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Information Warfare

Special Forces to build ‘influence artillery’ for online campaigns

WASHINGTON — To stay ahead of rapidly moving threats in the information space, 1st Special Forces Command is building an Information Warfare Center that will specialize in “influence artillery rounds.”

Critical to Special Forces’ role is deploying to remote locations while still being able to effectively message portions of a population.

The center, to be based at Fort Bragg, will consolidate the command’s psychological operations capabilities and will wrap around other information related capabilities such as cyber and space, Col. Ed Croot, chief of staff at 1st Special Forces Command, said in a Feb. 17 virtual presentation for AFCEA TechNet Augusta.

Ideally, the center will see, sense or detect adversary activity around the globe in physical and virtual spaces and within minutes, push that information to those that need it.

The team members will specialize in developing what Croot called influence artillery rounds, no easy task since in the influence world, they must tailor those “munitions” to each specific target, unlike a missile.

“There’s a unique threat audience, a unique friendly audience, a unique neutral audience that has to do with that influence and information piece. It’s extremely difficult to be able to move fast in that space,” Croot said.

The center will work with Special Operations Command’s Joint Military Information Support WebOps Center, which Croot said is delivers information through social media. The WebOps Center doesn’t build these digital rounds, so the Information Warfare Center will fill that role.

“Cyber is another delivery system. It’s a platform, like an artillery piece that you can deliver influence rounds through,” Croot said. “There’s an information revolution that has occurred, and things move faster than we’ve ever seen before, and it’s hard to change mindsets of people and systems and processes to be able to move at the speed of information.”

The geographic combatant commands are each building their own information warfare task forces, which act as forward extensions of the Information Warfare Center across 70 nations. The sensors in those 70 nations must be able to rapidly move information back and forth so the center can tailor the right influence campaigns in a timely manner.

Looking inward

Aside from the effort’s role to affect others within the information sphere, officials described the need to protect Green Berets from sophisticated snoops.

One’s digital footprint can easily be mapped in the modern connected world. As such, 1st Special Forces Command is looking for tools that can provide protection at the tactical edge.

This also includes training forces on how to reduce their digital attack surfaces while deployed and even in garrison in the U.S.

The dangers were demonstrated to great effect a few years ago during a unit exercise, Croot explained. Prior to deploying to the exercise in the U.S., the commander told his unit he wanted everyone off social media a full month prior.

One day into the exercise, the commander laid out how many people the unit had deployed, what base they came from, where they were going, what their mission was and where their families lived, all from their digital footprints, Croot said.

“If you want to be terrified, sit and see and watch a picture of a family member up on a Facebook post talking about you and where you work and where you’re going,” he said. “This is real, and it absolutely is something that we have got to take seriously from a from a home station force protection perspective, let alone at the edge.”

https://www.c4isrnet.com/information-warfare/2021/02/18/special-forces-to-build-influence-artillery-for-online-campaigns/

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Eroding America from within: Marketing data threatens military cohesion

Are algorithms destroying society, or are they merely revealing the schism which always existed? The increased granularity of highly detailed datasets combined with increasingly accurate microtargeted advertising make the question largely unanswerable but nonetheless, pose an unaddressed threat to the armed forces and a national security vulnerability.

Most military strategists only consider center of gravity as that area where the greatest concentration of enemy troops can be found,” and therefore, they concentrate their efforts on directing kinetic operations against physical forces. However, Clausewitz clearly drew parallels between physical forces and their cohesion — that is their ability to operate as a collective unit. “Where there is cohesion, the analogy of the center of gravity can be applied.” The bond between soldiers is at the center of the will to fight, and it is this bond that is currently under assault.

Several recent articles highlight the cognitive vulnerabilities exploited by the data social media companies and other data brokers collect. The troves of intricately detailed information collected by online and social media companies were used to target disinformation campaigns (a.k.a., story weapons), and yet, much of the broader national defense strategy fails to acknowledge this actively exploited force protection vulnerability. There are currently no provisions in law or force structure to actively assess this vulnerability, nor to defend against it.

The 2016 presidential election was the first great awakening of the American public to the ways in which political campaigns gathered data on potential voters, despite the fact that this data collection has occurred for years. Beyond voter registration data, the rise of social media and the app economy further increased the surveillance and data collection on the American population, including its military. A January 2021 article in Wired pointed out how servicemembers could be selected for targeted advertisement on Facebook by selecting their occupation as Air Force or U.S. Army. While Facebook has removed these detailed targeted categories, advertisers could still select military as an employment category. Even then, the ability to narrow the audience by selecting base locations, ages, incomes and other interests makes the military an easily targeted population through Facebook for disinformation campaigns.

Facebook’s advertising imperative is to allow advertisers — anyone who has a Facebook business account — to find the desired target audience. The feature would exist even if Facebook were to remove all military targeting and locations from their dashboard. Why? Any number of shell companies reportedly continue to use consumer lists, despite customers opting out. The detailed data collected on nearly every aspect of Americans’ daily lives by data brokers such as Axiom, Experian, Magellan and others includes mailing lists that are frequently bought and sold with zero oversight or visibility.

The plethora of detailed data generated in this data wholesale ecosystem creates a massive cognitive force protection vulnerability for the U.S. military. As stated by Kallberg and Hamilton, “We have to treat influence operations and cognitive attacks as serious as any violent threat in force protection.” There is evidence that foreign adversaries are influencing veterans through social media by impersonating veteran service organization and veterans themselves. Unfortunately, there is no mechanism within the military to identify, assess or defend against this threat – a threat that is not viewed as a vulnerability by security firms.

The algorithmic social media ecosystem and targeted advertising economy represent a national security threat, one that the Department of Defense should take seriously. While there are agencies that investigate allegations of criminal activity, there are many ways to damage the U.S. military well below the threshold of criminal activity. Understanding and defending against targeted and algorithmic manipulation must be addressed as a force protection critical vulnerability before the erosion of cohesion — already undermined by the current social media divisiveness over the COVID pandemic response, masks, the vaccines and the recent election turmoil — achieves our adversaries’ greatest victory: erosion of the United States from within.

https://www.c4isrnet.com/opinion/2021/02/15/eroding-america-from-within-marketing-data-threatens-military-cohesion/