Back to 2025 Home PageInformation attack, while "platform-based" in the physical universe of matter and energy, is not the only counterplatform, and the USAF must move its authoritative doctrinal thinking in AFDD-1 away from the idea that information attack involves only the use of computers and communications.91
Indirect information warfare attacks the "observation" level of knowledge at which the information must be perceived to be acted on. In many cases, indirect IW will be platform-to-platform as, for example, offensive and defensive electronic warfare, jamming or other interference systems, and psychological operations via the successor systems to Commando Solo. It may, however, rely on nonelectronic old fashioned military deception and psychological operations. Offensive and defensive indirect IW will grow in importance as information dependence creates information targets for an adversary to exploit against the United States. The armed forces could become "vulnerable sophisticates" in the worlds of 2025.92 Counterplatform is not everything, but counterplatform attack will not be obsolete.
Direct IW as information attack, on the other hand, corrupts the "orientation" level of knowledge so that adversary analysis, whether artificial-intelligence, information-technology based or, most importantly, based in the mind of the human decision maker, decides and acts with full confidence in either the information observed or the integrity of his (machine or human) analytic processes.93 Information attack, then, may or may not be counterplatform.
The future potential in information warfare to substitute precise and discriminate credible information- whether by the methods of C2W (deception, PSYOP, or other means) or information attack- to a precise and discriminate target decision maker is the essence of decisive maneuver as it may position the adversary in space and time, by his own decision, in that strategic situation so disadvantageous "that if it does not of itself produce the decision, its continuation by a battle is sure to achieve this." It is not so much perception management as orientation management. Information is both the target and the weapon: the weapon effect is predictable error. If, on the other hand, information attack fails and battle is necessary to convince the adversary the old-fashioned way, the differential information-in-war advantage provided by global awareness and the information-based planning and execution control provided by global reach may permit decisive maneuver by USAF air and space assets of such speed, precision, and discriminate force that the joint task force never leaves the Continental United States execute its dominant maneuver.
In the future operating environments marked by ambiguity, speed, and precision effect, it will be the relative or differential advantage in information, information processing, and communication and information security that will provide the narrow margin for victory. Future USAF mastery of information attack, through air and space power unconstrained by artificial notions of battlefield-only command and control warfare, could provide those capabilities for asymmetric strategic response based on decisive and differential information advantage in most future security environments.
Information warfare, in this essay, was defined as "actions taken to achieve relatively greater understanding of the strengths, weaknesses, and centers of gravity of an adversary's military, political, social, and economic infrastructure in order to deny, exploit, influence, corrupt, or destroy those adversary information-based activities thorough command and control warfare and information attack." The only question is whether the USAF is prepared to take those actions.
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