The Theatre of Operations in the ‘War of Ideas’

Fighting a war in a digital age

From the article linked to above:

The gritty video captures the crackle of machine-gun fire, the boom of explosions and the whoosh of shrapnel passing dangerously close overhead.But this compelling glimpse of Canadians under fire during a patrol west of Kandahar wasn’t shot by a journalist travelling with the troops. Rather it was taken by a soldier himself.

When Cpl. Philippe Lemieux’s reconnaissance unit was ambushed by insurgents Saturday morning, the 26-year-old soldier pulled out his personal camera, caught the action and gave a copy to The Globe and Mail.

By Monday, his video was on the newspaper’s website – and Lemieux’s commanders were asking questions about this soldier-turned-videographer. Back at defence headquarters in Ottawa, military policy-makers were again wrestling with the challenges of fighting a war in the digital age.

I’m fascinated by the way in which the advent of the Information Age is changing the what, how and why of the wars which we fight. I don’t think we’ve got a handle on it yet really. I think Rupert Smith’s book The Utility of Force comes quite close–at least it made a strong impression on me. The story above reminded me of an especially illustrative passage from that book:

We now come to the manner in which we fight and operate amongst the people in a wider sense: through the media… Whoever coined the phrase ‘the theatre of operations’ was very prescient. We are conducting operations now as though we are on stage, in an amphitheatre or Roman arena. There are two or more sets of players—both with a producer, the commander, each of whom has his own idea of the script. On the ground, in the actual theatre, they are all on the stage and mixed up with people trying to get to their seats, the stage hands, the ticket collectors and the ice-cream vendors. At the same time they are being viewed by a partially and factional audience, comfortably seated, its attention focused on that part of the auditorium where it is noisiest, watching the events by peering down the drinking straws of their soft-drink packs—for that is the extent of the vision of a camera.

But this is just the beginning because the ‘theatre of operations’ which Smith describes is even more complex than he allows. We no longer operate exclusively ‘through the media’ as he puts it, or more accurately by what is now called the ‘mainstream media’ comprising large broadcast and print media, because just as the advent of the Information Age has transformed the weapons, command and control systems and sensors with which armed forces conduct the physical battle, it has transformed the way in which ideas are propagated in the form of words and images. We fight in an age in which via the new ‘social media’:

• Combatants on all sides can be their own reporters;

• Unaffiliated, independent lone reporters have as prominent a voice as some traditional media

• The audience is not a passive consumer; it is an active participant in the generation of comment and analysis in huge volume and, far less frequently, of original reportage.

In short, the theatre of operations has morphed off a virtual battlefield which in some crucial respects supersedes what happens on the real one.

I’m perhaps over-reaching here but I think what some now are calling the ‘War of Ideas’ is something which takes place largely virtually and to some extent independently of the real: it’s war for Marshall McLuhan’s Global Village. On the virtual battlefield, and sort of getting back to the original article that set off this rumination, the distinction between combatants and non-combatants, participants and non-participants, observed and observer is blurred. In a Daily Telegraph editorial a while back (‘Digital cameras have dispelled the fog of war’, Daily Telegraph, 12 May 2004, sorry link dead) Andrew Marr hinted at what this would mean for future wars: ‘If ordinary troops can film anything and store it in tiny chips, or send it straight on, then the gap between what actually happens in war and what the domestic audience knows about has been closed.’ Could the First World War have been fought if people at home were watching in the carnage of the Somme in real-time, Marr asks. ‘[W]arfare’, he continued, ‘has depended for centuries on a rampart of silence, a wall of willed incomprehension, between civilians at home and those killing. In a small way, the arrival of digital photography has broken through that wall.’

My friend Chris Ankersen reminds me that Marr is falling into the journalists’s conceit-trap which says ‘that which is reported is true’. The reporting of the real battlefield and the ‘Virtual Battlefield’ are different things. But still I think Marr has his finger on something important. Still and moving imagery from the battlefield in such volume, timeliness, and form (ie., digital and thereby easy to propagate and edit) and from a non-jounalist perspective is a new thing which is making a big difference in the what, why and how of warfare; but the way in which that difference is made is by the harnessing of that live-feed to political purpose by the addition to it of judgment, evaluation, subjectivity, selection bias, spin, and so on. The power of the ‘image’ converted into propaganda is awesome. (Proof of point: Micheal Moore’s artful ‘documentaries’.) We do this poorly in no small part because when it comes to the West and warfare ‘propaganda’ is a function that dare not speak its name. The irony, not lost on the other side, is that when it comes to cultural-ideational output we are hugely dominant. We have the best propagandists and lots of them: but they work in advertizing and their war is convincing you that your life would be perfect if only you had a razor with three blades instead of two. To the ideologues of the Islamic World the West represents an irresistible and insensate force of cultural contamination and ideational infiltration. That’s why they fear Britney Spears and Barbie more than JDAMs and Tomahawks.

Put differently, the centre of gravity is, as always, the mindset and will of the people but the peopleand soldiers via social media are active participants in the contest to shape and influence that mindset in a way and to an extent which they have never been before. AQ, for all that its ideology is avowedly backward-looking, intuitively understands the world of Web 2.0. We should take a lesson. As Jason Burke put it in the Guardian article ‘Bin Laden, Master of Propaganda‘:

You may not like what he is saying. You may abhor everything he stands for. But you are listening… The truth is that Osama bin Laden is very good at what he does. He is one of the great propagandists… He has an awesome understanding of the holy triumvirate of political communication: the power of the image, the message and the deed. And he understands how they work together.

