US plans to 'fight the net' revealed: BCC =01-27-06

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4655196.stm

Friday, 27 January 2006
By Adam Brookes : BBC Pentagon correspondent

A newly declassified document gives a fascinating glimpse into the US military's plans for "information operations" - from psychological operations, to attacks on hostile computer networks.

The document says information is "critical to military success"

Bloggers beware.

As the world turns networked, the Pentagon is calculating the military opportunities that computer networks, wireless technologies and the modern media offer.

From influencing public opinion through new media to designing "computer network attack" weapons, the US military is learning to fight an electronic war.

The declassified document is called "Information Operations Roadmap". It was obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University using the Freedom of Information Act.

Officials in the Pentagon wrote it in 2003. The Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, signed it.

Information Operations Roadmap
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/27_01_06_psyops.pdf
Note: Some of the salient sections are blacked out!

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The "roadmap" calls for a far-reaching overhaul of the military's ability to conduct information operations and electronic warfare. And, in some detail, it makes recommendations for how the US armed forces should think about this new, virtual warfare.

The document says that information is "critical to military success". Computer and telecommunications networks are of vital operational importance.

Propaganda

The operations described in the document include a surprising range of military activities: public affairs officers who brief journalists, psychological operations troops who try to manipulate the thoughts and beliefs of an enemy, computer network attack specialists who seek to destroy enemy networks.

All these are engaged in information operations.


The wide-reaching document was signed off by Donald Rumsfeld

Perhaps the most startling aspect of the roadmap is its acknowledgement that information put out as part of the military's psychological operations, or Psyops, is finding its way onto the computer and television screens of ordinary Americans.

"Information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and Psyops, is increasingly consumed by our domestic audience," it reads.

"Psyops messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public," it goes on.

The document's authors acknowledge that American news media should not unwittingly broadcast military propaganda. "Specific boundaries should be established," they write. But they don't seem to explain how.

"In this day and age it is impossible to prevent stories that are fed abroad as part of psychological operations propaganda from blowing back into the United States - even though they were directed abroad," says Kristin Adair of the National Security Archive.

Credibility problem

Public awareness of the US military's information operations is low, but it's growing - thanks to some operational clumsiness.

When it describes plans for electronic warfare, or EW, the document takes on an extraordinary tone. It seems to see the internet as being equivalent to an enemy weapons system

Late last year, it emerged that the Pentagon had paid a private company, the Lincoln Group, to plant hundreds of stories in Iraqi newspapers. The stories - all supportive of US policy - were written by military personnel and then placed in Iraqi publications.

And websites that appeared to be information sites on the politics of Africa and the Balkans were found to be run by the Pentagon.

But the true extent of the Pentagon's information operations, how they work, who they're aimed at, and at what point they turn from informing the public to influencing populations, is far from clear.

The roadmap, however, gives a flavour of what the US military is up to - and the grand scale on which it's thinking.

It reveals that Psyops personnel "support" the American government's international broadcasting. It singles out TV Marti - a station which broadcasts to Cuba - as receiving such support.

It recommends that a global website be established that supports America's strategic objectives. But no American diplomats here, thank you. The website would use content from "third parties with greater credibility to foreign audiences than US officials".

It also recommends that Psyops personnel should consider a range of technologies to disseminate propaganda in enemy territory: unmanned aerial vehicles, "miniaturized, scatterable public address systems", wireless devices, cellular phones and the internet.

'Fight the net'

When it describes plans for electronic warfare, or EW, the document takes on an extraordinary tone.

It seems to see the internet as being equivalent to an enemy weapons system.

"Strategy should be based on the premise that the Department [of Defense] will 'fight the net' as it would an enemy weapons system," it reads.

The slogan "fight the net" appears several times throughout the roadmap.

The authors warn that US networks are very vulnerable to attack by hackers, enemies seeking to disable them, or spies looking for intelligence.

"Networks are growing faster than we can defend them... Attack sophistication is increasing... Number of events is increasing."

US digital ambition

And, in a grand finale, the document recommends that the United States should seek the ability to "provide maximum control of the entire electromagnetic spectrum".

US forces should be able to "disrupt or destroy the full spectrum of globally emerging communications systems, sensors, and weapons systems dependent on the electromagnetic spectrum".

Consider that for a moment.

The US military seeks the capability to knock out every telephone, every networked computer, every radar system on the planet.

Are these plans the pipe dreams of self-aggrandising bureaucrats? Or are they real?

The fact that the "Information Operations Roadmap" is approved by the Secretary of Defense suggests that these plans are taken very seriously indeed in the Pentagon.

And that the scale and grandeur of the digital revolution is matched only by the US military's ambitions for it.
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See PDF File: Information Operations Roadmap
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/27_01_06_psyops.pdf

EW Related Link:

June 2000
Electronic-Warfare Assets Badly Neglected
http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/issues/2000/Jun/Electronic.htm

Lack of adequate funding is undermining critical war-fighting capability
by Rep. Joseph R. Pitts

The history of warfare is often described as a struggle between the offense and the defense. That's a fine framework, if you like football. But there may be better ways of thinking about warfare in the information age.

Perhaps the real military struggle today is between awareness and deception. Each side in a conflict strives to learn as much as possible about an adversary's location, leaders, capabilities, strategy and tactics-while at the same time denying the enemy information about friendly forces.

