to action—explaining the ways and means of executing an information strategy in practical detail.

For interested readers, the book offers historical accounts and theories that will challenge the way we view the world. How we see ourselves. How we view opportunities, threats, and challenges that are subtle but nonetheless potent: the unseen ‘swords’ and unheard ‘bullets’ that influence the world and our communities. And how we can better think critically, insurgently, and asymmetrically to overcome challenges in our own lives—personal and professional.

For seasoned professionals, its value is threefold. First, it may introduce and connect distinct sub-disciplines to provide a grander strategic picture of your profession beyond your immediate duties. A student or practitioner of psychological warfare may benefit from learning more about intelligence. And an intelligence officer may benefit by learning more about analyzing narratives. Second, it may condense and explain the very industry in which you operate—a short-hand to use to communicate what you do to non-experts. Third, the book introduces new theories and analyses that may spur thought, discussion, and action in your field.

The book is simultaneously a reference guide—something to keep on your desk to define and explain certain terms and phenomena as they pop up in your life and work. In this way, the table of contents will be helpful. Although there is value in reading the book from start to end—as each section builds on the previous—it has been designed to also be read out of order without losing too much meaning.

For concerned citizens and students, this is a guide to understand information warfare that takes into account numerous opposing views. The endnotes provide an array of literature and articles in the humanities, social sciences, neurobiology, and fine arts for further investigation and research.

For teachers, trainers, and managers, this book offers a logical and pragmatic way to impart the study of information warfare.

A Note on Style and Structure

The style and structure have one thing in mind: the reader. I have attempted to summarize concepts into a staccato-like flow without unnecessary flourishes—perhaps a literary critic’s nightmare.

Some concepts (especially in the Strategic Intelligence chapter) are simply introduced while others are more fully developed. The structure is uneven. This is purposeful. The reason for this is that some phenomena are hotly debated while others are relatively straightforward. And some phenomena are more confusing and commonly misunderstood than others.

The simple, direct approach (aside from the first chapter, which summarizes millennia of historical lessons) intends to explain and simplify without losing meaning. The style is also designed to save the reader time.

CHAPTER 1 – THE FOUNDATION OF CIVILIZATION

Information—when given meaning and purpose in the form of narrative—transformed life on earth.

Narrative is the foundation of civilization.

Narrative became the bedrock of trust, social cohesion, governance, identity, law, trade, warfare, and security.

Information warfare predates militaries and states. Leaders competed to adopt masterful narratives and protect the self-evident nature of said stories to try to win over willing populations—to unify masses and deploy them martially. ‘Winning’ civilization creation myths, whether based in history or not, along with shared narratives of threats, would allow leaders to unite large communities to function and go to war. The leaders that could deliver a more compelling ‘why,’ could perhaps win people to their ideas of governance and legitimacy.

Today winning over or disillusioning populations through information strategies is still an overshadowing vanguard of international politics and warfare. By the armistice of the First World War observers noted …information warfare was a powerful weapon—it could raise armies, incite violent mobs, and destabilize whole nations.¹ And more recently the Russian Chief of the General Staff wrote in 2013, The role of non-military means of achieving political and strategic goals…in many case have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness…²

This is not new. Information warfare and its centrality to strategy is not a new concept. It was never enough for someone to be physically strong or savvier at throwing a spear to mobilize a citizenry.

Many studies of early humans assert that the ability to communicate abstract stories—not tools, weapons, medicine,³ physical strength, fire, or early spoken language by itself—about today and the future⁴ allowed Homo sapiens to cause the extinction of stronger larger-brained cousin species throughout the world and then reach the top of the food chain.⁵

A ‘cognitive revolution’ occurred 70,000 years ago, long after early spoken languages and controlled daily use of fire. Some mark this as the ‘dawn of human history.’⁶

Humans were eventually even drawing creative abstract designs from 40,000 to 10,000 years ago so that a narrative could be transmitted and preserved beyond a single moment and place in time⁷—likely so that people could memorize, copy, and reach the span of a continent.⁸

This biological turn not only allowed people to create fictive stories but also propelled Homo sapiens to consume imagined narratives voraciously. Human brains are hardwired to hear, enjoy, and remember narratives—and to be persuaded and motivated by them.

