{"id":1751713,"date":"2022-11-26T06:30:28","date_gmt":"2022-11-26T11:30:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1751713"},"modified":"2022-11-26T06:33:12","modified_gmt":"2022-11-26T11:33:12","slug":"dod-reevaluating-irregular-warfare-and-info-operations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/dod-reevaluating-irregular-warfare-and-info-operations\/","title":{"rendered":"DoD Reevaluating Irregular Warfare and Info Operations"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">14<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fdod-reevaluating-irregular-warfare-and-info-operations%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1751713&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/Ukraine-SOF-2.jpg\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\" alt=\"image\" \/><\/div>\n<p>As the Department of Defense is still transitioning from over two decades of counterinsurgency operations and doctrine to now challenging nation-states, it is examining what irregular warfare and information operations look like against these sophisticated actors.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhat we\u2019re struggling with right now [is] how do we evolve irregular warfare and our understanding thereof for great power competition, for challenging Beijing and Moscow, maybe differently than we were in the global wars on terror over the last couple of years,\u201d Richard Tilley, director of the Office of Irregular Warfare and Competition, whose office is also tasked with force design updates, said during the NDIA SO\/LIC Symposium Nov. 18. \u201cWe\u2019re in a period of transition where we\u2019re trying to figure out what is irregular warfare in this new era.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Tilley said that the lessons from the counterinsurgency era are still valuable as the DOD continues to contend with violent extremist organizations and proxy fights will persist into the future, noting that the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.fedscoop.com\/us-army-lesson-from-ukraine-war-cyber-ew-capabilities-not-decisive-on-their-own\/\">conflict in Ukraine is providing a \u201ccrash course\u201d<\/a> for a population to resist an invader or occupier.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe\u2019re going to face the problem that we have in Ukraine probably again and probably several other times over the coming decades. We need to figure out how to play in this information environment, how to influence populations, how to determine what a population\u2019s will to resist is and how to do that,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/defensescoop.com\/2022\/11\/16\/how-the-war-in-ukraine-is-forcing-dod-to-think-differently-about-armed-conflict-and-cybers-impact\/\">Ukraine is also demonstrating<\/a> that DOD must evolve its understanding of irregular warfare, Tilley said, especially as it applies to understanding a population\u2019s will to resist and succeed. <\/p>\n<p>For instance, the conventional wisdom was that Ukraine would fall very quickly to Russia, he said, noting \u201cwe\u2019re trying to figure out why did we get that so wrong,\u201d along with a long recent list of mea culpas. Those include the Iraqis not repelling ISIS from the city of Mosul and the swift defeat of the Afghan army by the Taliban.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe don\u2019t have a good track record of trying to identify this will to resist in these proxy and surrogate and ally populations,\u201d Tilley said. \u201cBut I think what we can hopefully do in the information space is trying to figure out better metrics and better analyses that allow us to understand that better.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>DOD is good at quantitative analysis such as the number of forces or assets, but not at qualitative analysis.<\/p>\n<p>The private sector could be a good place to turn for that given its long history with commercial marketing campaigns.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cYou look at marketing, that is qualitative analysis. What makes people drink Coke, what makes people drink Pepsi and how do you market to those individuals? I think the private sector has used the information domain through marketing to the Nth degree because that\u2019s how you make money. That\u2019s how you\u2019re profitable,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI think we, as the department and in the national security enterprise, need to be able to pull some of those lessons and try to figure out, how do you quantify and assess within the IC that local population\u2019s will to resist because, quite frankly, proxy warfare is not going anywhere and whether it\u2019s Europe or whether it\u2019s the Pacific, it\u2019s going be back and we need to have a better understanding of how our partners and allies are going to fight, are going to resist because if we keep missing, next time we may not be as fortunate where the Russians weren\u2019t probably as capable as we thought they were and the Ukrainians were a little bit more resilient than we thought we were and they didn\u2019t get overrun,\u201d Tilley added.<\/p>\n<h2 id=\"h-deterrence-and-active-deterrence\">Deterrence and \u2018active deterrence\u2019<\/h2>\n<p>When it comes to developing a future force, Tilley said DOD is looking at creating a joint force that can deter conflict in what officials call the competition phase that exists below the threshold of war. But deterrence and winning are not necessarily synonymous.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe point is not necessarily to win the war against these adversaries \u2014 the point is to deter that war. We have to really think about how are we using the information environment to message and to influence that adversary so they don\u2019t take actions that we don\u2019t want them to do, so we don\u2019t have to get ourselves into it into a war,\u201d he said. \u201cYou get through a whole bunch of ways that aren\u2019t warfighting. You do demonstrations, you do exercises, you do reveal and conceal, you do deception. You do all these different things, but we don\u2019t have a good conceptualization of how those things all nest together.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Nestled beneath one of the DOD\u2019s top pillars of its National Defense Strategy, integrated deterrence, is a new concept being gamed out for the information force: active deterrence.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAs we look at potential near-peer conflict, that phase between competition and conflict right now is called crisis, and that brings into your mind this idea of \u2018Oh no, something just happened, what do we do about it?\u2019 We coined a term that is a phase now that we call active deterrence. Now think of this as a military subset of integrated deterrence,\u201d said Thomas Browning, deputy chief technology officer for mission capabilities in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. \u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Behind this concept \u2014 which he said is still \u201cmostly in the wargame room right now\u201d \u2014 is how DOD can use capabilities such as cyber, electronic warfare, deception, perception management and other information-type capabilities together to change the adversary\u2019s calculus for going to war.<\/p>\n<p>He recognized that active deterrence is a bit of an oxymoron because it\u2019s done after deterrence fails.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s really this idea of how could we put those non-kinetic capabilities together in a way that has a meaningful effect on the adversary, meaningful effect on both their intent and ability to execute conflict,\u201d Browning said.<\/p>\n<p>His office has been conducting a series of exercises called Eloquent Omen that is gaming the concept out.<\/p>\n<p>It is \u201cpulling those threads of how do I take these capabilities and not just prove out that cyber tools could work, not prove that EW could work, but this integration of an information campaign where the cyber is accentuating the EW is accentuating the messaging that I\u2019m trying to bring across,\u201d Browning said. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to think through those potential, and I\u2019ll call them plays or capabilities, where we\u2019re taking cyber and EW and making those actual integrated capabilities much in the way you would do with kinetic operations and I don\u2019t think that\u2019s the norm today.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>One key lesson he said they\u2019ve learned from these exercises is that proper and early signaling to adversaries matters.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cA lot of the EW and cyber moves that we made, the adversary didn\u2019t have context for understanding what they were seeing or why they were seeing and it walked us into this understanding that I\u2019ve really got to start messaging early,\u201d Browning said. \u201cI\u2019ve got to start developing understanding in their mind, literally, of how to understand me so as you start developing those non-kinetic tools previous to conflict when you don\u2019t necessarily have the authorities to execute though. There\u2019s the time to actually build that story through messaging and through [information operations] so that as they see the effects, you get the intended response out of the adversary.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As the Department of Defense is still transitioning from over two decades of counterinsurgency operations and doctrine to now challenging nation-states, it is examining what irregular warfare and information operations<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1751716,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[547],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1751713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-bongino-report"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1751713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1751713"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1751713\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1751716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1751713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1751713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1751713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}