Yesterday (June 26, 2008), Andrew Exum posted a blog entry over at Small Wars Journal on Information Operations. As part of the post, he laid out a challenge to SWC members.
So far, as of early morning the following day (June 27, 2008), a rather active thread on the question has emerged. Part of the thread was a comment I posted that tried to pull apart the roots of Information Operations (IO) so that an actual, analytically useful, definition could be produced. After working on the post for half an hour, I realized that it would require a lot more thought and detail, hence this post...
Good reads all, Ex's and Marc's posts and the Council discussion.
Comments
While the definition of IO in JP 3-13 is IMHO misguided--it's pretty good for Info Warfare, but we've excised that term from the doctrinal lexicon--the pub has the answer to a better one, which coincides with what I've been teaching for over a decade. (See NDU Strategic Forum #115, "Defining Information Power", June 1997, at http://www.ndu.edu/inss/strforum/SF115/forum115.html ) How do we characterize or define operations in our other environments? Simple: air operations are the use of the aerospace, maritime ops are the water/sea, etc. JP 3-13 does a very nice job out outlining the information environment--again, mirroring my teaching for the past decade--as the integration of three distinct yet interrelated dimensions, which I paraphrase as CONNECTIVITY (the ability to exchange information), CONTENT (what gets exchanged), and COGNITIVE EFFECT (how humans are affected). The biggest problem with the current 3-13 definition--and also the reason it was created--is that it is nothing more than a collection of budget programs and rice bowls: we have defined IO in terms of what we are bureaucratically able to spend DOD $$ on. That is understandable--concepts without resources are merely hallucinations--but also stupid and dysfunctional. A FAR better approach would be to define IO as terms of its operational environment: if what you are doing is connecting/sharing content, or creating content, or using it to achieve cognitive results, you are doing IO.