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Rage – Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’s son Achilles,

murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,

hurtling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,

great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion,

feasts for the dogs and birds,

and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.

Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed,

Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles.

Homer, The Iliad¹

Before social media, there were bards. They provided information about war to scattered listeners as they traveled the countryside and recited their stories of warriors and gods to audiences enthralled by tales of bloody daring. In Homer’s case, his vivid reporting about the siege of Troy was delivered about four centuries after the events he described, a concept that may be hard to grasp by those of us accustomed to real-time bulletins from today’s battlefields.

The Iliad has through the years been an anchor in the history of conflict. Like many tales of war, it is both horrifying and rousing. The Iliad dates to roughly 3,000 years ago, but its depictions of combat are not too far removed from the grittiest reporting from Syria, Somalia, Afghanistan, and other places dominated by contemporary warriors’ rage.

People throughout the world today may be distant in time and space from most conflicts, but instead of depending on the occasional bard’s visit to learn about a war hundreds of years after it was fought, we can now get information about war quickly and constantly. Our televisions and mobile devices can bring us war as it is being fought. We stare at the wine-dark blood of a distant battlefield for a few moments and then casually move on to more information from more sources about more topics.

Information at war is sometimes history. Without Homer’s words, what would we know about the Trojan War? Spearheads and chunks of pottery from a spot in today’s Turkey are information of a sort, but such artifacts do not stir the spirit as words do. And today, words need not stand alone; they arrive supplemented by sounds and images from the battleground.

We will see that information at war has many functions, memorializing wars of the past and shaping wars of the present. As was the case on the plains of Troy, rage still begets more rage, and fighters’ souls continue to hurtle down to the House of Death. Warfare’s carnage belongs to no single epoch. As in Homer’s time, there are today plenty of wars. Inflicting death and destruction for purportedly noble reasons remains a persistent trait of humankind.

“Information” can appear in varied forms. In this book, one mutation of information that will receive considerable attention is disinformation, which has been defined by UNESCO as “information that is false and deliberately created to harm a person, social group, organization, or country.” This is different from misinformation, which is “information that is false but not created with the intention of causing harm,” and it may be disseminated in the belief that is true. Another category is mal-information, that is “based on reality, but is used to inflict harm,” such as true information that violates someone’s privacy without a public interest justification.² (The work of gossip columnists and paparazzi may be included in this category.) Disinformation has long been used by governments as a weaponized form of communication that is a tool of warfare. Today’s technologies make this more pervasive and more effective.

Some other terms used in this book are these:

 “troll”: communicator, human or mechanical, of inflammatory material designed to provoke or harass;

 “bot”: performs automated tasks, such as high-speed, high-volume retweeting or attacks on a computer network;

 “deepfake”: video and speech combination for which a computer has learned appearance and speech patterns of the targeted subject. (If you see a realistic online video of Barack Obama endorsing Donald Trump, you may assume it is a deepfake.)

Another principal focus of this book is war journalism. With so much recent emphasis on disinformation as a way to affect public opinion, the importance of the news media is sometimes overlooked. When considering information at war, a holistic approach is needed. Despite efforts in numerous countries to undermine the credibility of journalists – through tactics that include labeling their work “fake news” and in some places imprisoning them (or worse)³ – much of the global public still uses news coverage as an important element in shaping opinions about wars near and far.

Among the constituencies of conflict are those who fight wars, those who use their power to bring about and manage armed conflict, those who disseminate information about wars, and those who consume that information. This book examines slices of their shared stories, beginning in the mid twentieth century, when the rise of radio, and its bards such as Murrow and Shirer and Sevareid, marked the start of the era in which broadcasting brought timely information that helped redefine publics’ perceptions of the nature and costs of war.⁴

War’s evolution has been shaped by shifts in geopolitics and by advances in technology. In scattered combat zones, states fight among themselves, against non-states (such as Al Qaeda), and sometimes against their own people (the Syrian War that began in 2011 being one example). As for the tools of war, we have moved from the longbow to the ballistic missile, and in the information universe from the messenger racing on horseback to the satellites and cellphones that reach billions.

