The Dark Art of Influence: Psy-Ops and Information Warfare Redux

News Weekly

3 December 2024

3.1 MINS

by Edward Gray

Information Warfare is an integral – and largely misunderstood – part of conflict. The use of terms like “misinformation” by politicians and pundits does nothing to help dispel this misunderstanding. And government responses that hinge on censorship – such as Australia’s Combatting Misinformation Bill – aid adversaries in their campaigns.

Information Warfare is the weaponisation of communication – be it true, false, factual or fictional – to shape the behaviour of target audiences to support broader goals. This does not happen in isolation but is part of a broad suite of economic, military, and other operations.

You can see Information Warfare as a specialised form of marketing. Marketing is about communicating a particular message to get you to buy a particular product. Marketing is an instrumental use of communication to persuade the target audience to take a particular action; usually, to purchase a product. Information Warfare is the same – except it’s not trying to persuade you to buy something, but to do something.

Complex Web

Furthermore, most information operations are not premised on single, simple messages. Instead, they rely on a range of separate, seemingly unrelated messages that work together to shape the behaviour of an entire target group. This includes the actions of subgroups within the target group reacting against the messaging – and can even include messaging on both sides of an issue.

As such, Information Warfare operations often rely on exploiting real injustices and pointing to real problems to give their messaging legitimacy and build trust. The point is not the injustice or the truth of the message, but to weaponise that in ultimate support of strategic objectives. Like Iago in Othello, information warriors take whatever facts they can and spin them to suit their designs.

This means that Information Warfare communications do not need to be coherent or consistent. They are not fundamentally about whatever specific argument the communication is making. The argument is irrelevant to the information warrior. What matters is its impact – not just on those who hear it, but also those who oppose it.

Russian operations since 2016 are instructive here. The Russians did not have a preferred U.S. presidential candidate, nor did they influence the election’s outcome. However, they made it seem like they did through “implausible deniability”, as Allon Uhlmann and Stephen McCombie of Macquarie University’s Department of Security Studies and Criminology have shown.

The Russian objective was to give anti-Trump elements enough evidence to oppose him – not because they are anti-Trump but because a divided and polarised America would be a less effective adversary. They have continued with this.

The Hunter Biden laptop scandal plays into this approach. By all accounts, the laptop and its contents are now accepted as completely genuine. The reaction of serving and former intelligence officials, and the press at the time, was to call the laptop Russian disinformation and suppress it.

Moscow would have been gleeful at this because it reinforced its own messaging of untrustworthy U.S. elites censoring the truth to maintain power. The Russians wanted a distracted and dysfunctional American polity so they could prepare for their military invasion of Ukraine – and that is exactly what they got.

Early in the Cold War, Western intelligence agencies realised it was foolish to rely on censorship to counter communist propaganda. The whole point of the Western Alliance was that liberal democracy was superior to communist totalitarianism – and free speech and free association are fundamental to liberal democracy.

However, propaganda – the unrestricted political psychological warfare of the communists – did pose a real threat if not countered. The Alliance’s solution was simple – double down on free speech with the view that malicious propaganda could be drowned out.

To this end, they funded public broadcasters, independent publications, think tanks and academic scholarship, artists and writers. They used tax breaks, direct funding, and existing mechanisms to promote as many voices as they could.

The individual’s politics did not matter. The objective was not to determine the message, but to ensure multiple messages got out. It did not even matter if this led to messages that were critical or questioning of government policies. Democracies are meant to question their governments, after all.

The outcome was striking. While some communist-backed messages had an impact in the West, for the most part their campaign failed. The strategic objectives of communist Information Warfare – the collapse of liberal democracies and the downfall of the capitalist democratic West – did not happen.

By adopting an open approach to fighting Information Warfare on home soil, democratic nations were better able to respond to the problems communists were preying on to get their way. By being more democratic, they undercut the lure of revolution and tyranny.

The key to fighting information wars as democracies is to understand that there are no shortcuts. There is no legislation that will make misinformation go away. The price of victory is eternal vigilance.

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Republished with thanks to News Weekly. Image courtesy of Pexels.

About the Author: News Weekly

ANALYSIS / Freedom / HISTORY / Politics / Safety & Security / World

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