Call to Action: “…Before Firing a Shot:” Operations in the Information Environment in the Marine Corps
Posted on: July 12,2022CTA/Intro: In a 7 July article in Breaking Defense, Justin Katz reported on the Commandant’s rationale behind the Marine Corps’ focus on “Information Warfare.”
In a contested environment, faced with a peer adversary, the Information Domain may prove decisive. Controlling the narrative, sharing information across disparate and distributed Marine, Special Operations, and Submarine forces and pushing national and theater intelligence and situational awareness to the tactical commanders of Stand-in Forces will require a different approach to Operations in the Information Environment.
Comments
Perspectives from putting emerging doctrine into practice:
– We don’t have adequate constructs for a tactical force (this has long been the Marine Corps milieu) that is now working in strategic spaces from both cognitive (narrative) and technical (cyber/space – authorities/permissions) perspectives and I’ll say this is even the case at the service level which is strictly by law a “man/train/equip” organization to be employed by someone else, but finding itself more and more as an element of influence/perception and within the non-kinetic WEZ of our adversaries every day. We’ll see where the emerging Marine Corps Information Command takes us but at least this doctrine is a good start at laying some foundation to think about it
-And I think that’s the biggest take away: a way to think about the application of information and that it needs to be a principal consideration from the very beginning. We are moving beyond the days of IO or the IRCs being “bolt ons” to the plan but information being the basis of the planning to begin with. I’m encouraged by what I see in the emerging joint doctrine (draft 3-04) about the importance of narrative at the beginning of planning (and an assessment framework per your discussion below about MOE in this realm – assessment has always seemed to be a long standing challenge for us unless you bake it in from the very beginning so the challenge of assessing information approaches really isn’t new to me in some sense albeit your collection plan to confirm the indicators might look different now adays). MCDP 8 gives us a good place to start.
-And while the narrative is important (see Maj Rob Benda’s article in the July 22 Gazette on “Specified Narrative” – very good) it is only one of three elements of information advantage. So per the short UKR analysis we’re doing here I believe UKR holds to prevailing narrative advantage due mainly to them doing exactly what they said they would do (fight) and RUS doing what they said they wouldn’t do (fight). Its the classic “say-do” gap and exclusive of an internal Russian audience, their pretense isn’t sticking with anyone despite a quite extensive mechanism to project their information (more on that in a bit).
-Second piece of info advantage is systems overmatch, and again as it relates to UKR, while the RUS forces have mass, their ability to coordinate that mass seems less effective than it could be and UKR seems to have a better approach to maneuver and fires specifically and while not direct support part of their system includes support from international partners so is germane to a systems comparison. You’ll think I’m an advocate of the Gazette, and I certainly am being on their editorial panel, but again recommend a July 22 article from Maj BA Friedman on the Recon-Strike complex and its relationship to maneuver warfare. I think he nails it:
“Since information warfare takes as its primary target the adversary’s information processing system (C2) and maneuver warfare seeks asymmetric, opportunistic ways of attacking critical vulnerabilities and weaknesses, the marriage of the two has the potential to be a potent form of warfighting. Where traditional maneuver warfare might seek positions of weaknesses in the adversary’s physical array, Information Age maneuver warfare would similarly take the C2 system of the adversary as its target, employ indirect and advantageous ways to disrupt, corrupt and deceive it through communicative and cognitive weaknesses as well as physical weaknesses through both kinetic and non-kinetic means.”
-Third piece of info advantage is force resiliency and essentially protecting our system from the effects of adversary efforts to disrupt/corrupt it. I keep thinking about the article about the “UKR cyber war that wasn’t” in the early stages of this conflict and how UKR built a resilient system to withstand the RUS informational and physical approach to the conflict. Interesting that they’re still fighting well above their weight class.
So my scorecard shows advantage:UKR and taking an information approach (cognitive and technical/direct and indirect) to combat the entire system is very effective. (Again, see Friedman’s article for a vignette on how the Taliban did this to take over Afghanistan last year…interesting).
While this post is admittedly tangential to Col Russell’s, it ties directly to the Corps’ approach to information from a domain and doctrinal perspective. One thing noted in MCDP-8 Information is the concept of “prevailing narrative” which gains a “public opinion or perception advantage yielding trust, credibility, or believability.” In short, it means that our actions match our words, that our message matches the facts on the ground; and conversely, that we are able to gain information advantage by demonstrating that our adversary’s actions on the ground do not match their words.
It is thus very disturbing to consider the implications of some of the “words” used to describe Russian combat operations in Ukraine in the latest Marinus piece in the August 2022 Marine Corps Gazette. Much of the article attempts to argue that Russia’s catastrophically bad military performance in the early weeks of the invasion was in fact a deception plan aimed at pinning down or attriting Ukrainian forces. There may be room for argument regarding Russian intent, although to claim that the significant losses in Russian equipment and manpower from their effort to seize Kyiv was all part of the plan seems a stretch.
Yet the implications of other arguments in the article are more concerning. Such arguments include:
-Russian “desire to avoid antagonizing the local people”
-the notion that part of Russia’s information narrative was that “the sustained occupation of [territory] by Russian forces would have supported the proposition that Russia was trying to conquer all of Ukraine,” which is not a Russian goal
-“avoidance of collateral damage that resulted, not only from the extraordinary precision of the weapons used by also from the judicious choice of targets”
-an “overall Russian policy of limiting missile strikes to obvious military targets”
-that Russia is “an adversary…liberated from…the brutality inherent in the legacy of Lenin”
The chasm between Marinus’ words and well-documented Russian actions on the ground – not to mention Russian words in themselves, which could not be clearer in stating goals of conquering Ukraine and Russifying it, which one would think might indeed antagonize the population – suggest that the author(s) themselves have proven highly susceptible to adversary information operations, which suggests that the priorities of internalizing the concepts of MCDP-8 have a long way to go, and also suggests that there will be serious challenges to this internalization and application of information warfare when senior commentators like Marinus show themselves to be so badly vulnerable to information campaigns of the enemy.
This is in addition to the very serious ethical implications raised by Marinus in recommending the Russian approach as a model closer to our own maneuver warfare doctrine. Indiscriminate targeting of civilian people and infrastructure, a deliberate campaign of collateral damage, and battlefield brutality that includes forcible relocation, torture, the murder of arrested civilians and prisoners of war, and the weaponization of sexual assault and rape are not models worthy of consideration.
That Marinus seems quite blind to Russia’s actions on the ground, as opposed to their words, indicates there is a long way to go in some corners in properly understanding and applying operations in the information environment. That Marinus, in all defiance of well-documented battlefield brutality, would argue that Russia’s information approach is a model to follow is much more concerning, raising serious questions about their perception of the laws of armed conflict and what message Marines should be taking from Russia’s very deliberate disregard for those laws. Perhaps the ethical problems deserve a separate “call to action,” but perhaps not given that MCDP-8’s message on “narrative” is that narrative supports operations because it tells the truth. Not “antagonizing the local people”? Russia has not self-proclaimed a goal of “trying to conquer all of Ukraine?” “Avoidance of collateral damage…from the judicious choice of targets?” “Limiting missile strikes to obvious military targets?” “Liberated from…the brutality inherent in the legacy of Lenin?” This is certainly a narrative, but it is not truth. And that such claims have entered the professional discourse of the Marine Corps say much about the state of our understanding of operations in the information environment, and none of it good.