I wrote this piece as I was leaving the Army, I was planning on letting it sit in the archives for a while but I guess I’ll go ahead and explain what it’s talking about.
1. The Russian information operations are not about the American elections. It’s been a sustained information warfare campaign for the last several years, and the elections were part of it.
2. The Russians are playing on existing differences in society. The key difference between their modern campaign and traditional campaign is they have population data to target their propaganda, so they can identify arbitrary fracture lines in groups.
On a side note, this is the same technique that traditional human intelligence uses, which the Russians are good at. Most people are generally good people and don’t manipulate others intentionally, so if this is new to you the US Army’s FM 2-22.3 covers about 20 different methods (non-exhaustive) of manipulating individuals with this sort of information, intended for interrogation. It covers playing on peoples’ fears, their ego, love, etc. The Russians are just doing this on a wide scale, albeit it’s also the same thing other advertisers do, just more widespread and coordinated.
3. Undermining groups is not random. It’s using an evolutionary strategy of undermining groups threatening to Russia’s interest rather than creating groups out of thin air. Without having the data that they’re using for analytics for identifying sub-populations, it’s rather hard to figure out what group a given set of divisive propaganda is targeting. Also, it isn’t just the bots or the social advertising. It’s full-spectrum.
4. The Russians are not the only ones that are using these techniques. However, they are more aggressive about it because Putin freaked out that the US was going to try to overthrow him. They’re in a corner and acting out of weakness, not strength. That being said, we’re not all that great about responding to events in the world so there isn’t a guarantee we come out of this with a good outcome.
I didn’t choose the top picture, the wording just frames it for why it was relevant to the Army (keeping it apolitical).
I was a human intelligence collector, although I'd also been running a small cell out of South Korea doing analysis in the region in 2016.
The paper was in response to the July prompt of a quarterly contest, "Is the Army too antiquated in how it fights the Information War?" (http://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/NCO-Journal/NCO-Jour...). This piece went through several extra months of trimming and editing and the program was subsequently discontinued.
1. The Russian information operations are not about the American elections. It’s been a sustained information warfare campaign for the last several years, and the elections were part of it.
2. The Russians are playing on existing differences in society. The key difference between their modern campaign and traditional campaign is they have population data to target their propaganda, so they can identify arbitrary fracture lines in groups.
On a side note, this is the same technique that traditional human intelligence uses, which the Russians are good at. Most people are generally good people and don’t manipulate others intentionally, so if this is new to you the US Army’s FM 2-22.3 covers about 20 different methods (non-exhaustive) of manipulating individuals with this sort of information, intended for interrogation. It covers playing on peoples’ fears, their ego, love, etc. The Russians are just doing this on a wide scale, albeit it’s also the same thing other advertisers do, just more widespread and coordinated.
3. Undermining groups is not random. It’s using an evolutionary strategy of undermining groups threatening to Russia’s interest rather than creating groups out of thin air. Without having the data that they’re using for analytics for identifying sub-populations, it’s rather hard to figure out what group a given set of divisive propaganda is targeting. Also, it isn’t just the bots or the social advertising. It’s full-spectrum.
4. The Russians are not the only ones that are using these techniques. However, they are more aggressive about it because Putin freaked out that the US was going to try to overthrow him. They’re in a corner and acting out of weakness, not strength. That being said, we’re not all that great about responding to events in the world so there isn’t a guarantee we come out of this with a good outcome.
I didn’t choose the top picture, the wording just frames it for why it was relevant to the Army (keeping it apolitical).