Pentagon's Information Operations Anarchy
OSD, President, Military Commanders Stuck in 1995
By John Stanton
1995--Silence is not Golden: US Government Efforts to Establish Information Security Strategies. A Wall Street official indicated there are transactional costs to doing business in the digital age and one of them is information fraud. Cable industry officials said information warfare between information thieves and industry is a problem that the cable companies handle through their own countermeasure...Someone woke up one morning and decided a new threat was needed...That new threat to national security is electronic information warfare (EIW) the hottest and most over hyped threat inside the Washington, DC Beltway and includes everything from encryption to technology transfer to legitimate battlefield applications and ominous new defense measure to protect the US economy and culture...To have high confidence that the network vulnerabilities would be reduced, the government will have to insert itself more and in new ways into the commercial marketplace.” Journal of Technology Transfer
1997—Dilemmas Abound in Crafting National Information Policy, National DEFENSE Magazine
1998–White House Plans Cyber Homeland Defense Effort, National DEFENSE Magazine
1998—Nation's Info Infrastructure Vulnerable to Nuclear Pulse (HEMP). There is a lot of misinformation put out by the mass media and movie companies about high altitude electromagnetic pulse. This is a subject that is actually well-understood and has been well documented for 40 years. People have forgotten everything we learned in this area and chose to ignore the threat. The amount of effort to do some simple things to make electronic systems less vulnerable is minuscule and any god engineer knows how to design-n this type pf protection.
2000--Rules of Cyberwar Baffle US Government Agencies. Congress also has stepped in to fund increased cyber-warfare activity and numerous hearings have been held on the subject. Late last year, lawmakers approved nearly $500 million of the president's early 1999 request for information operations. A Senate staffer indicated: "The Congress is in the mood to fund programs related to information operations. On the House side, there have been talks about a future Homeland Defense Committee that would be formed to deal with cyber defense issues, along with chemical and biological defense concerns. National DEFENSE Magazine,
February 2001–U.S. Homeland Defense Policy Mired in Competing Interests, National. DEFENSE Magazine
2002–Terror in Cyberspace: Terrorists Will Exploit and Widen the Gap Between Governing Structures and the Public (written prior to 911). American Behavioral Scientist
2007--Evolutionary Cognitive Neuroscience: Dual Use Discipline for Understanding & Managing Complexity and Altering Warfare. “In February 2007, the Defense Science Board (DSB) released a little noticed report titled, 21st Century Strategic Technology Vectors. In the report the DSB recommended that military planners explore the Human Terrain in which US warfighters operate. To do this, the DSB suggested a radical approach: tap into the non-kinetic social sciences network for analytical data and marry future findings and applications to the military warfighting toolkit.” Dissident Voice. Also covered in the Washington Times.
2008—Framework for Strategic Cultural Analysis. Warning on culture clash within military, academia and how will HT analysis be used in kill chain. Briefing Defence Academy , Cranfield.
Holy Crap!
Well I'll be a hog-tied mule! I wrote all that stuff? I can tell you it was only thanks to some great editors that I got to cover those issues way back in the 1990's and have my name attached to them.
I apologize profusely reader/readers for this apparently self-serving article.
But hear me out!
When I read the news today that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was going to look into Information Operations practices in response to the widely covered Furlong-Pelton-CIA-DOD affair, I immediately set out to write a piece that would cover new ground, illuminate the field of Information Operations/Strategic Communications and give you, the reader, a couple of new insights. But I had that Deja Vu moment that I'd traveled this ground before and, indeed, I had. I'd actually forgotten about some of the items that my awesome editors had me track down.
So what to do?
Should I rework those past articles sort of like John Lennon did with the song Revolution (fast to slow)? Or should I just cite them an leave 'em at that? I chose the former and some of the latter.
My only, new, two cent insight on these matters was that the realization that the speed of global communications can barely keep pace with the accelerating rehash rate operating in the minds of America's political/military leaders and, for that matter, media groups here in the USA. The problems and solutions that we so desperately seem to need to justify war/expenses or construct a thesis/report have, for the most part, all come before. In this instance, the DSB's work is instructive.
Does anyone in IO, for example, know what they are doing beyond manipulating electrons? Do journalists understand the subject matter/issues? Are the SECDEF and Commanders in control of information that matters? Does history or information from the past have anything instructive to say?