The effort to gain superior awareness or "knowledge dominance" in combat is as old as warfare itself. But in an era of multispectral sensors, instant communications and precision munitions, dominant knowledge may mean quick, decisive victory, while inferior awareness may mean rapid, crushing defeat. It is not enough, however, to know the enemy. It is equally important that the enemy not know you. Those twin imperatives of modern warfare are the rationale for the burgeoning mission area of "information operations."

The United States has been engaged in at least one form of information warfare for more than half a century. Since the advent of radar in the late 1930s, U.S. airborne forces have played a cat-and-mouse game of countermeasures and counter-countermeasures that has come to be known as electronic warfare (EW). For a variety of bureaucratic and doctrinal reasons, the armed services today prefer to differentiate electronic and information warfare. But from a purely practical perspective, it is obvious that EW has always been about controlling the electromagnetic spectrum in wartime so that we can know the enemy better than he knows us.

Italian air-power theorist Guilio Douhet wrote in his hugely influential treatise, "The Command of the Air," published in 1921, that a prime reason why he believed offensive aircraft would revolutionize warfare was the impossibility of knowing all the possible routes they might use to approach intended targets.

Douhet's argument became the wisdom in Europe during the inter-war years, which explains why British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin warned his countrymen in 1932 that "the bomber will always get through."

Fortunately for Britain, the invention of radar on the eve of World War II deprived air power of its most critical advantage-surprise-and thus enabled a relatively small defensive force of fighters to prevail in the Battle of Britain.

Since that time, it has been apparent to military planners that the success of air campaigns depended upon suppressing enemy defensive sensors while exploiting similar technology, such as precision seekers, for offensive purposes.

In the early years, foiling enemy defenses involved simple techniques such as flying below radar horizons or filling the sky with a blizzard of reflective chaff. But during the Cold War, electronic warfare became an increasingly more complex task of lethal and non-lethal defense suppression, employing sophisticated skills and equipment.

The main reason why electronic warfare grew so complicated was that defenders learned how to adapt to various strategies. Radars became more powerful, more discriminating and more agile. Command and control networks became more resilient and responsive. Surface-to-air missiles became smarter and more numerous. Each time America fought an air campaign-in Korea, in Vietnam, in the Persian Gulf-potential adversaries learned new ways of coping with U.S. EW methods, forcing the Pentagon to come up with more clever electronic counters. From this perspective, low observables (stealth) are just one in a series of measures conceived to preserve electromagnetic dominance.

But stealth in its early years was sometimes oversold as a revolutionary alternative to EW. So its fielding at the end of the Cold War led to a neglect of electronic-warfare missions and technologies. This problem was most apparent in the Air Force, which decided-despite the critical importance of EW in Operation Desert Storm-to retire its EF-111 Raven and F-4G Wild Weasel electronic-warfare aircraft in the 1990s. The jamming mission migrated to the Navy's EA-6B Prowler.

Today, there are 124 EA-6B Prowlers organized in 19 squadrons-10 carrier-based, eight expeditionary (land-based) and one reserve. The Prowler has proved indispensable in a series of air campaigns such as Operations Northern and Southern Watch to enforce Iraqi no-fly zones, and Operation Allied Force against Yugoslavia. It is rare for U.S. planes to enter hostile air space anywhere in the world without standoff jamming provided by the Prowler. In the Kosovo operation, even stealthy strike aircraft were supported by the Prowler, and the loss of a U.S. combat plane-an F-117 stealth fighter-was directly attributable to lack of adequate EW coverage.

But if Kosovo reinforced the importance of electronic warfare, it also underscored just how neglected EW assets have become. There were so few EA-6Bs available worldwide to support the Balkan air war that Prowlers were shifted out of Northeast Asia and the Persian Gulf region, leaving those areas temporarily uncovered. Even instructors from the Prowler's home base at Whidbey Island, Wash., had to be deployed.

The simple truth is that America's airborne electronic-warfare forces are overworked and under-funded. To make matters worse, they are beginning to show their age. The average Prowler is nearly 20 years old, and no new airframes have been produced in a decade. It's time to move on to a new airframe, but steps must be taken to preserve EW capabilities until a platform is selected and operational sometime in the next decade.

An advanced digital EW architecture for the next-generation support jammer called ICAP-3 soon will be operational, and initially will be deployed on Prowlers before it transitions to more modern aircraft. But there is a host of other EW-related shortfalls that must be addressed-from better connectivity to more precise anti-radar munitions to night-vision devices for pilots. The armed forces cannot continue to neglect these needs.

That is the reason why members of the House of Representatives have established an Electronic Warfare Working Group. The working group was conceived as a task force to assure greater congressional understanding and oversight of electronic-warfare systems and missions. The performance of U.S. forces in Operation Allied Force made clear that Congress and the Pentagon need to pay closer attention to electronic warfare, not just because it is a high-leverage war-fighting skill, but also because of the strides other nations are making in that arena. America cannot maintain its military edge unless it continues to control the electromagnetic spectrum.

Joseph R. Pitts is a Republican congressman from Pennsylvania and is co-chairman of the Electronic Warfare Working Group in the U.S. Congress. He is a member of the Defense Advisory Board of the Lexington Institute.
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