Our brains are well equipped to consume a 'good' story. Good stories typically incorporate one or more winning features such as surprise, suspense, or strong emotional valence. These not only enhance entertainment value, but they also rapidly engage our neurobiology to make stories more memorable—allowing learning writ large as well as sustainable understanding of a society's foundational principles. A few notable neurobiological actors engaged through narrative include:⁹

- Oxytocin, a neuromodulator and hormone, may be released in response to identifiable characters, and result in increased trust and empathy on the part of the story’s audience.¹⁰

Oxytocin may also boost a listener’s sense of belonging with a group (us) against an outside threat (them).¹¹

- Norepinephrine, a stress-activated neuromodulator and hormone, may be released upon hearing or reading a riveting story. Norepinephrine elevates vigilance and can enhance memory. This may at once make audiences more viscerally invested and better suited to remember.¹²

- Dopamine, a neuromodulator, signals discrepancy between what is expected and what actually occurs. If a story has a surprising twist, we experience a certain 'high' and, in the future, are better able to recall this story than a dull, predictable version.¹³

One might say that people are biologically tuned to devour some types of compelling stories; or that human biology dictates the criteria for what makes a story compelling. A ‘good’ story is able to lastingly influence the way we feel and think. One can go so far as to assert that, we’re all born storytellers. It’s part of our species.¹⁴ Or even that [s]torytelling is not something we do. Storytelling is who we are.¹⁵

The period between the cognitive revolution and then agricultural, industrial, scientific, and digital revolutions appeared not to have allowed humans to evolve intellectually to directly rule and directly socialize beyond the numbers that comprise a typical small clan (about 120).¹⁶ Thus narratives to create and sustain social constructs remain important.

There is no biological ability in humans to directly rule over or directly coordinate with large numbers of people.

It is narratives that allow us to cooperate in the tens of millions.

1.1 Shared Narratives

‘Imagined realities’ and ‘national mythologies’ fueled shared psychological orders allowing many strangers to form social constructs.

Of special note is the ability to collectively plan for and have shared faith in a future—people may stay, unify, and invest in large communities providing safety, opportunity, and meaning tomorrow and next year as today.¹⁷ In fact a human is unique for her brain’s ‘default’ circuit, which is to imagine the future…¹⁸ and communally imagine that a construct will be there tomorrow. And people may have faith in a social construct because others have faith today as in the future of this imagined reality.¹⁹

Shared narrative-driven realities—allowing many people to believe in intangible ideas like nation, state, money, law, and order—allowed the first chiefdoms around 7,500 years ago, first kingdoms 5,000 years ago, and the first empire 4,250 years ago.²⁰

Shared abstract realities enable today’s states, international systems and bodies as well as trade, law, diplomacy, and security. These principles exist only in the imagination. Nature, by itself, provides no physical precedent for statecraft.²¹ Even equality, liberty, freedom, and human rights are invented or realized by abstract narrative. To boot, many government narratives even brand themselves on the idea that an order exists not of this world—communities claimed a Holy Roman Empire in Europe through the Middle Ages, and current U.S. coins call upon a higher power of trust.²²

Even in totalitarian states, governments place a premium on narrative. These governments require a critical mass of supporters even if they repress, through force, the majority of citizens. Hitler and Stalin would unlikely have survived politically if they lost support of a critical mass that buoyed them through upheavals, rebellions, resistance, and intra and inter-party conflicts. According to historian Hannah Arendt, Nor can their popularity be attributed to the victory of masterful and lying propaganda over ignorance and stupidity.²³ Totalitarians must engender acceptable shared fictive constructs of some supporters as a prerequisite to achieving and maintaining power.²⁴

On the other end of the spectrum, societies that sell themselves as ‘liberal democracies’ or ‘republics’ may claim to bask in open dialogue—where the value and protection of the discourse itself is a driving shared narrative that allows an invested social construct.²⁵ Debates over seeming paradoxes between liberty and security, enlightenment and traditional religious values, economic equality and ideals of capitalism, conservation and industry, and ideology and humanity, for example, reign supreme as foundational values. The importance and protection of the intellectual struggle becomes the shared narrative.

