There is no doubt- as Baumard claims- that information warfare plays a fundamental role in today’s economy and society. Furthermore, its importance has led to the emergence of a new form of conflict and therefore led to a change in reasoning. Our highly-digitalized economies and society obviously present significant windows of vulnerability linked to the fact that the modern economic system cannot but be open and fluid. At any rate, the concept of information warfare – as is widely known – emerges primarily from American publications and emerges in the moment in which the legitimacy of information has been placed under discussion in the American context. Required to deal with significant budget cuts, the leading US federal intelligence agencies have attempted to justify the preservation of their budget by emphasizing the importance of protecting the nation’s economic security; and yet as early as the 90s, it had become clear that the logics of conflict present in the geopolitical sphere have been transferred to the context of the economic sphere in which nations must be capable of implementing strategies of dominance based on the control of both the information infrastructure and the flows of technological and economic knowledge.
A strategy that takes into account modern new needs must give careful attention to the vulnerability of critical information infrastructures (on the other hand, the rapid growth in computerized piracy has encouraged nations to create ad hoc organizations for the control and surveillance of the development of this new crime). Another observation regards the increase in the strong economic rivalry between nations that has lead to the fundamental apprehension that economic intelligence has become an authentic fact of life for the world’s leading industries; deeper knowledge of information mechanisms, in fact, becomes a fundamental element of success or failure. It is now precisely this crucial importance in economic context of the leading industries and multinationals that has compelled nations to officialize their approaches in the context of information intelligence. Even if the use of denigration, discrediting and disinformation campaigns has always been a part of both the political and economic world, in today’s world the acceleration of the data digitalization has created the need for both nations and certain companies to adopt offensive and defensive systems sufficient to the situation.
A large-scale disinformation operation waged against an industry or multinational corporation can create enormous economic damage. As known to psychological warfare experts, disinformation is certainly an offensive resource with highly particular characteristics because it is a sword that cuts in one direction only, its effects are particularly insidious and can be discovered only in a second moment, but above all, the objectives of disinformation are oriented to the loss of the adversary’s reputation and legitimacy on one hand and the loss of its financial support (in the case of companies, for example), on the other. Yet whereas in traditional conflicts the economy of forces was based on a relationship of inertia, and logistic superiority represented a fundamental dimension for either victory or defeat, in cognitive warfare, similar asymmetry cannot be imposed in the knowledge system, and above all, unlike traditional conflicts, information warfare has its own autonomy regardless of who constructs or sends the message.
Eliminating the spokesman of the message therefore does not modify the dimension of the cognitive conflict but on the contrary only strengthens the adversary. Furthermore, Anglo-American practices are based primarily on the need to immediately control the electronic sources that underlay the economic, political, and military decision-making system. In this strategic view, controlling the public news infrastructure assumes fundamental importance; in any case, a closer analysis shows that the control of the world’s information infrastructure is incompatible with its ample and de-structured way of diffusion in today’s world. The exponential growth of the information infrastructure does not permit the possibility for vertical or hierarchical coordination. Furthermore, the concept of strategic dominance is based on the ability of a state to prohibit or dissuade a rival nation from emphasizing its rules of conduct and on perception of reality.
This approach starts from the assumption that the global control of news flows infrastructure would permit the achievement of global economic and political dominion. In any case, this concept is revealed ingenuous because it ignores the fact that the control of the news differs from the formation of judgments and beliefs. Faced today with the emergence of cognitive warfare and the complexity and fluidity of information, traditional security services do not possess adequate culture because the belief system on which such systems are based is built on the collection of observable facts and the processing of such information: we have agents collecting information on one hand and agents making analysis on the other. This dual organization is certainly suited to traditional conflicts but is not adequate to cognitive conflict: the logic is completely different because due to the speed with which information moves only a very short time is available to control and analyze it this therefore requires rapid decision-making processes.
In other words, the capacity for interpretation and attribution of meaning in real time is the basis for cognitive warfare; furthermore, given that most non-state organizations are in fierce competition and have access to the same news from the same sources, it is highly improbable that a private or state-owned organization will acquire a decisive competitive advantage unless an improvement is made in the satellite control system over news and human information. After this clarification has been made, it must be repeated once again how crucial the control of the news flow is to victory and how mistaken it is to believe that merely destroying the adversary’s information infrastructure will suffice. On the contrary, the destruction of the latter can offer the adversary a greater degree of freedom or promote the use of alternative information tools in a context where – as is known – the distribution of information has been liberalized. Security services must realize that the current trend in worldwide information infrastructure is its Balkanization, or in other words, its dispersion and fragmentation. Efficiency in any case depends more and more on the mastery of decentralized cognitive capacity and less and less on the control of the information infrastructure. Their economy of forces in the context of modern political conflict lies on the mastery of very different cognitive systems and the imposition of a unified interpretation schema is not a strategy capable of providing fruit in the long-term.
