Reorganization Is Not Transformation: Why Information Must Become the Army’s Seventh Warfighting Function
Abstract:
In Elevating Information: Why the Army Should Establish Information as a Core Warfighting Function for Multi-Domain Operations, I argued that the Army should make information a seventh warfighting function. Instead of addressing its underlying challenges with information in warfighting, it is consolidating its Information Operations (IO) and Psychological Operations (PSYOP) communities into a single branch under the US Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School (USAJFKSWCS). Despite the school’s claim that this is a transformational change in how the Army employs information, this article contends that it is not. Merging the IO and PSYOP branches is, at best, an administrative housekeeping task. The merger creates no new capability and does not enhance existing capability for the Army’s warfighting forces. This merger does not change how the Army’s conventional formations plan, train, or fight with information. Relocating IO to the special-operations schoolhouse will further silo a scarce capability inside the special-operations enterprise and pull information expertise further away from the corps, divisions, and brigades that need it most. To enact a truly transformational approach, the Army must establish information as the seventh warfighting function, build capable information cells at warfighting headquarters, resource conventional forces with organic information formations, and train information at echelon, in both professional military education and at combat training centers.
The Case for Merging Information Operations and Psychological Operations
The recent Special Warfare Journal article by Major George Wasickanin makes the case for merging the Army’s Information Operations (IO) and Psychological Operations (PSYOP) career fields. Major Wasickanin correctly diagnoses the central problem: peer and near-peer adversaries can potentially outmaneuver the United States in the information environment, as his example of the 2025 Black Sea disinformation effort against NATO partners illustrates.
His argument makes several reasonable claims. First, the Army’s information capabilities are today scattered “across various commands, branches, and centers of excellence,” and a single branch imposes unity where there was fragmentation. Second, the Psychological Operations Qualification Course must modernize away from a counter-radicalization focus needed to support the Global War on Terrorism toward large-scale combat operations. Third, by merging the IO and PSYOP career fields, the Army produces officers who can both plan and conduct psychological operations and integrate information into the operations process.
By unifying the PSYOP and IO branches and modernizing the curriculum, the Army provides some tangible improvements for officers in those career fields. Yet this solution does not reach the Army’s central problem with information; the diagnosis is right, but the proposed solution falls short of it. Fundamentally, none of these changes elevate the doctrinal status of information, the staff that employs it, within the Army’s warfighting formations. Nor does it build an available force structure to conduct information operations for a division commander. The merger merely improves initial qualification training; it does nothing to change the force.
Merging IO and PSYOP Leaves Doctrine Untouched
Army Doctrine Publication (ADP) 3-0, Operations, is the Army’s foundational statement of how it fights. In its March 2025 edition, ADP 3-0 recognizes six warfighting functions: command and control, movement and maneuver, intelligence, fires, sustainment, and protection. The Army provides a useful definition for a warfighting function, describing it as a group of tasks and systems, including people, organizations, information, and processes, united by a common purpose that commanders use to accomplish missions. ADP 3-0 identifies information as one of the five dynamics of combat power—leadership, firepower, information, mobility, and survivability—which, by doctrine, “requires all warfighting functions to generate and apply.” While current Army doctrine requires information to produce combat power, the glaring gap is that it provides no dedicated function to produce it.
A warfighting function is not just a label; it determines how the Army fights. Warfighting functions have a dedicated cell on every Army staff from brigade to corps. This cell provides each warfighting function with a seat at the table during the Army’s military decision-making process and in the targeting working groups that drive operations. While the Army organizes the G39 for information operations on the staff of a division and corps, it remains incompletely resourced and empowered compared to the six warfighting functions. In the March 2025 revision of Field Manual (FM) 3-0, multidomain operations remain the Army’s central warfighting concept, drawing on lessons from the Russia-Ukraine war. While multidomain operations elevated the rhetorical importance of the information dimension, they did not institutionalize information as a warfighting function. The Army cannot have a doctrine that calls information decisive while treating it as an afterthought.
