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[infowar.de] Arkin 30.09.05: Codename of the Week: Global Harvest
http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/earlywarning/2005/09/help_for_karen_.html
Help for Karen Hughes
Codename of the Week: Global Harvest
As Under Secretary of State Karen Hughes begins her monumental campaign to
improve the world's opinion of the United States, not to worry, military
information warriors are poised to jump in as soon as the FEMA of public
diplomacy falters.
Certainly one of the fastest growing military sectors is that of
information operations (IO). And in IO, there is no aspect of the military
effort to make friends and influence people overseas that is hotter right
now than one most people have never even heard of: human factors analysis.
According to an internal Defense Department document, Director of Central
Intelligence Directive (DCID) 7/3, "Information Operations and Intelligence
Community Related Activities," defines human factors analysis as: "The
psychological, cultural, behavioral, and other human attributes that
influence decision-making, the flow of information, and the interpretation
of information by individuals and groups at any level in any state or
organization."
If you are wondering what really happened to the early "data mining" and
"link analysis" projects associated with Able Danger and other programs,
look no further. It is now resident in new compartmented and secret
programs like that of the
<http://aia.lackland.af.mil/homepages/pa/spokesman/Jan05/atc7.cfm>Global
Harvest office at the Joint Information Operations Center (JIOC) in San
Antonio, Texas.
A wide variety of human factors analysis work has been done in the
intelligence and information warfare communities since the 1990's, just not
necessary under that name, and not in one place. The fledgling Land
Information Warfare Activity (LIWA) of the Army that supported Able Danger,
the Joint Warfare Analysis Center (JWAC), the Defense Intelligence Agency,
the National Security Agency and CIA, as well as a huge cadre of Air Force
information warfare specialists in the San Antonio area were all studying
foreign leaders' decision-making, "belief systems," and the communications
and information environment they operated in. They produced social network
analyses of leaders and their associates, particularly to support
operations in Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, and North Korea. The culmination
of this early work occurred in Kosovo in 1999, with a full fledged
<http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/earlywarning/files/the_other_kosovo_war_29_august_2001.doc>"crony
ta rgeting" campaign against Slobodan Milosevic.
By the time the Y2K threat loomed, poised to bring life as we know it to
a screeching halt, information warfare (IW) had become such a huge cottage
industry that one friend remarked that even the toilet paper in the
Pentagon was being labeled IW-related.
As is often the case with these new (or not so new) disciplines, soon
enough everything from tactical leaflet drops and loudspeaker operations,
to national-level computer network attack and covert operations were being
stuffed into IW (and its big brother, Information Operations). There was a
need to separate the varsity from the junior varsity, the pedestrian from
the boutique.
So the JIOC stood up in September 1999, redesignated from the Joint Command
and Control Warfare Center, which was itself formed from the nucleus of the
former Joint Electronic Warfare Center (JEWC). In 2000, the DIA established
its own Human Factors Analysis Center, and NSA followed with an Electronic
Space Analysis Center (nothing to do with space, up there, that is), while
the CIA and NSA established a jointly managed Information Operations
Technology Center. Soon we were winning the information war!
It was way too much entrepreneurial energy, the shadow warrior types say.
Others say it was duplicative, undirected, unfocused. As one expert as the
time
<http://www.army.mil/professionalwriting/volumes/volume3/may_2005/5_05_3.html>wrote,
the Defense Department's definition of information operations was "so
broad" that "IO is everything and it is nothing."
The Pentagon stepped in to harness all of the disparate resources and exert
greater control. On January 10, 2003, President Bush signed "change 2" to
the Unified Command Plan (UCP) 2002, designating U.S. Strategic Command
(STRATCOM), the grand-daddy of very old fashioned nuclear targeting, as the
lead command for the worldwide information operations mission. STRATCOM
took control of the JIOC, which provides "comprehensive operational and
technical support on the information operations (IO) aspects of military
operations." (The JIOC was authorized 271 positions as of December 2004,
including 100 contractors and three allied officers--Australia, Canada and UK).
Secretary Rumsfeld then signed the classified October 30, 2003 Information
Operations Roadmap, a comprehensive plan containing 57 recommendations in
order to make information operations a "core military competency."
One of the recommendations was giving STRATCOM operational tasking
authority over DIA's Human Factors Analysis Center as well as the NSA's
Electronic Space Analysis Center. With tasking authority over the JIOC and
these two other centers (and with its sights set on control of JWAC as well
-- JWAC is responsible for the "physical" space) -- the uber information
warrior would surely win the information war!
The task of integrating STRATCOM and the various intelligence agencies
falls to Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for
Intelligence and Warfighting Support. Boykin, famous for his
lets-win-the-battle-for-hearts-and-minds remarks about Islam and his own
Christian faith, has directed that the DOD improve its intelligence support
to information operations. In particular, he has directed the strengthening
of human factors analysis, methodologies, and products to ensure
"actionable" information for planners and operators.
Meanwhile, the Joint Chief of Staff is working to solve the definitional
problem that information operations are everything and thus nothing. Its 5
July 2005 draft update of the information operations doctrine, revealed
here for the first time, contains a new definition for information
operations: "The integrated employment of electronic warfare (EW), computer
network operations (CNO), psychological operations (PSYOP), military
deception (MILDEC), and operations security (OPSEC), in concert with
specified supporting and related capabilities, to influence, disrupt, or
deny human [my emphasis] and automated decision-making, while protecting
our own."
The draft doctrine breaks down the "information environment" into
information, physical and cognitive dimensions. The cognitive is called
"the most important of the three," and "the mind of the "decision maker"
and the "target audience (TA)," formerly called the populace, is called the
objective of all information information.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot: Global Harvest. It and other secret projects of
these various commands and centers are using dozens of different software
programs to integrate all of the "human factors" data, to, you guessed it,
win the information war!