Information Operations (I/O)

Excerpts from "Information Operations: Putting the 'I' back in DIME", an official strategy paper written by Robert Steele:

IO content can be thought of in two parts: Strategic Communication (the message) and OSINT (the reality). The first cannot be effective without the second. It is not possible to craft the right message, nor to deliver that message to the right person at the right time in the right context, without first understanding “ground truth” at a substate level of granularity (tribes, villages, neighborhoods). OSINT is the horse seeing the path, strategic communication is the cart carrying the message. One must precede the other.

Surge local focus for ATTENTION. Classified assets simply do not surge. Classified imagery satellites are optimized for hard targets and do not do well against jungle canopy or caves in mountains. Signals capabilities are terribly ineffective against Third World languages and fast-changing signatures. Clandestine assets tend to be clustered in the capital cities and focused on the cocktail party circuit. They also do not transfer well—in one case, two clandestine case officers sent to Somalia without language skills literally became unhinged, according to an extensive investigation by The Washington Post. In contrast, private sector capabilities, with all necessary language and local knowledge qualifications, focused on open sources can surge very ably.43 Commercial imagery on demand within 2 days, with 2-day repeat cycles, and 1-meter resolution? Broadcast monitoring, local area gray literature collection, mosque sermon monitoring, a photograph of an arms dealer’s front door taken with a cell phone camera, boots on the ground for verifying whether the new uranium mine really exists? No problem. Not only no problem, but available at a fraction of the cost of a classified asset. All you need is a decent budget and a mind-set acknowledging that legal and ethical open sources of information just might be your best option. It bears mention that open sources can be discreet—commercial enterprises and private investigators routinely sign and enforce nondisclosure agreements with severe penalties for infractions.

Since DHS and its constituencies cannot afford the high-end systems that DoD has been funding for itself, and DoD cannot afford to pay for 50 to 5,000 C4I nodes across America, there is only one option: an open source software solution that allows everyone to tie in to a new Open Source Information System-External (OSIS-X), and the melding of OSIS-X into an Application-Oriented Network (AON)60 that permits the sharing of secret information on a by-name basis regardless of nationality 24/7. There is a subtlety involved in all this that requires strong scrutiny by both DoD and DHS information and intelligence managers. While DoD can and should be responsible for global monitoring in support of defense missions, we must be accutely conscious of the possibility (in my opinion) that 50 percent of the “dots” relevant to preventing the next 9/11 will be “bottom-up” dots collected at the county level by direct observation from citizens, public employees, and law enforcement professionals. Today those dots have no place to go. Although congressional hearings have been held and will be held again on the need for a national domestic intelligence network, DoD should consider a pilot project with the U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) and a few key states (e.g., New York, Texas, Virginia) in which DoD’s man-machine foreign language processing capabilities are made available to all 911 operators, at the same time that a new number, 119, is established as a pathway for citizens to report via locationally-aware voice, image, or electronic message, any suspicious individuals, packages, or activities.

The bulk of the money for intelligence is invested in technical collection rather than in Tasking, Processing, Exploitation, and Dissemination (TPED). Of intelligence funding, 99 percent is focused on secret collection rather than open source information acquisition and exploitation. Emerging threats and nonstate actors are best understood through realization of Dr. Cambone’s vision of universal coverage, 24/7, in all languages, using open sources of information. At the same time, DoD lacks adequate personnel with language skills relevant to most of the complex emergencies and conflict zones where U.S. forces are engaged.

The global information explosion and its logarithmic increase cannot be understated. Figure 2 illustrates where information quantities are headed. Information has doubled over these past years, so we are now looking at 100 billion gigabytes or 100 exabytes, roughly equivalent to 2 trillion four-door filing cabinets of hard-copy documents. Within this complex multimedia and multilingual environment, the noise to signal ratio will get tougher, and so also will the early warning, anomaly detection, and pattern recognition challenges. This is just the digital information—when one adds unpublished local or expert knowledge, locally-available hard copy or “gray literature,” and geospatial information as well as television and audio programming not available through the Internet, the awesome magnitude of this challenge becomes apparent.