The merger described in HQDA Execution Order 083-26, “Information Warfare (IWAR) Initiatives,” will not change the Army’s approach to information. Creating a single career field and a single qualification course does not empower an information planner on a division staff. It does not require a corps commander to weigh effects in the information environment with the same emphasis as kinetic fires and does not give a brigade commander a single additional soldier to plan and execute information operations. Major Wasickanin’s article claims that new graduates will “integrate information effects with the same rigor the Army applies to integrating fires and maneuver.” But fires and maneuver are integrated with rigor because they are warfighting functions. Army doctrine establishes a dedicated cell for each function and, through that cell’s chief, gives it a vote in operations. A combined branch does little to change the Army’s systemic problem with information.
Reorganization Masquerading as Transformation
Once you strip away the language of ‘cognitive warfare,’ ‘lethality,’ and ‘transformation,’ what remains is the consolidation of two under-resourced career fields. The persistent temptation in any large institution is to mask a hard structural problem behind an administrative change that leaves the underlying problem alone.
This is not a new problem for the Army, which has chronically struggled to define its approach to information. One review found seven different names for the Army’s information mission set in four decades, spanning “command, control, and communications countermeasures” in 1981 through “command and control warfare,” “information warfare,” “information operations,” “inform and influence activities,” and “information advantage.” The author concludes that the Army in the 2020s is roughly no farther ahead in its doctrinal understanding of information than it was in the early 1990s. The Army knows the importance of information in warfighting but is unsure what to call it or how to organize to employ it. The current merger of IO and PSYOP is just the latest iteration of the historical pattern. Major Wasickanin’s own article notes that the effort was originally branded “Information Warfare (IWAR),” which has now been abandoned in favor of Psychological Operations, the original branch name. The capability that the Army has renamed seven times in forty years does not need an eighth name.
A transformational change that would allow the Army to fight with information in large-scale combat operations would include new formations, enhanced staff structures at echelon, manning authorizations, and a doctrinal imperative that makes information central to planning.
The consolidation of PSYOP and IO delivers none of these changes. The merger will undeniably impact the soldiers in those career fields, yet will be a cosmetic change that is largely invisible to the Army’s warfighting formations that those soldiers exist to support.
The Ukraine war continues to demonstrate the necessity of elevating information to a central role in operations and planning. The most important variable on the battlefield that allows leaders to transform information capability into effects is not technology but organization. Information and space capabilities deliver value only when a force has the structure to incorporate them into combined-arms maneuver. Russia demonstrates how a stove-piped military staff fails to convert its information-warfare advantages into tangible battlefield results. The US Army War College’s integrated study of the war considers information advantage one of just four factors in modern land warfare. Information sits alongside fires, maneuver, and sustainment. The lesson the war in Ukraine offers the US Army is that organizational structure determines to what degree information matters.
The Special-Operations Center of Gravity
The merger may also be pulling the Army’s most capable information planners in exactly the wrong direction. The IO career field was the Army’s integrator for information inside its main warfighting formations, such as corps, divisions, and brigades. The IO officer’s role is to synchronize information-related capabilities for the conventional commander. Folding that officer into PSYOP, a special-operations branch, risks subordinating information-warfare expertise to special-operations priorities at a time when conventional formations dominate the Army’s focus on large-scale combat operations.
The Army already has very limited information-warfare-aligned capabilities. The Army fields only two active-component Psychological Operations groups, the 4th and the 8th. Both are assigned to the 1st Special Forces Command (Airborne) and provide support primarily to special operations forces. The 8th Psychological Operations Group, together with its 3rd and 9th Psychological Operations Battalions, is slated for deactivation in fiscal year 2026. As a result, the Army will rely on a single active-component group in crisis to support all its special operations and conventional warfighting requirements. With three-quarters of the Army’s PSYOP force in the Reserve Component, the Army lacks a readily deployable capability to employ influence on the battlefield without an extended delay for mobilization and deployment.
