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Hi,
This article dates back to November the 24th last year but the information it provides is now more
important then ever.
Everybody wondering who to trust and what to rely on in these times of confusion, should bare in
mind that one of the main weapons of the US are those of mass disinformation as clearly stated in
this article from the LA times by William M. Arkin.
Sander Faas
DEFENSE STRATEGY; The Military's New War of Words
The Los Angeles Times; Los Angeles, Calif.; Nov 24, 2002; William M. Arkin;
Abstract:
One of [Donald H. Rumsfeld]'s first steps into this minefield occurred last year with the creation
of the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence. Part of its stated mission was to generate
disinformation and propaganda that would help the United States counter Islamic extremists and
pursue the war on terrorism.
The plan summary, for instance, talks of "strategic" deception and "influence operations" as basic
tools in future wars. According to another Defense Department directive on information warfare
policy, military leaders should use information "operations" to "heighten public awareness; promote
national and coalition policies, aims, and objectives ... [and] counter adversary propaganda and
disinformation in the news."
The problem is that Rumsfeld's vision of information warfare seems to push beyond the notion that
American ideas and information should compete with the enemy's on a level playing field. And
Rumsfeld's vision, with its melding of public information and deception, is taking root in the
armed services.
Full Text:
(Copyright The Times Mirror Company; Los Angeles Times 2002. Allrights reserved.)
It was California's own Hiram Johnson who said, in a speech on the Senate floor in 1917, that "the
first casualty, when war comes, is truth."
What would he make of the Bush administration?
In a policy shift that reaches across all the armed services, Secretary of Defense Donald H.
Rumsfeld and his senior aides are revising missions and creating new agencies to make "information
warfare" a central element of any U.S. war. Some hope it will eventually rank with bombs and
artillery shells as an instrument of destruction.
What is disturbing about Rumsfeld's vision of information warfare is that it has a way of folding
together two kinds of wartime activity involving communications that have traditionally been
separated by a firewall of principle.
The first is purely military. It includes attacks on the radar, communications and other
"information systems" an enemy depends on to guide its war-making capabilities. This category also
includes traditional psychological warfare, such as dropping leaflets or broadcasting propaganda to
enemy troops.
The second is not directly military. It is the dissemination of public information that the
American people need in order to understand what is happening in a war, and to decide what they
think about it. This information is supposed to be true.
Increasingly, the administration's new policy -- along with the steps senior commanders are taking
to implement it -- blurs or even erases the boundaries between factual information and news, on the
one hand, and public relations, propaganda and psychological warfare, on the other. And, while the
policy ostensibly targets foreign enemies, its most likely victim will be the American electorate.
One of Rumsfeld's first steps into this minefield occurred last year with the creation of the
Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence. Part of its stated mission was to generate disinformation
and propaganda that would help the United States counter Islamic extremists and pursue the war on
terrorism.
The office's nominal target was the foreign media, especially in the Middle East and Asia. As
critics soon pointed out, however, there was no way -- in an age of instant global communications
-- that Washington could propagandize abroad without that same propaganda spreading to the home
front.
Faced with a public outcry, Rumsfeld declared it had all been a big misunderstanding. The Pentagon
would never lie to Americans. The Office of Strategic Influence was shut down. But the impulse to
control public information and bend it to the service of government objectives did not go away.
This fall, Rumsfeld created a new position of deputy undersecretary for "special plans," a
euphemism for deception operations. The special plans policy czar will sit atop a huge new
infrastructure being created in the name of information warfare.
On Oct. 1, in a little-noticed but major reorganization, U.S. Strategic Command took over all
responsibilities for global information attacks. The Omaha-based successor to the Strategic Air
Command has solely focused up to now on nuclear weapons.
Similarly, the country's most venerable and historic bombing command, the 8th Air Force, which
carried the air war to Germany in World War II, has been directed to transfer its bomber and
fighter aircraft to other commands so that it can focus exclusively on worldwide information
attacks.
The Navy, meanwhile, has consolidated its efforts in a newly formed Naval Network Warfare Command.
And the Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan, or JSCP, prepared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, now
declares information to be just as important in war as diplomatic, military or economic factors.
