Information at War. Philip Seib

souls, but made their bodies carrion,

      feasts for the dogs and birds,

      and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.

      Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed,

      Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles.

      Homer, The Iliad¹

      Before social media, there were bards. They provided information about war to scattered listeners as they traveled the countryside and recited their stories of warriors and gods to audiences enthralled by tales of bloody daring. In Homer’s case, his vivid reporting about the siege of Troy was delivered about four centuries after the events he described, a concept that may be hard to grasp by those of us accustomed to real-time bulletins from today’s battlefields.

      The Iliad has through the years been an anchor in the history of conflict. Like many tales of war, it is both horrifying and rousing. The Iliad dates to roughly 3,000 years ago, but its depictions of combat are not too far removed from the grittiest reporting from Syria, Somalia, Afghanistan, and other places dominated by contemporary warriors’ rage.

People throughout the world today may be distant in time and space from most conflicts, but instead of depending on the occasional bard’s visit to learn about a war hundreds of years after it was fought, we can now get information about war quickly and constantly. Our televisions and mobile devices can bring us war as it is being fought. We stare at the wine-dark blood of a distant battlefield for a few moments and then casually move on to more information from more sources about more topics.

      Information at war is sometimes history. Without Homer’s words, what would we know about the Trojan War? Spearheads and chunks of pottery from a spot in today’s Turkey are information of a sort, but such artifacts do not stir the spirit as words do. And today, words need not stand alone; they arrive supplemented by sounds and images from the battleground.

      We will see that information at war has many functions, memorializing wars of the past and shaping wars of the present. As was the case on the plains of Troy, rage still begets more rage, and fighters’ souls continue to hurtle down to the House of Death. Warfare’s carnage belongs to no single epoch. As in Homer’s time, there are today plenty of wars. Inflicting death and destruction for purportedly noble reasons remains a persistent trait of humankind.

      “Information” can appear in varied forms. In this book, one mutation of information that will receive considerable attention is disinformation, which has been defined by UNESCO as “information that is false and deliberately created to harm a person, social group, organization, or country.” This is different from misinformation, which is “information that is false but not created with the intention of causing harm,” and it may be disseminated in the belief that is true. Another category is mal-information, that is “based on reality, but is used to inflict harm,” such as true information that violates someone’s privacy without a public interest justification.² (The work of gossip columnists and paparazzi may be included in this category.) Disinformation has long been used by governments as a weaponized form of communication that is a tool of warfare. Today’s technologies make this more pervasive and more effective.

      Some other terms used in this book are these:

       “troll”: communicator, human or mechanical, of inflammatory material designed to provoke or harass;

       “bot”: performs automated tasks, such as high-speed, high-volume retweeting or attacks on a computer network;

       “deepfake”: video and speech combination for which a computer has learned appearance and speech patterns of the targeted subject. (If you see a realistic online video of Barack Obama endorsing Donald Trump, you may assume it is a deepfake.)

      Another principal focus of this book is war journalism. With so much recent emphasis on disinformation as a way to affect public opinion, the importance of the news media is sometimes overlooked. When considering information at war, a holistic approach is needed. Despite efforts in numerous countries to undermine the credibility of journalists – through tactics that include labeling their work “fake news” and in some places imprisoning them (or worse)³ – much of the global public still uses news coverage as an important element in shaping opinions about wars near and far.

      Among the constituencies of conflict are those who fight wars, those who use their power to bring about and manage armed conflict, those who disseminate information about wars, and those who consume that information. This book examines slices of their shared stories, beginning in the mid twentieth century, when the rise of radio, and its bards such as Murrow and Shirer and Sevareid, marked the start of the era in which broadcasting brought timely information that helped redefine publics’ perceptions of the nature and costs of war.⁴

      War’s evolution has been shaped by shifts in geopolitics and by advances in technology. In scattered combat zones, states fight among themselves, against non-states (such as Al Qaeda), and sometimes against their own people (the Syrian War that began in 2011 being one example). As for the tools of war, we have moved from the longbow to the ballistic missile, and in the information universe from the messenger racing on horseback to the satellites and cellphones that reach billions.

      Information at war has always been a weapon in itself – generating anger, sorrow, determination, and other facets of mass psychology that can influence the outcomes of conflict. As we will see, in the twenty-first century roles for information have become truly integral, rather than merely supplemental, parts of warfare.

      Information can now circle the globe in moments, and few boundaries can stop it.

More significant than the gadgets of communication technology are the ways in which global publics have been able to use information tools to understand and affect the course of conflict. They have become more than spectators. Billions of people have devices that allow them not only to watch warriors in action, but also to tell potentially vast audiences what they themselves are seeing and add their own comments (some accurate, some not) to the flow of war-related information. Individual combatants themselves sometimes describe their views.⁵ Distances between fighters, professional information providers, and the public continue to shrink, while the ranks of those who share information have expanded dramatically. Twitter and its kin have become, in some cases, instruments of war.

      Intensified scrutiny, both objective and biased, changes the ways in which wars are conducted. No conflict is detached from politics, and information helps tighten the connection. Information can alter the level of accountability of those who authorize and pay for wars, as well as the responsibilities of those who do the fighting. Those who decide to wage war must be able to influence – if not wholly control – information.

      Henry Kissinger wrote that what has great significance in world affairs “is not only the number of people with access to information; it is, even more importantly, how they analyze it. Since the mass of information available tends to exceed the capacity to evaluate it, a gap has opened up between information and knowledge and, even beyond that, between knowledge and wisdom.”⁶ Ideally, thoughtful consideration of information at war will help to close that gap.

      One slice of this book’s overall topic is “media and war,” which has been the subject of many studies that focus on a relationship that is in some ways symbiotic but usually maintains some level of separation between its two elements. “Media” in such analyses is usually equated with news media, and the journalism of war is a rich field that continues to produce important examinations of how wars are fought and managed. Especially in democracies, independently gathered and reported news content has long been a factor in how wars are perceived. Journalists’ depictions of a particular victory or defeat can influence public opinion and shape the course of a war. The accuracy or inaccuracy of that reporting may have profound effect on policy. This was the case during the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam, among other instances. That coverage and other reporting from the Vietnam War (addressed in chapter