As a result, the brigade combat team, division, or corps has little or no organic capacity to conduct target-audience analysis, develop and produce products, run social-media operations, or integrate influence with cyberspace and electronic warfare. When the Army needs those capabilities, they are resourced from the Reserve Component, whose forces lack the habitual staff relationships complex warfighting demands and often arrive too late to be relevant. The merger of IO and PSYOP will drive information-warfighting expertise deeper into the special-operations enterprise. Operations in the information environment are central to large-scale combat operations, and warfighting formations need organic capability at the onset of crisis. Relying on loaned special-operations forces, or on reserve forces that arrive too late to matter, is a recipe for failure.
Train Information Warfighting at Echelon, Not at the Schoolhouse Alone
Updating the PSYOP qualification course, no matter how modern, does not prepare the Army to fight and win in the information environment. At the brigade, division, and corps level, the information fight is waged in the targeting and synchronization working groups. This is where the Army achieves effects in the information environment, and information planners today do not compete on equal footing with kinetic fires or maneuver. There is a dearth of understanding of information among Army planners outside of the specialized career fields that conduct operations in the information environment.
The Army must institutionalize information competencies into professional military education and then evaluate information warfighting in combat training center rotations. The Army already invests in information warfighting at the National Training Center and the Joint Readiness Training Center. It is here that it replicates the civil information environment and the opposing forces’ electromagnetic spectrum. Yet the Army must expand this further by increasing the opposing force’s use of deception and disinformation, training leaders and staff to fight an enemy who maneuvers cognitively as well as physically. What is measured on combat training centers is what is valued, and every rotational unit must be evaluated on its effectiveness in integrating information into maneuver to the same degree they are evaluated on integrating fires and maneuver.
What Actual Transformation Requires
If the Army is serious about information as a pillar of multidomain operations, it must first establish information as the seventh warfighting function. This is the only mechanism that guarantees information is integrated at every echelon from the start of the operations process rather than sprinkled on top. The Army already understands how to run warfighting functions this way. Consider protection: as a warfighting function, it gets a chief of protection and a protection cell at every echelon. On every staff, there is a recurring protection working group on the battle rhythm, where the outputs are briefed to the commander and injected into the targeting process. Protection does not rely on the commander’s personal interest; Army doctrine requires that it be a primary consideration in planning. A warfighting function provides the Army with a dedicated staff with a chief of the warfighting function at every echelon. This chief has a seat at the table in the military decision-making process — one that information currently lacks. This is the fundamental difference between a capability a commander may choose to employ and a warfighting function that the Army is organized to employ.
Army officers have advanced versions of an information warfighting function in Military Review, including a 2020 call to make information the Army’s seventh warfighting function, and to evaluate how such a function would be resourced. In contrast to the US Army, the US Marine Corps, which fights in the same information environment, took decisive action on integrating information into its formations, and established information as its seventh warfighting function. To appreciate how far the US Marine Corps was willing to invest in information, it assigned a Lieutenant General as a Deputy Commandant for Information, who was then charged to resource and integrate information in warfighting. This is an exceptional commitment from the service that authorized the fewest general officers.
The Army must further build its information capability into conventional formations; this includes expanding information cells at every echelon and investing in new formations. The Theater Information Advantage Detachments and Multi-Domain Effects Battalions are a solid step in this direction. The Army must go further and field active-component information forces that belong to the corps, divisions, and brigades they are tasked to support. Relying on capability borrowed from special operations in crisis or on Reserve Component forces that will likely arrive too late to the theater to matter, further relegates information as an afterthought in planning.
Finally, the Army must train the whole staff to understand how information affects warfighting, rather than relying solely on specialist career fields. Information must be integrated into professional education from the Basic Officer Leader Course and continue through the Army War College. Further, the Army must continue its emphasis on the information environment in every combat training center rotation, but also go further, and grade information warfighting the same way it does the integration of fires into maneuver.