Information at war has always been a weapon in itself – generating anger, sorrow, determination, and other facets of mass psychology that can influence the outcomes of conflict. As we will see, in the twenty-first century roles for information have become truly integral, rather than merely supplemental, parts of warfare.

Information can now circle the globe in moments, and few boundaries can stop it.

More significant than the gadgets of communication technology are the ways in which global publics have been able to use information tools to understand and affect the course of conflict. They have become more than spectators. Billions of people have devices that allow them not only to watch warriors in action, but also to tell potentially vast audiences what they themselves are seeing and add their own comments (some accurate, some not) to the flow of war-related information. Individual combatants themselves sometimes describe their views.⁵ Distances between fighters, professional information providers, and the public continue to shrink, while the ranks of those who share information have expanded dramatically. Twitter and its kin have become, in some cases, instruments of war.

Intensified scrutiny, both objective and biased, changes the ways in which wars are conducted. No conflict is detached from politics, and information helps tighten the connection. Information can alter the level of accountability of those who authorize and pay for wars, as well as the responsibilities of those who do the fighting. Those who decide to wage war must be able to influence – if not wholly control – information.

Henry Kissinger wrote that what has great significance in world affairs “is not only the number of people with access to information; it is, even more importantly, how they analyze it. Since the mass of information available tends to exceed the capacity to evaluate it, a gap has opened up between information and knowledge and, even beyond that, between knowledge and wisdom.”⁶ Ideally, thoughtful consideration of information at war will help to close that gap.

One slice of this book’s overall topic is “media and war,” which has been the subject of many studies that focus on a relationship that is in some ways symbiotic but usually maintains some level of separation between its two elements. “Media” in such analyses is usually equated with news media, and the journalism of war is a rich field that continues to produce important examinations of how wars are fought and managed. Especially in democracies, independently gathered and reported news content has long been a factor in how wars are perceived. Journalists’ depictions of a particular victory or defeat can influence public opinion and shape the course of a war. The accuracy or inaccuracy of that reporting may have profound effect on policy. This was the case during the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam, among other instances. That coverage and other reporting from the Vietnam War (addressed in chapter 1) has seen, over the years, its accuracy challenged,⁷ and it has clearly contributed to increasingly adversarial dealings between press and government. This dynamic tension fosters an environment in which the motives and even the patriotism of the protagonists have been called into question. When carried to extreme levels, such vilification may not only affect war-making but also jostle the foundations of civil society.

Fast and easy access to information through social media and other venues has changed the role of gatekeepers – traditionally the news organizations through which information has long been channeled and filtered on its way to the public. The universe of information providers is much larger today, and it keeps growing, which means the concept of “information hegemony” is increasingly obsolete. This increased number of information sources sometimes contributes to a “clash of emotions,” which can shape a political environment in ways that affect whether or how a war is fought.⁸

This has led to non-journalistic media influencing warfighting in new ways. Even governments that have long controlled the information that reaches the public have learned that they can be circumvented with increasing frequency. Censors can be eluded, and firewalls can be scaled – not always, but frequently enough to broaden the range of voices making themselves heard about war.⁹

In this volume, perhaps more significant than conventional issues related to news media performance during war is the weaponization of information itself. We have moved into an era beyond news media monopolization of information about armed conflict. “Information” in this context has, to an unprecedented degree, become much more than “news” as we have traditionally known it, and it is affecting warfare in ways that continue to evolve at a brisk pace. Because information has become so easy to gather – or to invent – and disseminate, state and non-state actors can wield it to stir anger, sabotage elections, and soften or stiffen the resolve of citizens who are too often treated as mere pawns in politics and conflict.