When civilizations meet, the assumed shared truths of one society can have dire consequences on another. They may each believe that their particular assumptions of world and human order is correct. As renowned philosopher Jason Stanley explains with regards to British colonization:

The moral of colonialism is that it is much harder to make ‘objective’ decisions on behalf of others even for the sake of their own good. Even those British colonialists who were sincere and well-meaning found it impossible to distinguish between genuinely liberal values, their own local cultural practice, and naked self-interest.²⁶

Narrative-driven social constructs can be so powerful that people will impose their own ideas on others under the assumption that a certain ideal is ‘self-evident’ and thus universal. And at times each side uses the same ideal (or at least the same title of an ideal) from differing perspectives. And at times, civilizations have held deep-rooted narratives that their ideology must conquer the world and all ‘ignorant’ people living in ‘darkness.’

Leaders in the past and present have even used the hard sciences, humanities, and social sciences (especially, in some cases, economic theories and statistics) to justify or bolster their shared narratives. Some have used such ‘evidence-based’ assumptions, misassumptions, and embellished assumptions (especially from cherry-picked ‘facts,’ clumsy and shallow conclusions from partial data, use of hack charlatan ‘expert’ interpretations, and theories and findings that were later scuttled in favor of new scientific understandings) to generate shared identity and from this policy and strategy. Extreme are the cases of fascist manipulation of intentionally misinterpreted knowledge and subsequent popular unreasoned ignorance regarding racial supremacy. A bit more common are statistical misrepresentations and sometimes misunderstanding and consequent over-confidence in such data to justify policy.²⁷ And still more common today, perhaps, are national identities and subsequent policies that hinge on evidence that may very well be updated, amended, or rendered obsolete in the future. And even theories anchored in logic and evidence from peer-reviewed published basic research may very well be viewed through the biased prisms of leaders: …history shows that even the well-meaning are likely to conflate the products of genuine scientific expertise with the imposition of their own subjective values.²⁸

Whatever the process or moral justification, strategic leaders go to great lengths to create, disseminate, and protect shared narratives to keep a society alive, united, and safe.

While biological order in nature may indeed be relatively stable, …an imagined order is always in danger of collapse, because it depends upon myths, and myths vanish once people stop believing in them. In order to safeguard an imagined order, continuous, diligent, and conscious efforts are imperative.²⁹

Those that lead are always vulnerable to ruptures in societal cohesion if citizens stop believing in the shared imagined order. A rupture may result from underlying values of norms and laws weakening over time, or a revolution or invasion may offer a different notion of legitimacy. In such cases the very idea of legitimacy is under attack by a rival social construct. Examples may include: the Westphalian system of states non-European countries were forced to or elected to adopt; the spread of Islam in its first centuries collapsed previously held societal narratives; and some communist revolutionaries in China, Vietnam, and Cuba were able to not only martially defeat enemies but also, at least in part perhaps, countered (and attempted to collapse) the popular foundational ideas previously held in those countries. Today many violent extremists pose an existential threat, in the minds of some governments, to the concepts that underline governance and law—these groups wish to end the Westphalian system and disregard human rights and individualism. Even as these radicals fail, they still try to eat away at liberal principles. As Henry Kissinger asserts, Those under assault are challenged to defend…the basic assumptions of their way of life, their moral right to exist and to act in a manner that, until the challenge, had been treated as beyond question.³⁰

Strategic leaders in all fields then must take meticulous care to build and protect narratives that are the basis for all tools of statecraft. From the youngest of ages, unnatural cultural instincts are learned. And education systems, rituals, rites, celebrations, holidays, symbols, laws, norms, community pressure, and security forces protect invented realities and the assumption of their immutable and manifestly unassailable nature.