Is This Feasible?
The most ardent objection from the Army is likely to be the twin challenges of cost and difficulty. For the Army to add a new warfighting function, it would require the US Army Transformation and Training Command (T2COM) to lead a doctrine revision. This process is what would ultimately drive force-structure changes beyond mere realignment. The Army has considered and declined similar proposals before, including failed bids to make special-operations and human-domain warfighting functions. Building organic information capability across warfighting echelons will undoubtedly require manpower and training time, two resources the Army has never had enough of to meet every documented requirement.
Yet, the argument shouldn’t be “this will cost too much” but rather, is the cost now cheaper than losing the information fight in the next large-scale combat operation? The structural changes to integrate information as a warfighting function might cost just a fraction of a single weapons procurement program; the difference is that information is a proven vulnerability that potential American adversaries are willing to exploit. Adding information as a warfighting function is achievable; the Army has altered how it views combat power as recently as its March 2025 doctrine revision around the five dynamics. The Marine Corps proved that adding an information warfighting function and the headquarters personnel to resource it won’t precipitate an institutional collapse. The obstacle for the Army is not feasibility; it is its willingness.
Conclusion
Information becomes a force multiplier on the battlefield when commanders have the resources necessary to integrate it into their operational approach from the outset. In one of the clearest examples in recent history, Ukrainian commanders in 2022 telegraphed a counteroffensive toward Kherson, massing forces that drew substantial press coverage, all with the intent to misdirect the Russians toward a southern axis of advance. Russia failed to see through the Ukrainian deception and shifted reserves. Ukraine then struck in the north, in Kharkiv Oblast. Unsurprisingly, Russian forces were unprepared and were quickly routed, allowing Ukraine to recapture thousands of square kilometers. Throughout, the objective was the employment of information to achieve positional advantage and enable a numerically inferior, less capable force to successfully mass combat power at the decisive point.
Now consider a scenario where the US Army fights its next large-scale combat operation with a division conducting a deliberate defense to protect a vital American ally. Will the division have the ability to use information to achieve a decisive advantage, or will effectiveness be hampered by an adversary that places greater importance on the employment of information? The US Army has achieved significant successes in the past, employing information decisively without the need for a dedicated warfighting function. A compelling example is the deception operation that allowed the coalition to achieve surprise during the ground offensive in Operation Desert Storm. Yet Russia, which has used information effectively at other points in the war, was itself outmaneuvered in Kharkiv in 2022. The question for senior Army leadership is not whether the Army can fight without a dedicated information warfighting function, but whether the modest cost of structural transformation is worth enabling a decisive force multiplier against future adversaries in large-scale combat operations.
The difference between these two scenarios is not technology or talent, key areas in which the US Army maintains an advantage over most potential adversaries. Rather, it is how a force wields information to fight wars; does it view information as a central component of operations or an afterthought to enable the maneuver plan once it is written? The risk is that adversaries will outperform the US Army in the information environment, particularly those who have already elevated information to the level of their own warfighting functions. Combining the IO and PSYOP qualification courses and branches is inherently an administrative change that will do little to change how the Army is prepared to use information to fight and win. Only the Army’s senior leadership can decide to make information the seventh warfighting function and resource warfighting commands with the forces and expertise to achieve information advantage. The Marine Corps and the Joint Force have already decided that information is central to their warfighting doctrines, yet the Army’s approach continues to underprioritize information’s role in its approach to warfighting. The question that remains is whether the Army will continue to administratively reorganize or if it will finally transform how it fights with information.
Author’s note: LTC David R. Cowan, US Army (Ret.), previously argued for an information warfighting function in Small Wars Journal. The views expressed are the author’s own and do not represent the position of the US Army or the Department of Defense.