Can information start a war? Not on its own, but it certainly can influence the likelihood of one. When the Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers in the United States were screaming for war against Spain in 1898, they affected the American political environment and nudged, if not pushed, President William McKinley toward war.¹⁰ Today, an individual or group putting inflammatory material on social media can help cause civil disorder, and perhaps – in combination with other factors – incite pro-war sentiment.

Information conveyed through popular culture also can affect attitudes about war.¹¹ Mrs. Miniver, a British film (based on a bestselling novel) released in 1942, showed audiences in the United Kingdom and elsewhere how heroically resolute the British people were, even in the face of heavy bombing and the evacuation from Dunkirk. German propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels noted its effectiveness, saying, “There is not a single angry word spoken against Germany; nevertheless, the anti-German tendency is perfectly accomplished.”¹² The Germans themselves knew the value of cinematic propaganda, as exemplified by films such as Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. Through the Second World War, the Cold War, and beyond, fictive and documentary films have been, to varying degrees, persuasive in how publics view specific conflicts and war generally. A detailed examination of this topic is outside the scope of this book, but it is an intriguing field for exploration.

Information’s credibility has long been affected by the venues through which it is presented, but these venues are now so plentiful that information consumers may lack the knowledge needed to distinguish among sources and weigh their relative credibility as they decide what to believe. Online content competes with the media forms to which we grew accustomed during earlier decades. YouTube rivals television; websites and the likes of Facebook and Twitter vie with print; text messaging and email supersede face-to-face conversation and provide incessant updates about events. The speed and variety of providers have few limits, and members of the public dip into various offerings with a click or a tap that unleashes a river of information that washes over them.

This book is about relationships among primary contributors to information at war, including the public, which must be defined broadly. Some members of the public watch war as if it was a spectator sport; the television or cellphone screen does not drip the blood of combat onto the living-room carpet, and escaping a war zone is merely a matter of switching channels or clicking on another app. Others might have much more at stake: those who are themselves caught up in war, including the noncombatants who become “collateral damage” (an obscenely cold-blooded term) as war’s fury touches their lives. Some of these may choose to be “citizen journalists” themselves, tweeting, blogging, or otherwise presenting information about the rage of warriors and the damage they inflict.

Information tools available to the public are also used increasingly by conflicts’ actors themselves. Within recent years, we have seen inflammatory – and often false – information deployed within targeted populations as part of long- or short-term provocation leading toward military action, as was the case with Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine.¹³ Joining the ranks of conflict-related communicators are “trolls,” “bots,” and other mechanical and human spreaders of tales that are designed to disrupt. “Deepfakes,” for instance, can look and sound so real that they can mislead even those who consider themselves to be savvy information consumers.

Distorted information has long been used for military advantage. To some extent, this could be offset by influential mainstream information providers with the skill and wherewithal to verify and, if needed, correct misleading material. In recent decades, these have included trusted print publications as well as many of the foundational news broadcasts on radio and television, their ranks expanded by global and regional cable and satellite news networks. Today, however, that policing role has shriveled due to the ease with which global publics can obtain information directly from an always-growing universe of sources, some of which have negligible allegiance to truth.

We are in a transitional period during which individuals are learning (at varied speeds) how to navigate the sea of information. Which information providers offer safe harbors with reliably accurate content? Which ones are actually whirlpools that lure audiences with appealingly angry messages? How can the public distinguish among them? What level of media literacy is essential in the information era?¹⁴

War is always with us in one way or another. Information can change the course of war, and war can change the role of information. The persistence of conflict and the relentless flow of information ensure that information at war will long continue to be part of our lives.

This book proceeds roughly chronologically.

During war, as at other times, information can make the remote seem proximate. The first true “living-room war” was a function of radio, and one of the most distinctive voices early in the era of electronic media was a young man born near Polecat Creek, North Carolina – Edward R. Murrow. As we see in chapter 1, “Living-Room Wars,” Murrow told many of his stories of war from the battle zone in real time, which captivated their audience and heightened their impact. His voice came into American living-rooms from across the Atlantic in 1940 as Great Britain was enduring intense German bombing, and his reports helped to chip away at the isolationism that was strongly influencing US politics. His work and that of other journalists provided President Franklin D. Roosevelt with room to maneuver as he sought to help keep Britain afloat in its fight against Nazi Germany.

