"Information Dominance"

Like a genie in a bottle or a humunculus risen from clay that turns to destroy its creator, our military techniques and strategies have been employed against us in the "Global War on Terror." As the massively documented article in today's Times makes clear, the Department of Defense has taken a strategy originally developed for use against the Soviet Union and other Cold War enemies (electronic warfare and its descendants, information warfare and information dominance) and deployed it against us.

Electronic warfare developed early in the 20th century. Essentially, it operates as a "force multiplier" for military operations by denying the enemy the ability to communicate and to conduct surveillance and reconnaissance. This is accomplished by jamming their radio frequencies with white noise so that their military units cannot share operational intelligence or commands from higher echelon units to junior units. Enemy radar sites are jammed, disrupted or attacked with "beam riding" missiles that home in on the radar stations emitting signals.

In later years, simply denying the enemy the ability to communicate evolved into planting false information within the enemies command and control communications network. Meaconing, for example, is the practice of placing false radio beacons to draw aircraft off course. RB-50 reconnaissance aircraft were drawn over the border in Turkey by Soviet meaconing and shot down for violating Soviet airspace. Spoofing is another technique, whereby fake radio transmissions mimic enemy units communication, sowing confusion and disinformation, or create the illusion of friendly forces in places where they are not located. In World War II, Allied forces in England created a diversion by spoofing a massive invasion force with fake communications that operated as a decoy for the Normandy invasion force. Psychological operations were conducted during the Vietnam war, broadcasting propaganda and dropping leaflets in order to destroy the enemy's morale and sow discontent.

In the 1990s, these many different techniques and strategies, electronic warfare, meaconing, spoofing, psyops, etc., were all gathered together under the doctrine of "information warfare" and, later, "information dominance." This doctrine was deployed in the Gulf War as a coordinated joint strategy by all branches of the military to deny Iraqi communications, create false data to confuse and misdirect Iraqi military units and to induce via propaganda individual soldiers into surrendering.

The latest revelations that the Department of Defense and cultivated and deployed retired military officers as "analysts" on Fox News, NBC, CNN and other news networks in order to spread talking points, false information and propaganda. This effort grew out of the doctrine described above:

Torie Clarke, the former public relations executive who oversaw the Pentagon’s dealings with the analysts as assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, had come to her job with distinct ideas about achieving what she called “information dominance.” In a spin-saturated news culture, she argued, opinion is swayed most by voices perceived as authoritative and utterly independent.

And so even before Sept. 11, she built a system within the Pentagon to recruit “key influentials” — movers and shakers from all walks who with the proper ministrations might be counted on to generate support for Mr. Rumsfeld’s priorities.

(emphasis added)

This is reminiscent of the use of interrogation training techniques used on US military units that fly reconnaissance missions in international airspace near enemy territory, such as North Korea. Lessons learned in the POW camps of North Vietnam about how to resist interrogation, not just physical torture but also mental manipulations, were used on US military personnel in order to train them for the possibility of capture and interrogation by the enemy. These techniques included sleep deprivation, stress positions, political indoctrination, simulated burials and waterboarding. In the Global War on Terror, these techniques, which we borrowed from the worst of our enemies during the Cold War, were actually employed at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and in secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe.

Now it appears that another Cold War military doctrine has been directed toward another application, except this time, instead of "enemy combatants" and "terrorists", the target is the American public.

Must Read: Bill James on Freakonomics blog

This Freakonomics Q&A is a treat for baseball fans. Bill James, the autodidact statistician and "creator" of sabermetrics, has brought a real sea change to baseball in general and the Red Sox in particular. Lots of gems in here. My favorite:

Q: Using various statistics over a player’s lifetime, and comparing them to “league norms,” is it possible to determine which players may have used steroids?
A: Absolutely not, no. The problem is that many different causes can have the same effects. If a player used steroids, this could cause his home run total to explode at an advanced age — but so could weight training, Lasix surgery, better bats, playing in a different park, a great hitting coach, or a good divorce. It is almost always impossible to infer specific causes from general effects.

McCain's "Wisdom"

Today's opinion piece in the WSJ on Obama opens up what will surely be a favored line of attack through the rest of this election: Obama means well but he's naive and immature. Can't be trusted with the security of the nation.

The main point of the essay is that Obama doesn't understand defeat and the consequences of defeat in quite the mature and deep-seated way that McCain understands it. Noting that Obama only has one defeat on his resume (a failed bid for Congress), the comparisons to McCain's Vietnam (and post-Vietnam) experience with the demoralized military of the Seventies are meant to suggest that McCain possesses the measured wisdom earned through decades of experience.

However, there is a howling mistake in the examples given. First, McCain virtually jerked the rug out from under President Clinton, forcing a rapid exit and withdrawal from Somalia in the wake of a firefight that left U.S. soldiers dead, their bodies defiled on television. But then, years later, McCain wrote that Osama bin Laden saw a weakness in the United States' withdrawal and felt emboldened to act. So, which is it? Was McCain wise to push for withdrawal from Somalia instead of escalating our involvement? Or was he foolish for cutting our losses and retreating in shame? Are we meant to infer that McCain has somehow learned from his mistake?

Patches? We don't need no stinkin' patches...

Many moons ago, I spent more than a few years in the military intelligence community, mostly in the Far East. The "spook" world is intriguing, as it manages to blend the cerebral and the visceral into a tight-knit intellectual/warrior culture. On the one hand, studying the enemy requires high-level analytic ability but, on the other hand, the purpose of all the academic pursuit is to more accurately target lethal force, to put "steel on target", as they say.

This is all kept under wraps, of course, for good reason. One interesting glimpse into this world is in today's NYT, with an article about patches created by various "black ops" organizations like the National Reconnaisance Office and various stealth military units (mostly U.S. Air Force). The picture above is from Skivvy Nine, the "legendary" USAF unit in the Republic of Korea. One key to the code: the knight is a chess reference; intelligence, like the knight, is the most unpredictable force on the battlefield.