The strategic capabilities plan is the central war-fighting directive for the U.S. military. It
establishes what are called "Informational Flexible Deterrent Options" for global wars, such as the
war on terrorism, and separate plans written for individual theaters of war, such as Iraq.
To a large extent, these documents and the organizational shifts behind them are focused on such
missions as jamming or deceiving enemy radar systems and disrupting command and control networks.
Such activities only carry forward efforts that have been part of U.S. military tactics for decades
or longer.
But a summary of the strategic capabilities plan and a raft of other Pentagon and armed forces
documents made available to The Times make it clear that the new approach now includes other
elements as well: the management of public information, efforts to control news media sources and
manipulation of public opinion.
The plan summary, for instance, talks of "strategic" deception and "influence operations" as basic
tools in future wars. According to another Defense Department directive on information warfare
policy, military leaders should use information "operations" to "heighten public awareness; promote
national and coalition policies, aims, and objectives ... [and] counter adversary propaganda and
disinformation in the news."
Both the Air Force and the Navy now list deception as one of five missions for information warfare,
along with electronic attack, electronic protection, psychological . attacks and public affairs. A
September draft of a new Air Force policy describes information warfare's goals as "destruction,
degradation, denial, disruption, deceit, and exploitation." These goals are referred to
collectively as "D5E."
In order to do a better job of deception, the joint chiefs have issued a "Joint Policy for Military
Deception" that directs the individual services to work on the task in peacetime as well as
wartime. Specifically, it orders the Air Force to develop better doctrine and techniques for
incorporating deception into war plans.
The Air Force, in response, now defines military deception as action that "misleads adversaries,
causing them to act in accordance with" U.S. objectives. And, like the other services, it is
increasingly folding its "public affairs" apparatus -- that is, the open world of media relations
-- into the information warfare team.
"Gaining and maintaining the information initiative in a conflict can be a powerful weapon to
defeat propaganda," the Air Force said in its January doctrine.
That echoes a statement by Navy Rear Adm. John Cryer III, who worked on information warfare in the
Combined Air Operations Center in Saudi Arabia during the Afghanistan war: "It was our belief ...
we were losing the information war early when we watched Al Jazeera," Cryer said at an October
conference, meaning that the U.S. perspective was inadequately represented on the Arab world's
equivalent of CNN. "We came around, but it took a lot longer than it should have."
Of course there is nothing wrong with making sure the U.S. point of view gets represented in the
news media, both abroad and at home. Done properly, that is a prescription for more openness and
less unnecessary secrecy.
The problem is that Rumsfeld's vision of information warfare seems to push beyond the notion that
American ideas and information should compete with the enemy's on a level playing field. And
Rumsfeld's vision, with its melding of public information and deception, is taking root in the
armed services.
The new Air Force doctrine, for example, declares that the news media can be used not only to
convey "the leadership's concern with [an] issue," but also to avoid "the media going to other
sources [such as an adversary or critic of U.S. policy] for information." In other words,
information warfare now includes controlling as much as possible what the American public sees and
reads.
The disinformation campaign being constructed goes against even the military's own stated mission.
Truthfulness, the Air Force says, is a key to defeating adversaries. Accordingly, the service
branch adds, "U.S. and friendly forces must strive to become the favored source of information."
The potential for mischief is magnified by the fact that so much of what the U.S. military does
these days falls into the category of covert operations. Americans are now operating out of secret
bases in places like Uzbekistan and the Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq; Special Forces units are
said to be inside western Iraq as well. In the meantime, the armed forces are making use of
facilities in the Arab states along the Persian Gulf.
In all these cases and more, the U.S. and other western news media depend on the military for
information. Since reporters cannot travel into parts of Iraq and other places in the region
without military escort, what they report is generally what they've been told.
And when the information that military officers provide to the public is part of a process that
generates propaganda and places a high value on deceit, deception and denial, then truth is indeed
likely to be high on the casualty list.
That is bad news for the American public. In the end, it may be even worse news for the Bush
administration -- and for a U.S. military that has spent more than 25 years climbing out of the
credibility trap called Vietnam.
Credit: William M. Arkin is a military affairs analyst who writes regularly for Opinion. E-mail:
warkin@igc.org.
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