Pentagon's Information Operations Anarchy

great concern to the private sector. As far back as 1995, many communications analysts were stating that NSA was already “sniffing” key network access points within the United States; i.e., harvesting telephone calls of interest. Not much has changed. This report gets you into SONET Rings and Asynchronous Transfer Mode. At the time, leading edge technologies for information transfer and swtiching.

DSB's 2006 Summer Study on 21^st Century Strategic Technology Vectors, among other things, argued for the merging of military science and social science. Chapter 2 of the report is titled Human Terrain Preparation. Constructed throughout 2006 and published in February 2007, Vectors is a seminal study focusing a good deal of its energy on Human Terrain Preparation, Behavioral Science and the need to incorporate data, kinetic or otherwise into the warfighters/DOD's tool kit.

One of the more notable quotes from Vectors follows. And it is the defintion and essence of Information Operations. IO is not complicated though contractors, journlists, politicians, and commanders will say otherwise (all with competing interests). As one former Delta Force/SOF veteran once said: “It's really just about communicating with people and understanding their point of view.”

The key is, of course, to make sure the filter for that information is not someone beholden to the balance sheet or seeking fame and fortune. As the DSB report indicated, the best information harvester is the soldier on the ground empowered to be a powerful collector of information. Who better to do that? That soldier's life and those of his comrades are at stake. Perhaps even his/her family back home. That's a powerful incentive to get the data and get it right.

Perhaps most central is to gain a deeper understanding of how individuals, groups, societies and nations behave and then use information to improve the performance of U.S. forces through continuous education and training to shape behaviors of others in pre-, intra- and post-conflict situations. Key enablers include immersive gamingenvironments, automated language processing and human, social, cultural and behavior modeling. The second is greatly enhanced capabilities to observe people, things, and activities in urban and other tough terrains and to record and recall the data. This will reduce sanctuaries where adversaries hide and draw support for their operations, and reduce their ability as irregular forces to hide in plain sight. Needed are new suites of close-in sensors and making the soldier on the ground empowered to be a powerful collector.

The third is extracting actionable information hidden in massive data much more rapidly than is done today. This capability would be critically important to commanders at all levels, intelligence analysts, and soldiers and marines on patrol. Last is producing effects—offensive and defensive, kinetic and non-kinetic, lethal and non-lethal—tailored rapidly to the circumstances in order to achieve the desired and avoid the counterproductive.

John Stanton is a Virginia based writer specializing in national security matters. Reach him at cioran123@yahoo.com