Report: The War America is Currently Losing


Cyber-warfare conjures up images of darkly lit rooms with shadowy individuals pouring over screens filled with unintelligible text and symbols. Perhaps that’s somewhat accurate, but wherever and whomever these people are, they pose a real threat to our nation, and not just with regard to military secrets. The ability to conduct our lives and enjoy things like electricity depend on data remaining secure.

John C. Inglis, former deputy director of the National Security Agency, said cyber attacks are only one form of influence, propaganda, and disinformation attacks being waged in the cyber war of ideas.

“Cyber warfare, in my view, is not a standalone entity,” Inglis told a Senate subcommittee hearing Thursday. “When you’re talking about information warfare, it’s at that top-most stack, and it does not necessarily comprise of an exchange of tools or an exchange of literal warfare. It is, in fact, a conflict of ideas.”

Apparently we are not doing well in this regard.

If what we are currently doing is not working, obviously a change is mandatory, especially considering what is at stake.

Rand Waltzman, a specialist on information warfare with the RAND Corp., told the subcommittee the U.S. government needs to review and revamp laws and polices in the information warfare realm in order to better fight influence warfare.

“Operations in the information environment are starting to play a dominant role in everything from politics to terrorism to geopolitical warfare and even business, all things that are becoming increasingly dependent on the use of techniques of mass manipulation,” Waltzman said, adding that information warfare operations “occur at a speed and at an extent previously unimaginable.”

Part of the problem revolves around whether the U.S. wishes to abandon some of its ethical priorities or even change its laws to allow what might be thought to be a more aggressive approach to information warfare.

Michael D. Lumpkin, a former State Department strategic messaging official, criticized the U.S. government’s capability to counter disinformation and promote its messages as outdated and stifled.

“We are hamstrung by a myriad of reasons, to include lack of accountability and oversight, bureaucracy, resulting in insufficient levels of resourcing and an inability to absorb cutting-edge information and analytic tools, and access to highly skilled personnel,” Lumpkin said.

At the same time, Lumpkin said America’s enemies are increasing their capabilities and investment.

“This, while our adversaries are increasing their investment in the information environment, will not be constrained by ethics, the law, or even the truth,” he said.

In this sense, we’re not talking exclusively about hacking government secrets, but rather the deliberate pursuing of disinformation campaigns.

Clint Watts, a former FBI agent and specialist on information operations, said Russia is the leading power in the use of information operation.

“Russia does five things that sets it apart from others in terms of influence,” Watts said. “One, they create content across deliberate themes, political, social, and financial messages, but they hyper-empower those with hacked materials that act as nuclear fuel for information atomic bombs.”

These information bombs power political groups and other profiteers in the social media space, further amplifying their messages.

It would sound like America is largely “out to lunch” on these issues.

Both the Islamic State’s social media campaigns and Russia’s influence operations need to be countered, in addition to the use of cyber means.

“When it comes to Americans countering cyber influence operations, when all is said and done, far more is said than done,” Watts said. “We talk about it a lot, but we do fewer iterations than our Russian adversaries.”

Watts said that when the United States has acted in the information operations space, “it hasn’t been effective, and at worse it’s been counterproductive,”

“Despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars since 9/11 on U.S. influence and information operations, we’ve seen the expansion of al Qaeda and the Islamic State,” Watts said. “We’ve excessively focused on bureaucracy and digital tech tools, but at the same time these social media monitoring tools have failed to counter al Qaeda. They did not detect the rise of ISIS, nor did they detect the interference of Russia in our election last year.”

This is all very disturbing. Not only is there the issue of keeping national secrets secure, but there is the decision as to how to combat disinformation campaigns. And, as the videos below describe, the threat to our infrastructure is even more grave.

It’s not like the U.S. government has always been a source of undiluted truth, and it’s clear that a sizeable portion, if not most of our population realizes that.

We certainly neither need nor desire a “Ministry of Truth.” Yet doing nothing is not an option either.

Source: Washington Free Beacon



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