Information Operations

[marct]

Mao TseTong (sp?), if I may paraphrase, said the population is to the guerilla (insurgent) as water is to fish. Our initial efforts in COIN were something like standing on a riverbank with a fishing pole, congratulating ourselves on every catch and thinking somehow we would eradicate all fishes from the water. To eliminate fish (insurgents) you must make the water (population) untenable for them.

I have always had a problem with this metaphor based on a) the assumed stance of the perceiver and b) the assumption of non-action" by the "water". In regards to IO, again using this metaphor, it implies poisoning or draining the water such that the fish can no longer breath. This might make sense in some COIN situations (e.g. Bolivia), but does it make sense in places such as Afghanistan? Only to a limited degree I would suspect.

Influence is an art, something not subject to algorithms and cold logic. The current definition simply does not fit into current operations. IO will continue to be nothing more than a point of confusion until a relevant, current definition is provided.

Brilliant post. Your paragraph above get right to the point, but unfortunately it is cause for pessimism: institutionally we are obsessed with metrics-based thinking, and only really take seriously that which can be counted. Since arts can't be measured, expect us to remain in a state of confusion.

Actually, many "arts" can be measured, but the metrics tend to be meaningless to the particular institutional mind-set you are referring to Stevely. Let me give you an example of this: "music", as an art form, is composed of rhythm, pitch and timbre that are produced sequentially through time. Each of these three, let's call them "base measures", can be measured, as can several of the emergent properties coming out of them such as harmonics. Where we run into difficulty is with he measurement of the effects of such emergent properties on humans. In part, this is because the neurology of humans with regards to something like pitch is not fixed at birth but, rather, is fixed at the age of abut 6 months. Furthermore, the interpretation, at a psycho-neurological level, is conditioned by individual experiences with, or conditioning by if you prefer, a given musical genre over time. The reason why I chose the example of music is that, to my mind, it is a good analogy for the more generalized case of "Information Operation".

Let's consider how we should break them down analytically (and remember, I'm an academic, not an IO type ).

1. "Information" - defined as "a difference that makes a difference" (Gregory Bateson) is composed of
   1. something within the environment that may be so classed and,
   2. the perception (or sensing) of that something.
2. The interpretation of that information; which is composed of
   1. a symbol system that defined what is information within the system,
   2. analytic "tools" (actually symbolic manipulations) of that information to derive "meaning", and
   3. a prescriptive system for action based on interpreted "meaning" (all of this comes from Andrew Abbott's, the System of the Professions).
3. Actions taken based on the interpretation of that information.

Now, that is the simplified system, and it gets much more complex later on . In particular, there is another, cross-cutting, dimension to this which deals with the media of communications in all of these steps. All media, barring face-to-face (F2F; which I'll talk about latter), distort the default value of communications for humans (F2F is the default value in that we evolved as a species using this medium) in either (or both) time and space. These distortions effect how the gathering, analysis and conclusions of IO are conducted and interpreted.

Face-to-face communication is the basic form of communications we, as a species, evolved with and is our "default value" for communicative media. This doesn't mean that people tell the "objective truth" (if such a thing can be told!) when they are talking face to face. What it does mean, however, is that we have a lot of neural circuity that acts to detect "lying", "cheating". Also, F2F communications contains a lot more "information" that we have available for interpretation (e.g. tonality, body language, eye positioning, scent, pitch, rhythm, timbre, etc.). This additional "information" (actually, sensory output) allows for an increased number of emergent properties such as "charisma", "spinning illusions", etc.

You know, this is turning into a rather long response . I think I'm going to leave it there for now and write up a blog entry on it.

Marc