Within each nation-state, the national government, the military, and the national law enforcement community represent just a fraction of the local knowledge and the direct access to varied open sources of multilingual and multimedia information. The seven other “tribes” include the business sector, the academic community, the NGOs, the local or regional news media, and self-organized citizen groups, labor unions, and religious congregations. Our concept of operations provides for the facilitation of web-based voluntary but also accredited and authenticated participation by any and all elements whose employees will be afforded anonymous access across the system, with the entire process taking place generally through and with the encouragement of their governments. The creation of such networks within each nation-state, and within each region, actually facilitates strategic communication in that the same network used to receive open source information can also be used to broadcast, in a carefully measured manner, specific messages to specific groups.

The U.S. Government has some pockets of excellence in sensemaking, but, in general, most of the government, including DoD, is still in the industrial era of paper reports and isolated human analysts trying to “connect the dots” without adequate toolkits. DoD needs a Strategic Decision-Support Center such as has been proposed by Captain Scott Philpott, USN, one of the original architects of the USSOCOM “pit.” Such a Center must bring together in one place the following elements:

• OSINT super-searchers with global access;
• Classified super-searchers with full access to all raw secrets;
• Brainstorming network with both in-house and distributed experts;
• Geospatially and time/date-based visualization; and,
• Modeling and simulation using rapid response incremental approaches.

[Me: The rapid Processing, Exploitation, and Dissemination of the German video 'Green Helmet Guy' could have immediately switched Hezbollah's PR victory of Qana into a psychological victory for Israel. Moral shaming--the appeal to emotional intuition to engender a specific reaction--is most effective when coupled with such visceral fare. Such an information operation would have been very effective had the US or Israel been able to exploit and disseminate the damning video using all government and media channels it could find. In the future, the US should task analysts to comb the web and local media for such things, and, either anticipating its worth or empirically testing by distributing it overnight to a blog, then saturate main media channels with the product. Furthermore, the US should have several of these IO's in its quiver before operations begin, and it should have an exploitation strategy that takes into account the non-abelian nature of crescendo, and the muffling effect of point-counterpoint.]

DoD needs to create or contract for a global open source acquisition, analytics, and technical information-sharing environment. It must be able to increase by an order of magnitude, and then a double order of magnitude, the near-real-time multilingual and multimedia information that can be delivered to DoD elements. It would be used to support operational planning, acquisition and logistics management, and all-source intelligence targeting, evaluation, and integrated production. This capability must merge global acquisition, translation, statistical analysis, analytic services (including historical and cultural analysis), and tailored dissemination in near-real-time. Such a capability will dramatically reinforce DoS public diplomacy, DoD strategic communication, and other missions, while being directly transferable to DHS. For example, the man-machine foreign language network can be used to reinforce all 911 Emergency Responder networks now lacking in foreign language capabilities.

There is no substitute for subject-matter experts (SME). However, the current practice is biased in favor of SMEs who are captive within vendor organizations, and consequently just one layer removed from the bureaucratic mind-sets they are supporting. There is also a bias toward SMEs that are U.S. citizens and have clearances. This is not the most effective means of understanding the real world. Instead, we must strike a balance in our outreach and integration by embracing:

• World-class experts regardless of nationality, hired one day at a time,
• World-class experts that are U.S. citizens without clearances,
• Retired government or private sector specialists, and
• Dedicated full-time analysts at the journeyman level.

If a vendor cannot readily identify the top 25 experts in the world on any topic, he or she is not ready to provide world-class support.

Precision Strategic Communication.
Novices do broadcast press releases. Journeymen do specialized lists. The real masters, however, know how to reach key communicators in any domain, any country, “by name.” Moreover, they employ individualized messages, informed by values-based biographies and sophisticated social network analysis.

Our second analytic frame of reference combines a deep understanding of human psychology and sociology with a suitably complex yet refined understanding of the dimensions of revolutionary change in any nation-state, tribe, or neighborhood. Analysis of emerging and unconventional threats is not about traditional orders of battle, but rather about the psychology of the individual and the sociology of the substate group. It is about connecting ideas and people.