Joel Harding, To Inform is to Influence: IO, SC, PD, what's in a name?
Image from article, with caption: A veiled girl protesting against the Morsi government uses her laptop just further on from the wall supposed to protect the presidential palace in Cairo, Egypt on Dec. 11, 2012.
The United States is unprepared to wage an information war against any truly concerted effort.
Don’t get me wrong, the Department of State, the Department of Defense, the BBG, USAID, and the White House all have people and offices dedicated to Strategic Communication, Public Diplomacy, or Information Operations. State even has a center devoted to waging information warfare against ISIS, the Intelligence Community wages information war quietly, with no fanfare, no public accountability, and no measures of efficiency.
We also have a few civilian efforts to expose data after analysis.
We, as a nation, are unprepared for waging a war of ideas. We have not yet been educated. We are not yet discerning, discriminating, or perceptive. We are naive to the extreme, with a distasteful arrogance perceived by most of the rest of the world. We are a nation divided by ideological issues and refuse to discuss matters on their merit, we are that inflexible.
We have not yet learned which sources are reliable, which sources are reliable but with a distinct ideological spin, and which sources are unreliable or purposefully push biased, propagandized, or extremist views. We still blindly accept news stories, forwarded by friends, at face value and seldom question with “if it’s too good to be true, that’s probably because it is.”
Our politicians, please don’t call them our leaders, answer to big money, to rich valued constituents, and to their ideological/political party. While we, as a nation, need to draw together after being flooded with reports of a wicked and overwhelming information war waged against our very society and the West, politicians are concerned about promoting their party values and not preventing this national security threat. Why not? Because “we” don’t want to make the bear angry. Putin is considered unpredictable, swift to anger, and with a nuclear arsenal at hand.
Unless we begin holding our politicians accountable, until we demand a government effort to educate us, post the truth and actively counter disinformation, until we actively and multilaterally hold Putin and Russia accountable for these relentless denied attacks against the US and the West, we will continue to suffer under a relentless barrage of disinformation, propaganda, and fake news.
Over three years, now, that Russia launched an information war against Ukraine and the West and what have we done? In the big picture, nothing. Nothing at all.
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