Information Operations: Warfare and the Hard Reality of Soft Power

Abstract

INFORMATION OPERATIONS: Warfare and the Hard Reality of Soft Power Edited by Leigh Armistead Washington, DC: Brassey's, 2004. xviii, 278pp, US$48.00loth (ISBN I57488-698-3)It is surprising to encounter a book about information and communications that is both exceptionally poorly written and yet worth reading. The faults in presentation are probably the result of its multi-contributor format (14 authors of six unattributed chapters) drawn from a military teaching environment at the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, VA. Intended as a textbook, it appears made up of lecture notes directed at military and intelligence students of information operations (IO). It reeks of the powerpoint pedagogy that has dominated a decade of institutional teaching.Interestingly, the book's chief strengths arise out of these same weaknesses. It offers a window into the evolving conceptual and organizational foundations of perhaps the most important area of new military, security and diplomatic thinking in the US strategic arsenal. It does this in the authentic voice of military and intelligence personnel at mid- and junior levels where much of the innovative defence policy thinking in any country begins.New ideas require new terminology and new organizational forms. Readers from outside the American IO communities will find helpful the book's seven pages of acronyms, together with its organization and flow charts, in navigating contemporary American IO doctrine.The authors pose an interesting question at the outset of the book: Would you recognize that you were in a revolution if you were in it? Their fervent answer is that policy levels in the American government have been slow to adapt to the fact that we are indeed in the grip of a revolution driven by the advances and ubiquity of electronic technology.An important result is that information and communications, always important in military, security, and diplomatic matters, have taken on heightened importance. They are now the principal weapons in a new battlespace, one that is focussed on the 'wetware', that is, the 'gray matter' of the brain in which opinions are formed and decisions made. The most, perhaps only effective weapon in this battlespace is information.They demonstrate that in the United States and several other countries (including Russia, China, and Australia), the fields once known as information warfare and public diplomacy have converged and expanded qualitatively and quantitatively well beyond their second World War and Cold War boundaries. …