War being brought into the living-room also had great effect two decades later, when television had been established as a principal news provider. By 1960, nearly 90 percent of American households had a television set,¹⁵ and seeing as well as hearing about war on a continuing basis would sharpen public perceptions about the nature of conflict. As portrayed by some in the news media, the costs of the fighting in Southeast Asia and the apparent endlessness of that war fueled Americans’ growing doubts about the necessity of such a conflict.

While television coverage was capturing attention, journalists working in other media were also wielding increasing influence. Certain print journalists made clear that they were not “on the team” in terms of shaping their reporting to conform to government officials’ wishful thinking. Correspondents such as David Halberstam of the New York Times aggressively challenged the purported wisdom of “the best and the brightest” policymakers.¹⁶ Such print reporters’ diligence, coupled with the dramatic force of television, reshaped the balance of power between news media and government in wartime. With increased amounts of vivid information available to them, more and more Americans had grounds for doubting, and then opposing, the war policies of their elected leaders.

Television’s rise also contributed to greater emphasis on the optics of war. In itself, this was nothing new. From the armor of Achilles gleaming in front of the walls of Troy to the giant missiles in parades through Red Square (and, more recently, Pyongyang), the appearance of military might has affected fighters’ and publics’ attitudes about their prospects in conflict. When news media deliver consistently pessimistic appraisals supported by grim visual evidence, a government (at least in a democracy) must devote ever greater effort to sustain popular backing for a war. This may include attempts to counteract the effects of information that the government deems to be an obstacle to achieving its goals in the conflict. That might be done in a number of ways, such as by interfering with collection and dissemination of information perceived to be unhelpful, and by the government producing its own information to offset unsupportive content.

Information has value only if it is credible. During wartime, government and news media may engage in a struggle for primacy in credibility, and the viability of the war effort may be shaped by the outcome. Newer information providers – including individuals – are now part of the mix. Sometimes their content offers valuable perspective on events, but sometimes their material may be politicized to the point of being fraudulent. This makes careful appraisal of information’s validity more important among information consumers who find such decisions complicated by the sheer volume of information flowing toward them.

As chapter 2, “Competing for Information Control,” illustrates, when governments recognize unhelpful political repercussions of news coverage of conflict, they might resort to simple obstruction, such as taking advantage of complex logistics to delay reports from the battleground. During the Falklands War between Great Britain and Argentina in 1982, the British Ministry of Defence controlled the transmission of news from the remote location of the fighting.¹⁷ During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the US Department of Defense kept war-zone journalists on a tight leash, impeding their reporting. This involved supervising reporters’ interviews and delaying communication of reports.¹⁸

Some of these constraints were a matter of political convenience rather than military necessity, but journalists themselves were coming to recognize that technology-enabled advances in real-time reporting could prove problematic. In the 1991 Gulf War, television networks and even local television stations could use satellite transmission to report live to their audiences during the fighting. Enemy militaries could tap into these broadcasts and learn, for example, about the efficacy of their artillery and missile attacks. Military officials and news executives knew they had to address this, preferably in a joint effort. There would be some degree of censorship, and news organizations had to determine how much of it they would impose on themselves rather than leaving that decision solely to the military.¹⁹

Such realization led, a decade later, to the cooperative venture of embedding about 700 American and international journalists with US military units during the early stages of the Iraq War that began in 2003. The embed process was designed cooperatively by the Defense Department and representatives from the news media, and technology was a factor in the Pentagon’s rulemaking. Military commanders knew that satellite broadcasting capability had expanded significantly since the 1991 Gulf War, with gear that was more portable and affordable, and so journalists would have greater ability to escape constraints and report on their own. Beyond that, the military wanted to influence news content without appearing to be doing so. Making journalists beholden for access (and personal safety) was a way to accomplish that. For their part, news organizations wanted to bring their audiences timely, exciting, “up close” reporting from the frontlines. The arrangements that were agreed upon were far from perfect, but they more or less served the interests of both parties.²⁰