When done well, information strategies may ensure an accommodating population. Successful information strategies affect the neurobiology of each citizen. Recent research suggests that foundational stories shape how we see and sense the world around us. Although the brain receives signals from the world around us (such as through seeing and hearing), the brain does not do so in a vacuum. Instead, the brain actively and predictively generates guesses to make sense of the world around.³¹ And these guesses are often predicated by prior expectations³² that may perhaps be grounded in foundational narratives about life and how the world works. Brains actively generate the world.³³ Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality³⁴ based on personal foundational understandings of life and society. If your foundational narratives—taught, learned, observed, and copied from a young age in society and within you family—view each human being as having equal value, your brain may be more apt to view each person that you see and with whom you converse as an equal soul. If your foundational narratives teach that a particular ethnic group has a lesser value than you, your brain may be more apt to view each person of that ethnicity as inherently inferior to you each time you come upon a human being from that ethnic community. To you this inequality may feel visceral, instinctive, and obvious independent of new information. Over time, some people can reprogram their assumptions.

Furthermore, when one internalizes a shared cognitive construct deeply enough, the person may reject (or even be repulsed by) intellectual assaults that contradict the basic assumptions of the communal narrative. A brain may act similarly to an intellectual attack on a person’s foundational principles as it does to a physical attack. The same fight-or-flight adrenalin kicks in from cognitive and violent attacks alike. This is one reason why some people seem to redouble their beliefs in the face of unsubtle undiplomatic arguments based in seeming evidence. People sometimes outright assault a person for questioning beliefs near and dear. At the very least ‘winning’ shared narratives (when one is indoctrinated to see the world in a particular way) are often only usurped with difficulty, care, and time.

One example of a sometimes ‘winning’ narrative is belief in money. Today, over ninety percent (perhaps as much as ninety-six percent³⁵) of money exists not in grain, dates, cattle, gold, coins, or dollar bills. This financial abstraction exists as electronic data that assume people are openly willing to cooperate within a trusted system. This trust begins and ends with a social narrative of political order and law. Money is valuable because other people believe money is valuable—and these others believe money is valuable because of political orders and laws based off cognitive creations.³⁶ Economies writ large then are built largely on credit—that is to say trust in the future efficacy of institutions to be resilient and robust in the years to come.³⁷

1.2 Limits of Violence

Many define power as some mixture of the physical and psychological.

However even behind the physical aspects of power are psychological constructs. Such imagined realities—accepted by masses as seemingly objectively ‘true’—are necessary to materialize and mobilize hard power.

Physical strength is rarely the foundation of power. Most political leaders today are not mixed martial arts champions. Most drug trafficking organization leaders are not the quickest to draw a pistol. Instead founders and leaders create, deploy, and protect shared psychological constructs—sold as ‘truth’—that allow the necessary mass cooperation to build militaries and win wars. Those who have mastered the skill of storytelling can have an outsized influence over others.³⁸

Even for Hitler, extreme violence, genocide, the holocaust, and invasions began, first, with an accepted fictive narrative that laid the foundation for a shared societal construct on which the armies of violence stood. As Austrian-born economist Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises observed:

Hitler and his clique conquered Germany by brutal violence. By murder and crime. But the doctrines of Nazism had got hold of the German mind long before then. Persuasion, not violence, had converted the immense majority of the nation to the tenets of militant nationalism.

For those strategists and scholars who focus primarily on physical strength it would be well worthwhile also to remember that wars are rarely two mercenary armies battling it out in the open. War is not some street fist fight between two strangers with nothing to lose or gain. Instead two or more sides fight and die for entities whose foundations are shared narratives. And careful coordination, communication, and intelligence are necessary even for a battle between two opposing fire teams (typically four-man infantry units).

There is another level of narrative that scholars too often glean over. As much as scholars assert that capitalist markets and strong governments are the mothers of individualism, states must create and propagate the most illiberal narratives in order to exist and persist. Scholars of multiple disciplines suppose that capable state institutions allow a person to marry whom he wishes, live where he wishes, and work where he wishes without the authorization and protection of the clan (although clans are still strong in many modern societies as will be discussed). No longer does a person fear exile by not going along with the common good of a clan, so the thinking goes. However, for states, free markets, trade routes, and liberalism writ large, there must first and foremost be the existence of a narrative that