The federal government needs to improve coordination and communication among its national security branches to effectively project information warfare tactics, according to a leading information strategist.
Chuck de Caro, a leading information warfare strategist who also lectures at National Defense University and National Intelligence University on information warfare tactics, told an Air Force Association Mitchell Institute for Airpower Studies audience yesterday that coordination among the Defense Department, White House, CIA, Broadcasting Board of Governors and State Department needs to improve if the United States is to prevail against terrorist organizations and their use of video, which de Caro said is their primary strategic weapon because of how cheap the internet has made video dissemination.
de Caro said each government organization has its own way of approaching information warfare tactics, leading to a fragmented result.
“Without the integration of those five, it’s really tough to be effective,” de Caro told Defense Daily following his presentation. “There’s no common language, there’s no common school across the government about projecting information, to the best of my knowledge.”
de Caro, who coined the phrase SOFTWAR as “the hostile use of global visual media to shape another society’s will by changing its view of reality,” suggested not creating a new agency, but rather an ombudsman-like position, possibly filled by a reservist who is not seen as solely a military-type or an intelligence-type or a diplomacy-type, but someone who can inspire both soldiers and bureaucrats.
“It’s the president’s guy whose media credentials are unassailable,” de Caro said. “Pick a reservist who can put on a uniform and when the military people see him, they can say ‘Hey, he’s one of us.’ If you’re a reservist and put a uniform on and you’re legitimately understood to be that way, you do it. How is that any different than the concept of ‘Citizen/Soldier’ upon whose broad shoulders we got this republic?”
de Caro said coordinating information warfare efforts is a worthwhile investment for the United States in the war on terror because influencing the lives and beliefs of others is more effective, and efficient, than traditional weapons programs. He said the mission of information warfare by the United States against terrorism is to convince those potential terrorists, who were likely born into a tribal region where an older patriarch wielded power, that their lives and liberties had value beyond what someone “who happened to be born before them” declared.
“Your mission of information warfare is to look at that broad demographic and say ‘You know, the idea of you being responsible for your own life and your life is valuable and not a product that can be bartered by someone else who happened to be born first, your liberty is yours and precious,’” de Caro said. “Giving those ideas to those people who would not know its (liberties are) self-evident defines our mission of information warfare across the spectrum of the United States government now and in the future.”
de Caro said a frustration he has teaching information warfare tactics is that they don’t often reach the highest ranks. He said he teaches “the best of the best” lieutenants and lieutenant colonels who are either going to get promoted to generals, or not get promoted and likely leave the military, and those guys who do get promoted have to decide if they want to rock their career boats on his information warfare tactics.
“So in class, I’d say 20 percent react…(with) dancing eyes, buying, understanding it,” de Caro said. “Then 20 percent see the threat, going, ‘Gee, that’s 16 years in this and he’s asking me to take a crap shoot when I could take the easy way out because I have a mortgage and a wife.”