Our armed forces, on the other hand, are struggling to adapt. Quoting from the original article again:

But the incident does renew old tensions within defence headquarters about how much access soldiers should have to the Internet, whether personal cameras should be allowed on operations.

“There’s two ways to look at. One reaction is … trying to impose the old notion of censorship from the battlefield in an electronic age,” said Doug Bland, chair of defence studies at Queen’s University,

“The other thought is better to enjoin them than fight them. What you do is regulate the use of this stuff and gain the co-operation of soldiers,” he said.

 

Why does this matter? Well, basically, because we are losing the ‘War of Ideas’. In February 2006 in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged as much:

Our enemies have skillfully adapted to fighting wars in today’s media age, but for the most part we, our country, our government, has not adapted. Consider that the violent extremists have established media relations committees—these are terrorists and they have media relations committees that meet and talk about strategy, not with bullets but with words. They’ve proven to be highly successful at manipulating the opinion elites of the world. They plan and design their headline-grabbing attacks using every means of communication to intimidate and break the collective will of free people.

Simply put, Islamists are winning the ‘War of Ideas’ because the organization and method of their operations is better adapted to the Information Age than our own: our forces are unmatched in the ability to manoeuvre metal and machines to deadly effect in physical battle; the other side is proving to be better at the purposeful shaping of people’s thoughts and beliefs.

There’s one over-arching cause for why this should be the case as explained by David Galula in Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice:

The asymmetrical situation has important effects on propaganda. The insurgent, having no responsibility, is free to use every trick; if necessary, he can lie, cheat, exaggerate. He is not obliged to prove; he is judged by what he promises, not by what he does. Consequently, propaganda is a powerful weapon for him. With no positive policy but with good propaganda, the insurgent may still win.

The counterinsurgent is tied to his responsibilities and to his past, and for him, facts speak louder than words. He is judged on what he does, not on what he says. if he lies, cheats, exaggerates, and does not prove, he may achieve some temporary successes, but at the price of being discredited for good. And he cannot cheat much unless his political structures are monolithic, for the legitimate opposition in his own camp would soon disclose his every psychological maneuver. For him, propaganda can be no more than a secondary weapon, valuable only if intended to inform and not to fool. A counterinsurgent can seldom cover bad or nonexistent policy with propaganda.

The above is via Mountain Runner who adds to it his own law: ‘The fungibility of force decreases as information asymmetry increases. In other words, the pen can be mightier than the sword in a world were perceptions matter more than fact.’

I’d hazard three further reasons we are struggling in the ‘War of Ideas’. First, we have not adapted our war-fighting structures (which includes the whole of government not just the armed forces) to the new information-dominated operational environment. As a result we fight the ‘War of Ideas’ in an ad hoc manner as though it were secondary or tertiary in importance whereas the other side treats it with resolute consistency as the main event to which everything else is subordinated. In short, we are not winning the virtual battle because we have not really put much into fighting it. For instance there is no single office for the leadership and implementation of information policy in the ‘War of Ideas’. There was one during the Cold War in the form of the United States Information Agency (USIA) until it broken up and rolled into the State Department in 1999.

Second, to the extent that we do fight the ‘War of Ideas’ we focus too much on trying to shift the outcome of what is essentially an intra-Muslim debate about the correct interpretation and implementation of the concept of Jihad. This is a vital and consequential debate but it is not one which we as outsiders can contribute to in a sophisticated and convincing way. In fact, our cause is done great harm by the gap between our rhetoric and our actions. On the one hand we say ‘We support democracy!’ On the other hand when faced with a hard choice we tend to back the most pro-Western (or least anti-Western) faction even when it pursues undemocratic means. Information warriors understand that actions speak louder than words:

 

Successful strategic communication assumes a defensible policy, a respectable identity, a core value. In commercial marketing, the product for sale must be well-made and desirable. The strategic communication stratagem hasn’t been built that can pull a poor policy decision out of trouble. (See Richard Halloran in Parameters, Autumn 2007)

Vulgar transation: you can’t polish a turd.

Third, we do not focus enough effort on winning and maintaining the hearts and minds of the most critical and accessible population: our own. Clearly, armed forces do not want to be concerned with the management of domestic perceptions of conflict; nor should that be their responsibility—although soldiers of all ranks must be ever aware of the impact on the virtual battlefield of everything they on the real one. Indeed, in the United States there is a specific legal impediment towards doing so in the form of the Smith-Mundt Act (1948) which required that propaganda intended for foreign audiences ‘shall not be disseminated within the United States, its territories, or possessions.’ (See the Smith-Mundt Act, Title 22, Chapter 18, Subchapter V, Section 1461, on the ‘Dissemination of Information Abroad’; also Dennis M. Murphy and James F. White, ‘Propaganda: Can a Word Decide a War?’ Parameters (Autumn 2007), pp. 15-27.) Forgotten is that the intent of Smith-Mundt was to repair what was seen as a dysfunctional propaganda system by creating the now defunct United States Information Agency not to forbid propagandizing.

Yet T.X. Hammes argues that the war we now face is one in which our opponent,

 

… uses all available networks – political, economic, social and military – to convince the enemy’s political decision-makers that their strategic goals are either unachievable or too costly for the perceived benefit. It is rooted in the fundamental precept that superior political will, when properly employed, can defeat greater economic and military power. (T.X. Hammes, ‘War Evolves into the Fourth Generation’, Journal of Contemporary Security Policy, Vol. 26, No. 2, p. 206.)

And if that is the case then we are ignoring the defence of a critical vulnerability. It is as though we had entered some gladiatorial combat with helmet visor closed, sword dull and bent, and shield lying in the dirt.