You may not care about information war - but information war cares about you...
What can we learn about war's potential effects on civilians from recent NTC exercises?
[I’ve paywalled this edition of Conflict & Democracy. I’ll write a wider-circulation post this weekend about Macron’s new found mojo over Ukraine and Scholz’ continued reticence.]
What would land warfare look like if Russia attacks NATO? That's a horrible question to have to think about, but it's what most Western armies are currently trying to figure out.
The answer, it turns out, has big implications for civilians too.
It's no exaggeration to say that, in the near future, battles could be won or lost through data gleaned from Facebook. The conflict zone will be alive with information, drawing civil society and social relationships more tightly into the outcomes than at any point in modern history.
Two recent articles from West Point's Modern War Institute, focused on changes at the US National Training Center (NTC), give a granular and eye-opening account of what to expect, based on lessons drawn from Ukraine.
We are suddenly talking about the military use of open-source satellite info, the use of cellphones for targeting and surveillance, RFID readers as dual-use devices - and even the use of commercially available advertising data from social media platforms to attack and disrupt the enemy.
In this issue of Conflict & Democracy I'm going to summarise the contents of the MWI reports and draw out what it might mean for civil-military relationships in an age of pervasive digital information.
Infowars at Fort Irwin
The NTC, located at Fort Irwin in the Mojave Desert, stages large scale conventional warfare exercises. US Army brigades fight a dedicated "enemy" opposing force (OPFOR), which is trained to act like an elite Russian unit, and can replicate changes in Russian battlefield technique learned in real time from Ukraine.
In the MWI articles, Maj Gen Curt Taylor, the NTC's commanding general, outlines some of the specific military changes:
Units have to fight while massively dispersed
Command posts and logistical bases have to disperse or hide, and are typically at least 15km/100km from the front line
Mass precision strikes - using armed small drones and GMLRS - can reach deep into the opponent's rear echelons - placing "forces well behind the front lines at significant risk of not just disruption, but also complete annihilation".
But the most interesting development is that the battlefield is not just militarily transparent: it is also becoming socially transparent.
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