The military units in which journalists were embedded found themselves with their mission expanded in a nontraditional way. Fighting the Iraqi enemy was the principal task, but some soldiers’ frontline responsibilities now included feeding, housing, and safeguarding a coterie of journalists. Most of these journalists had never served in the military and had received only brief training in matters such as first aid and dealing with a chemical weapons attack. Despite their occasional bravado, these men and women were amateurs among warfighting professionals, and they had to be treated with care by their hosts.²¹

The military wanted to facilitate news gathering that would show US efforts in the most favorable light to ensure continued popular support from the American public. With the 9/11 attacks of 2001 still very much on the public’s and journalists’ minds, some news organizations decided that putting a patriotic spin on their coverage would appeal to news consumers (and advertisers).²² Mutually beneficial coexistence between combat operations and journalism was becoming a more integral element of military and journalistic doctrine.

Nevertheless, with the Vietnam War still a frequently cited precedent, the government and news media continue at times to wrestle for control of the information flow. As journalists know, the boundaries between “military necessity” and “political expedience” can sometimes be hard to discern when it comes to withholding information or making it available to the public.

Chapter 3, “War Information Expands,” considers the broadened scope of war-related information-gathering. While wars keep being fought and journalists keep covering them, use of new information technologies has extended well beyond the professionals to whom it had long been limited. Perhaps the most revolutionary new tool is the cellphone camera. With it, unseen wars can be brought into the vision of governments and publics, and they can decide whether this information merits intervention in response. Today we can look into the past and ask, “What if …?” about previous wars. What if Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994 had been able to show the world their country’s genocide in progress? Would foreign governments have responded more promptly? A half-century before that, what if the Holocaust had been documented as it happened? Would the Allied powers have altered their strategy and made liberating the Nazi concentration camps a higher priority?

The list of such questions is virtually endless. The device so many of us carry in our pockets today may not have been available to alter events and save lives in the past, but it might do so today. Along with other tools, it is used by “citizen journalists” who have little or no formal journalism training but gather and disseminate descriptions and images of events that take place in front of them. Established news organizations see them as assets. The BBC, for instance, may ask witnesses to terrorist attacks and other such occurrences to provide photos, video, and general information that can be included in news reports.²³ Sometimes a deluge of responses is the result. At first glance, this may seem to be a valuable expansion of the flow of news. But vetting can be difficult; once the door is opened, fraudulent photos, videos, and text might come racing through. This means news organizations must pay particular attention to the accuracy of material from citizen journalists. Errors may be deliberate or accidental, but they should not be presented to the public.²⁴

Nevertheless, citizen journalists’ work can have great value. Syrians reporting from their hometowns during the war that began in 2011 have bravely provided coverage from places that conventional news organizations cannot (or dare not) reach. Rulers such as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad are finding it more difficult to slaughter their opponents without the rest of the world learning about it. How the world will respond to atrocities documented in real time remains open to question, but perhaps this new dimension of information availability will somewhat alter the calculations of bloodletting.

“Slaughter” is not too strong a word to describe what happens in a war, and not just to combatants. Civilian casualties and the destruction of homes, schools, hospitals, and much else tend to receive only secondary attention; they are the detritus of war. But some in the news media and those working for humanitarian organizations are determined that the world should know about this aspect of the costs of war. Cold objectivity sometimes is set aside in favor of a “journalism of attachment” that tells the truth about wartime savagery as it affects individuals.²⁵

In chapter 4, “Social Media Go to War,” examples of social media’s effects on conflict are reviewed. More sophisticated than citizen journalists are the information arms of nations’ militaries. They battle each other on social media, making their respective cases to near and distant audiences. Given that so many media venues are now global in reach, the contest over worldwide public opinion accompanies even conflicts in which the physical battlefield is small and isolated. Such has been the case between the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the Hamas fighters of Gaza. In terms of basic military power, this is a mismatch; the IDF possess much more firepower and other war-fighting technology than their Palestinian opponents do. In an all-out conventional confrontation, the IDF would certainly prevail. But political factors somewhat limit Israel’s combat options, and on the information battleground social media can serve Hamas as a kind of political equalizer if users possess the skills needed to produce attention-getting content.

