Information Warfare and the New Threat Environment

Speakers: Elisabeth Braw (American Enterprise Institute (AEI)); James Farwell (The Farwell Group); Dr. Christopher Paul (RAND)

Date: 8 December 2021

Speaker Session Summary

SMA hosted a panel discussion with Dr. Christopher Paul (RAND), Mr. James P. Farwell (The Farwell Group), and Ms. Elisabeth Braw (American Enterprise Institute (AEI)) as part of its SMA INSS/PRISM Speaker Series.

Information warfare is becoming a more important facet of competition, because while the US still has an overall military advantage, US adversaries are increasing their own military capabilities and are becoming more effective at conducting information operations. Furthermore, all actions—whether political or military—send a message. Dr. Paul commented that the correct messages can contribute to the defeat of an enemy. Also, information warfare can lesson a population’s resilience to fight in the first place. Ms. Braw emphasized that misinformation and disinformation are dividing countries at the civilian level and weakening their overall resilience to fight. Furthermore, Western countries’ free and open societies make their civilian populations easy and available targets for influence operations by adversaries. Effecting just a sizable minority in a country may be enough to break a country’s resilience and capability to defend itself.

Information warfare is a cognitive battle, which makes symbolism used and specific actions taken by actors especially important. Mr. Farwell commented that kinetic warfare is now used to support actors’ desired narratives, where before narratives were created to support actors’ military activities. Also, changing the way an opponent thinks can help avoid military operations all together. Dr. Paul and Mr. Farwell emphasized that changes in the way warfare is conducted will not change the actual nature of war. Violence and killing an opponent or destroying their capability to defend themselves is still the surest way to achieve victory. Leaders must consider the way an action will be interpreted and how it might fit into their grand strategy if they hope to achieve victory without kinetic warfare. Ultimately, having clear objectives that combine traditional military operations and information operations will most likely render the best outcome and help actors avoid kinetic war.

Speaker Session Recording

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Briefing Materials

Biographies:

Mr. James P. Farwell is an expert in information warfare, influence operations, and cyber policy and strategy, with a geo-topical expertise in the Middle East, North Africa, and Pakistan. He has advised the U.S. Special Operations Command, U.S. Strategic Command, Office of Undersecretary of Defense (Policy), Office of Undersecretary of Defense (Intelligence), and the U.S. Marine Corps on these topics. As a political consultant, he was the executive director of John McCain’s Ad Council for his 2008 race for President, former Speaker Newt Gingrich as Speaker, and as a candidate for President in 2012. In 2016 he advised Governor John Kasich as a member of his national security team. He has advised heads of state in elections in South Korea, Greece, and Bermuda.

An attorney, Farwell is Of Counsel to Elkins PLC in New Orleans specializing in cybersecurity and holds the advanced CIPP/US certification in cybersecurity. He writes regularly for journals and newspapers, including Parameters, Strategic Studies Quarterly, The National Interest, Survival, and other publications. He is the author of The Pakistan Cauldron (Washington: Potomac Books, 2011); Persuasion & Power (Washington: Georgetown U. Press, 2012); Communication Strategy (Tampa: Joint Special Operations University, 2015) (Co-author: Darby Arakelian); Revitalizing Cities (Lafayette: U. of Lafayette Louisiana, 2016); and The Architecture of Cybersecurity (co-authors V. Roddy, G. Elkins, Y. Chalker) (Lafayette: Sans Souci/U. of Lafayette Louisiana, 2017). His book, Information Warfare, was published by the Marine Corps University Press in 2020. He has written an opera, The Fabulist, to be produced at the Charing Cross Theatre in London by Tony Award-winner Steven Levy, expected to open in mid-2022; and a comedy, Legal Insanity, produced by Steven Levy in the United Kingdom in 2018. He is an associate fellow, Kings Centre for Strategic Communication, Department of War Studies, Kings College, U. of London; Visiting Scholar, Tulane School of Business; and a non-resident Senior fellow for the Middle East Institute.

Ms. Elisabeth Braw is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where she focuses on defense against grayzone threats. She is also a columnist with Foreign Policy, where she writes on national security and the globalised economy, and the author of The Defender’s Dilemma: Identifying and Deterring Grayzone Aggression (2021). Before joining AEI, Elisabeth was a senior research fellow at RUSI, whose Modern Deterrence project she led. Prior to that, she worked at Control Risks, a global risk consultancy. Elisabeth is also a member of the steering committee of the Aurora Forum (the UK-Nordic-Baltic leader conference) and a member of the UK National Preparedness Commission. Elisabeth started her career as a journalist, reporting for Newsweek, the Christian Science Monitor and the international Metro group of newspapers, among others. She regularly writes op-eds, including for the Financial Times, Politico, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (writing in German) and the Wall Street Journal. She is also the author of God’s Spies, about the Stasi (2019). Elisabeth attended university in Germany, graduating with a Magister Artium in political science and German literature.

Dr. Christopher Paul is a Senior Social Scientist at the RAND Corporation. He also teaches in the Pardee RAND Graduate School. Prior to joining RAND full-time in July of 2002, he worked at RAND as adjunct staff for six years.  Chris received his Ph.D. in sociology from UCLA in 2001; he spent academic year 2001-02 on the UCLA statistics faculty. Chris has developed methodological competencies in comparative historical and case study approaches, quantitative analysis, and evaluation research. Current research interests include operations in and through the information environment, security cooperation, counterinsurgency, and irregular/unconventional warfare. Recent RAND reports include RR-1166/1, Dominating Duffer’s Domain: Lessons for the U.S. Marine Corps Information Operations Practitioner, PE-198, The Russian “Firehose of Falsehood” Propaganda Model: Why It Might Work and Options to Counter It, and RR-1925/1-A, Lessons from Others for Future U.S. Army Operations in and Through the Information Environment.

The SMA INSS/PRISM Speaker Series description and list of the other sessions in this series can be downloaded here.