US Army Focuses on Updating Information Warfare
Where earlier U.S. Army information operations (IO) doctrine focused on bringing technologies to bear against a single adversary, an updated version due out next year talks about the need to engage and defeat decentralized small groups of enemies who might, for example, travel between countries.
To be submitted on Nov. 10 for vetting, FM 3-13 is meant to provide a road map for information warfare: crafting messages aimed at local populations, creating make-believe radio chatter to confuse an enemy, and more.
During the 1991 Gulf War, leaflets induced thousands of Iraqi soldiers to surrender - a major IO success. But today's fight in Iraq is more complicated.
"Things in that war were largely uncomplicated without as many social and cultural nuances. The U.S. and its allies were fighting a monolithic, hierarchically structured single adversary," said Paul Tiberi, deputy director of the Army's information operations component at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. "We know that is not the world we live in today, where there are countless audiences we need to address. There is more than one adversary, so it is about the complexity and interactivity of all these various actors that make the current operational environment much more nuanced."
This update, the first since 2003, emphasizes talking to locals as an essential element of fighting insurgents.
"I have to attend to the no-kidding interest of those actors in my AOR [area of responsibility] or my mission will not be successful," Tiberi said.
FM 3-13 complements the Army's full-spectrum FM 3-0 doctrine released last year, which calls for stability operations alongside major combat.
"There has to be a consistency of communications in deeds, words and images," Tiberi said. "There must be congruency so that receivers do not misperceive. What a soldier does on the street in Iraq has to conform to a strategic narrative. We ought to expect that it [FM 3-13] will cross military and cultural boundaries and collaborate with the public. One of the reasons leaders like [Gen. David] Petraeus are so successful is because they do a lot through face-to-face communication."
Counterinsurgency IO can include setting a curfew or establishing physical barriers, methods increasingly emphasized in FM 3-13.
"Sometimes you can physically separate the population from the insurgents," said Rickey Smith, who directs the Army Capabilities Integration Center-Forward. "If you cannot achieve physical separation, you can separate them mentally. You have to go beyond culture. It is not just about your adversary but about your whole environment."
The fast-changing informational environment created by today's technologies makes crafting a consistent message much more difficult, Cato Institute foreign policy director Christopher Preble said.
"It is much harder to craft a message these days, because accurate stories appear in newspapers regarding the war [and] are published online all the time," Preble said.
IO also includes efforts to deceive enemy military forces.
"Remember the drills leading up to the Gulf War? Or in World War II, when we created fake tanks out of rubber?" Smith said. "That is military deception designed to let the enemy figure out what is real and what is not. For more impact, combine that with psychological operations. We shot artillery rounds with leaflets in them in Vietnam. At the same time, I want to keep a firewall up so that we [the U.S.] don't do things in a domestic environment that we would do against our adversaries."
FM 3-13 also increases the Army's emphasis on electronic warfare such as roadside-bomb jammers and spectrum management. The Army has been learning from the Navy to build jamming devices that can manage a host of simultaneous electronic signals.
"The Navy stayed aggressive on this because their platform is to have a bubble of protection around them," Smith said. "We have been using their EWOs [electronic warfare operations] of theater spectrum management all the way down at the individual vehicle level. If you think of a ship as being a cluster of hundreds of antennae, managing that spectrum so you don't jam yourself is huge. For instance, when I put a jammer on a Humvee, what else am I jamming?" Future Combat Systems vehicles are designed with this in mind, he said.
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