The IDF–Hamas conflict is relatively transparent for those who want to watch the two sides make their cases in an online debate in which they are armed with words and images. But make no mistake – people still die while the barrages of information fly back and forth.

Non-state actors such as terrorist groups have also found that social media offer congenial platforms for their information purposes. Islamic State, Al Qaeda, and others have relied on online tools for recruiting, fundraising, and delivering a mix of threats and self-promotion, as well as for on-the-ground combat coordination. They use traditional news releases, in several languages, to tout their latest bloody accomplishments, and although mainstream media organizations can deny these extremist groups access to the public through their own venues, wholly excluding tech-smart users from social media is difficult. When Twitter sought to purge Islamic State messaging, it closed down more than 100,000 accounts in just one month, but it was far from certain that this effort had been as comprehensive as intended, and many of these accounts may have been swiftly reconstituted, either on Twitter or in “darker” recesses of the internet. Dealing with terrorist information initiatives will become more important if Islamic State concentrates on a virtual, rather than physical, caliphate, and if groups such as Boko Haram and Al Shabaab become more adept in their online efforts.²⁶

Gatekeepers have always been present in one form or another to govern information flows. In some cases, such as in China, these are government censors who rigidly oversee content before it can reach the public. In countries where information freedom is respected, newspaper editors, television producers, and other media professionals make decisions about newsworthiness based on criteria ranging from basic moral values to commercial interests such as keeping advertisers happy.

These gatekeepers were particularly influential when the media universe was more finite. Fifty years ago in the United States, consumers of television news had only three national channels to choose from, and newspapers served only limited geographic areas. Today, in much of the world, there is no such thing as local, or even national, news in terms of limitations on distribution to an audience. Even many small community newspapers rely on their websites to deliver their product, and so people anywhere in the world with internet access may read about town council doings and school lunch menus. On a grander scale, online news and satellite television are largely unconstrained by national borders. Citizens of most nations can read, listen, or watch how news media in other countries cover their own and others’ homelands. Governments that don’t want this coverage to reach their populations must struggle mightily to choke off incoming material that they find uncongenial.

Although gatekeepers still make decisions about newsworthiness and appropriateness of content of their own products, much of the information universe today is populated not by traditional providers but rather by websites, videos, and text content carried by the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Weibo, QQ, YouTube, and many others. For the most part (with the exception of extreme content, such as child pornography, that government regulators or communication companies themselves ban), the material that citizens around the world see on social media passes through limited or no review processes. Most gateways for information are wide open, and damaging material might not be flagged except post facto. Artificial intelligence systems that rely on screening algorithms are useful, but not foolproof.²⁷

Is the result of this openness information democracy or information anarchy? Probably some of both. For refugees in Congo wanting to tell their story to the world, having direct access to global publics is invaluable. For the workers in a Russian troll farm using false information to provoke conflict in a foreign country, their access is similarly vital.

Chapter 5, “Russia and New Dimensions of Information at War,” analyzes disinformation. This kind of war-by-influence has existed for many years. In 1940 and 1941, while Edward Murrow was broadcasting from London about the plight of the British under attack by Nazi Germany, British agents operating in New York City were producing information – much of it false – designed to push America toward entering the war.²⁸

Their efforts pale by comparison with those orchestrated today by the Kremlin, which has made information warfare a principal element in its military doctrine while it relies on troll factories and other content generators to disseminate largely false information that serves the purposes of Russian foreign policy.²⁹ The key to their efforts is volume, with hundreds of trolls producing thousands of online messages every day.

