The Enemy Is Always Faster

While I was on a consulting assignment, playing the J39 of a mythical Joint Task Force (JTF) being deployed to a notional country, our largest tactical unit was to be the 1^st Bde Combat Team of the 82^nd Airborne.

Part of my job along with a colleague was to portray enemy social media posters. While we were busily playing our roles on January 16, 2020, a gift dropped from the heavens. In the real word “Families of deployed paratroopers received ‘menacing’ messages, warned to double-check social media settings” See: http://bit.ly/2tDI07t which is also the photo source.

We quickly seized on the concept and borrowed some of the text of those messages and employed themselves. It was easy and effective. In fact, the student class that was trying to counter our influence efforts couldn’t even figure out who the ‘enemy’ social media authors were actually representing.

This is a clear microcosm of the world we live in. I have already noted a few very well-done pieces on the fact that Cyber Command does not have a true PSYOP/Influence capability (see: http://bit.ly/3aw8g4s ). In my view this is as one of my former SF colleagues used to say “deja do do” or I have seen this poop before.

Shooters want to shoot. If they are war fighters, they want to fire weapons and blow things up. If their cyber wizards, they want to shoot electrons (distributed denial of service attack) or employ other means to show their technical chops.

There is a glaring lack of an overarching strategy to achieve dominance or even parity in the information domain. Even if there were such a strategy, the bureaucratic nature of our government would hamper effective, timely response.

At the 2* JTF level for example, approvals would have had to be sought from the State Department, the Combatant Commander, SECDEF and presumably the White House to wage a multi-platform influence campaign including both social media and cyberspace operations over and above the tactical MISO/PSYOP executed by the JTF.

It is no wonder that the ‘enemy’ is cleaning our clock at the national, operational and tactical levels. As the 2020 Presidential Election comes closer and closer, I’m afraid we can expect more targeting by traditional enemies and adversaries as well as a host of opportunists to include Transnational Criminal Organizations and others who will seek to drive the American voter their way.

Unfortunately, experience shows this is not a drive, but a gimmee putt.