Stating that Western Society depends- as Baud claims -on information is certainly an undeniable logical truth. An awareness of current events but also the ability to provide prompt, pertinent response has become an integral part of today’s society. Yet in regard to information warfare too much accent has been placed on the West’s growing dependency on information technology; in any case the real threats come not only from the technological sector but also the amount of influence wielded by information. Consider the fact that terrorism can be seen also as a way of communicating. At any rate, unlike traditional weapons, those of information warfare can be used whenever necessary both to serve economic interests and neutralize international competition. Furthermore, they can be placed into action very easily and adopted by both organizations and individuals. The extent of dimension of the information warfare depends on three other types of war:
information warfare or the war of numbers regarding the destruction of information infrastructure and that aims at paralyzing the adversary’s defense system;
the cognitive warfare with the objective of acquiring, circulating and integrating the information necessary to maintain greater knowledge than the adversary in order to gain an operative advantage;
the war of influence waged to manipulate both religious and public opinion in order to facilitate action against the adversary.
Even if these three aspects are autonomous they are in any case closely interlinked. It must now be forgotten that in the struggle against terrorism the West has all too often concentrated its attention only on the information dimension whereas the real vulnerability of democratic society lies in the context of the influence that represents, we repeat, the terrorism’s field of action. Yet intelligence must intervene in information warfare – as in any other form of conflict – as a useful element in making decisions and not as a weapon. There is no doubt, in this regard, that with the objective of learning all it can about the adversary, intelligence may prove useful to information warfare in revealing the enemy’s weaknesses and waging influence campaigns.
We would now like to dedicate our attention to cognitive warfare that includes all the methods and processes required to acquire, explore and distribute the information necessary in operative context. Acquiring information in all its forms, even computerized, is a part of warfare and implies not only the power of obtaining more news than the adversary but also faster access to the sources of information in order to act on the same with greater efficacy. Consequently, cognitive warfare includes measures for the camouflage and protection of information – the so-called passive measures – and also the instruments destined to deceive the adversary of one’s real operative intentions (the so-called active measures). Furthermore, cognitive warfare is an element that is also found both in the mechanisms of industrial management as a completion of the notion of economic intelligence and in knowledge management mechanisms and processes of the diffusion of knowledge through mechanisms of protection.
The war of influence is not only a fairly present threat but also lies at the base of numerous asymmetrical conflicts, and primarily regards the use of the media and the utilization of messages destined to influence or manipulate public opinion (or political decisions). Democratic society based on the free circulation of information does not accept – at least openly – an active practice of influence; despite this, our democratic societies are very vulnerable to information manipulation. Such manipulation is naturally not only made by nations but also by private pressure groups, and can play a significant role in influencing public opinion. Second of all, the influencing actions must necessarily be aimed at the achievement of strategic objectives, known jointly in both civil and military context, monitored to achieve specific psychological ends, and be founded on close cooperation between civil and military intelligence organizations; as it concerns actions of influence, they have one fundamental objective, in other words, the restoration or maintenance of the trust of the civil population in the authorities or the weakening of the adversary’s will to fight. In order to achieve these objectives efficaciously, such influencing actions must be conducted as if they were military operations and therefore on the basis of non-factious objective information.
Naturally enough, these objectives can be pursued through secretive operations that include propaganda and disinformation. On the other hand, increasing one’s own power advantage – also by denigrating or compromising that of the adversary through disinformation – has always played a part in the art of war. In an open and democratic society, the manipulation of public opinion is certainly possible, of course, but it must be implemented through new forms. In the context of the struggle against terrorism, information remains a determinant element, and must be developed through these three objectives during information warfare:
- a) there must be an information matrix upstream from the operative decision-maker, and this requires the ability to generate an awareness of the battlefield and to integrate this knowledge with the information necessary to wage war (which is substantially the ability to anticipate the enemy’s moves);
- b) the information matrix downstream from the operative decision that serves to acquire and maintain the technical means and the processes of command and conduct that permit any determined mission to be followed;
- c) the communication matrix between the state and public opinion regarding the management and perception of the conflict.
