What is information warfare and how is it different from traditional warfare?
The world we live in seems to increasingly revolve around technology and information. The same could be said about warfare. Where as before, warfare would mean fighting over physical borders with conventional weapons, nowadays we have something called information warfare. The scenes associated with these two are very different. One filled with blood, bombed cities and trenches full of bodies, the other can be barely noticeable.
Information warfare is a term that is rather hard to define. It is quite new in nature and is still evolving. The definition given by the US Defense Information Systems Agency goes as follows, “actions taken to achieve information superiority in support of national military strategy by affecting adversary information and information systems while leveraging and protecting our information and information systems” (Takemoto 2001). But there are other slightly different interpretations available. However, Nichiporuk describes in his book six main components that fall under information warfare that we can define to help understand the term as a concept (Nichiporuk 1999). Those terms are electronic warfare, operations security, deception, physical attack, information attack and psychological warfare. Electronic warfare revolves around electromagnetics and could involve something like jamming communication systems, for example, to prevent the enemy from communicating amongst itself. Operations security is the only non offensive of the terms and is when one defends themselves from others attacks. This could be identifying own weaknesses and protecting them from attacks. The third term, deception, means giving away false information to mislead the opponent. This could mean sending out the wrong coordinates for an attack in order to keep the accurate location secret. Next, there is physical attack on information processes which could mean bombing communication centres for instance. This contrasts with the others, and is most similar to traditional warfare because it revolves around physical attacks. Fith, there are information attacks, which is when technology is used to sabotage someone else’s information systems. Viruses are a good example of this. They can send a virus to either delete or spy on the sata on the enemies systems. Lastly, there is psychological warfare, which means affecting people’s views and opinions by different types of propaganda. This could be for example through fake news.
So how does this information warfare differ from traditional warfare? There are three main aspects that we can look at. The first is the means with which the war is fought. In traditional warfare, these are mainly weapons and other physical machines. In information warfare, the idea is to affect the way that people think, so war is fought with pictures, texts, adds and other media content. Second, is the goal towards which the above mentioned means are used. In traditional warfare, the goal is to kill or injure people and destroy facilities. Contrastingly, in information warfare, the goal is to manipulate information in some way. Either to try and gain more information, destroy existing information or change the information that is circulating. Lastly, is the effect of the actions. In traditional warfare, the result is often injury or death. However, in information warfare it can be something much more subtle, like an inaccurate view of the situation.
To conclude, information warfare differs quite a bit from traditional warfare in it’s methods, but it’s goal to undermine the opponent and get an upper hand stays constant.
References:
Nichiporuk, Brian. (1999). U.S. military opportunities: information-warfare concepts of operation.
Takemoto, Col G. H. (2001). Information Warfare in the Cyber Domain.
