Knowledge Base

Information Warfare (IW) / Information Operations (IO)

Information Warfare includes ways of gaining and maintaining an information advantage over competitors or adversaries. Although there have been considerable efforts defining and documenting information warfare, there are still many different views. Much of the initial discussions have focussed on orienting IW/IO within a framework of conventional military doctrine and capabilities. Within DoD, this includes the five traditional disciplines.

Electronic Warfare

Electronic Warfare involves technologies and operations to acquire and maintain control of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Information Security

Information Security encompasses technologies and processes to ensure that information is available to only authorized users.

Operations Security

Operations Security incudes processes to protect operations from enemy detection and monitoring.

Psychological Operations

Psychological Operations includes planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign government, organizations, groups, and individuals. The purpose of PSYOP is to induce or reinforce foreign attitudes and behavior favorable to the originator's objectives.

Physical Destruction

Physical destruction involves denying an adversary use of his Command & Control assets by physically destroying them.

Although it has been convenient to define information warfare in terms of these traditional disciplines, this approach has the disadvantage of giving the false impression that the new IW/IO doctrine is merely a repackaging of old ideas, when nothing could be further from the truth.

CyberWar

Information Warfare / Information Operations represents a fundamentally new way of treating information as outlined above under the value of information. CyberWar introduce new issues and dimensions. While many of these may be inspired by traditional disciplines such as Electronic Warfare, they must be treated using out-of-the-box thinking and must consider the new technologies that have changed many established paradymes.

Information Operations: An Information System Taxonomy

This perspective views information operations from the perspective of the steps within an information system As such it is relevant to a broad set of engineering analyses. This breakout is also a useful way to view different stratgies for IW/IO based upon the relative emphasis given to each of these areas.

Information Acquisition

Information Acquisition includes techniques and technologies for acquiring or developing information. These include sensor and signal processing technologies used for functions such as intelligence, identification, location, reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition. The growing set of information technologies is already creating new challenges for collection systems, which must deal with increasing diversity and complexity at both the signal and data levels. Additionally, new doctrines for information warfare and information operations are defining new needs for information.

Information Protection

Information Protection includes techniques and technologies for protecting information against attack. Protection issues include authentication, confidentiality, integrity, availability, nonrepudiation, and reconstitution. Techniques and technologies include the set of information security solutions discussed on this site. The most widely established security architectural concept involves the use of the protected enclave Intranet separated from the outside world by access controls. Within the Intranet, there is an assumed level of trust among the internal users and separation from external threats. As long as network packets travel in physically protected channels such as cables in controlled areas, the protected enclave architecture remains a viable concept. As future networks evolve into more mobile forms to accommodate wearable and distributed computing, these networks will increasingly utilize cellular architectures with radio or infrared links. Separating internal and external links will become more complex and may require more complex security architectural concepts.

Information Processing

Information Processing includes technologies for processing information. These include computers, processors, memory, processing systems, software, algorithms, operating environments and computing tools.

Information Transport

Information Transport includes technologies to move information. These include voice and data backbone communication, networks, mobile, and satellite communications.

Information Management

Information Management includes technologies for managing the use of information. Information Management includes technologies for managing the use of information. These include human machine interface, databases, analysis tools, and collaboration. Although the term „information management„ is often used to refer to managing information technology, i.e. computers and information systems, we use the term here to refer to managing the information itself. Information management includes the full scope of management actions from planning, resourcing, controlling, and reporting on activities from acquiring, protecting, processing, transporting, and denying information. In this sense it is the heart of information operations. These concepts are relatively new and encompass techniques and technologies to view information, to store it, to combine it with other information and to share its use. Examples include: human machine interface, databases, analysis tools, and collaboration.

Information Denial

Information Denial includes technologies for attacking an enemy¼s use of his information. These include not only offensive command and control warfare, electronic warfare, but also operations security, deception, psychological operations, and C2-destruction. In general, there are different strategies for achieving information superiority over an enemy. One set of strategies relies on obtaining and using superior capabilities in the areas discussed in the previous chapters: information acquisition, protection, processing, transport, and management. Where these technologies are being driven by global commercial developments, no single country can count on having sole access or control of these commercial technologies, since they are for sale to anyone willing to purchase them. A different strategy is to threaten, attack or otherwise reduce an enemy¼s use of advanced information technologies. To even have this as an option requires the development of information denial capabilities that can be effective, usable, and credible against the evolving information technologies. Another reason to consider developments in this area is to red team, analyze and mitigate vulnerabilities implicit in our own use of these advanced information technologies.