Measuring the effects of contemporary political information warfare is still a developing science, but it is reasonable to assume that Russian disinformation efforts had at least some impact on the 2016 US presidential election and the 2016 British “Brexit” referendum. Further, such self-serving information tactics can be used to influence public attitudes about kinetic measures such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014.³⁰

Just as major militaries have had to expand their expertise beyond grand battlefield scenarios and adjust to the demands of combatting insurgencies and terrorists, so too must they develop strategies to address the exigencies of information-centric conflict. For now, Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin and Islamic State stand out as having relied heavily on information-enhanced tactics, but they will almost certainly be joined by others. The United States has responded, targeting terrorists’ online recruitment efforts and, in November 2018, launching a preemptive electronic attack on a Russian troll farm to prevent possible disruption of that month’s US congressional elections.³¹

Nevertheless, it is more than likely that state and non-state actors will continue to develop their information war capabilities. The Putin government has shown – in Ukraine, the Baltic States, and elsewhere – that it is committed to mastering the human–machine combination of hybrid warfare that relies heavily on information tactics. In addition to using information in armed conflict, Russia vigorously uses information to disrupt political processes within rival countries, such as the United States, as well as in Europe. One question this book addresses is whether such activity can reach a point at which it constitutes “war,” even if no bullets are fired. NATO has adopted a policy that expands the definition of “attack” beyond conventional armed conflict and now includes cyberattacks. Individual nations might soon do the same.³²

Chapter 6, “From Media Manipulation to Media Literacy,” examines cases related to information at war in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, and addresses how the flow of information can shape public attitudes about those who fight. This chapter also considers how publics around the world might adjust to the threats posed by information warfare. On their own and through broad-based education programs, citizens need to enhance their media literacy. They must know when to greet information with skepticism, and they must understand how to go about verifying news and other material, particularly online content delivered from unfamiliar sources. Truth is a powerful weapon to be used against malign information, and the public must become far more proficient at wielding that weapon.

Anticipatory information at war is present even when armed conflict is unlikely. Disinformation about the Covid-19 virus, vaccinating children against measles and other illnesses, and similar topics can be used to foster uncertainty and disunity among publics of nations that are considered long-term adversaries. Probing and softening a country’s resolve are parts of the long game of information at war – laying a foundation for possible future conflicts.

Chapter 7, “Where We’ve Been, Where We’re Going,” pulls together elements from past and present and considers what might lie ahead. Shakespeare wrote “What is past is prologue,” and another way to say that is “Nothing is new.” The preceding chapters presented numerous examples of how information has been used in war, and these instances provide some guidance about what the future might hold.

This final chapter also focuses on the giant looming over the future of information at war: China. This material appears near the end of the book because dealing with China and its information-oriented “three warfares” strategy will be so crucial to the future of so many aspects of global affairs moving forward in the twenty-first century. This will be the next great challenge for those who address issues related to information at war.

A note about the focus of this book: many of the examples cited relate to American journalistic and military issues, although there are substantial explorations of topics grounded in experiences of the United Kingdom, Russia, China, Ukraine, Finland, the Baltic States, Middle Eastern countries, and numerous others. The author, being an American and having written much about US media and foreign policy, is trying to make the best use of his expertise and is certainly not trying to understate the significance of the military and information-related histories of any other nation.

What would Homer have thought about all this? How would he have told his audiences about our contemporary manifestations of rage – wars with many weapons, including information? I refer to Homer’s work in several places in this book because I consider him to be a prime ancestor of those who gather and disseminate information at war.

In his book Why Homer Matters, Adam Nicolson stated: “Homer knows about the reality of suffering but never thinks of a world without conflict … . We might long for peace, but we live in war.”³³ Civilization will always be plagued by conflict of one kind or another, including those that use words and images as well as bullets. Information at war will be part of that.