Urban areas complicate military communications

[2RHPZ]

Hearing Impaired
Urban areas complicate military communications. To survive, forces must learn to intercept but not disrupt civilian networks.

by Ted McKenna
Aug. 12, 2004

The battlefield was once thought of as being a place apart, a deadly space where only the rules of war applied. Now it can be just around the corner. Consider a peacekeeping operation in a civil-war-torn country like Haiti or Sierra Leone, where civilian life may struggle on amid the ongoing warfare. Soldiers must destroy as little of the surroundings as they can, given the importance of the local population’s goodwill to the success of their mission (see IO in the Information Age’ - second post). But the vehicles, power lines, buildings, and all the other confusion of urban life play havoc with a key tool in waging war: communications.

Military forces may find when they enter urban areas that their radios no longer work because of surrounding noise and interference, and that the enemy, instead of being conveniently identifiable by a uniform, is hidden somewhere amid civilians who are either in collusion or totally unsuspecting. The communications the enemy uses, meanwhile, may not be traditional military communications networks, but the same cellular, satellite, landline, or other commercial networks that the rest of the populace uses, making intercepting or jam-ming communications correspondingly more complex. Addressing the needs of communications within urban areas has, therefore, become a priority for military planners who know that urban warfare will only continue to grow more common.

To begin with, urban areas obviously present more obstacles to forces attempting to communicate with one another as a result of buildings, towers, and other structures that obstruct signals; power lines and other sources of electromagnetic interference; and the presence of civilian networks upon which military frequencies should not be allowed to intrude. Buildings and other obstacles create the problem of “multi-path” signals, in which radio signals bouncing off surfaces at different angles criss-cross prior to being received, confusing the radios trying to pick up the signals and resulting in interference. Duane Schattle, deputy director of the US Joint Forces Command’s Joint Urban Operations Office, describes the situation as like the Verizon cell phone commercials in which an employee is walking around with a phone saying, “Can you hear me now?” There’s a reason he’s doing that. “You don’t see him out in the open areas doing that,” Schattle said. “He’s always in the urban areas. He’s in cities; he’s by cars; he’s by windows.”

With military communications, the situation is no different. In addition, another problem within urban areas is “noise,” noted Joe Schlesak, a research manager at the Communications Research Centre of Canada, a government organization that works with the Canadian Department of National Defence. Noise may be caused by power lines, building generators, car ignitions, and other sources of electromagnetic interference that create problems with radio communications, requiring greater signal transmission or receiver processing. Greater processing power within radios can, in fact, compensate for the multipath signals, sorting out the wheat from the chaff, while more powerful radios can be used to improve the “signal-to-noise” ratio. In addition, using a higher frequency also helps penetrate interference.

Recognizing the difficulties encountered by forces operating within cities, communications vendors are introducing new products intended to address the problems of urban noise and obstacles. Among the companies introducing new equipment, Harris (Melbourne, FL) introduced a handheld, ultra-high-frequency version of its Falcon II line of radios earlier this year that is designed to better handle the urban environment simply because higher frequency — though its range is less — better penetrates obstacles. Too high a frequency, though, and the range starts to suffer. Bill Glase, a Harris product manager, also noted that the use of radio repeaters within, say, an elevator shaft or the roof of a building, while not used just in urban areas, certainly can be of greater importance within cities because it aids communications that might otherwise be impeded by obstacles.

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UK forces patrolling the streets of Basra, Iraq, must keep their eyes peeled for improvised explosive devices, rocket-propelled grenades, and other dangers coming from out of the blue. The trick is to react to threats without mistaking innocent civilians for armed persons. Communications, both for command and control and intelligence on enemy activities, is the patrol’s lifeline.

But apart from turning to this type of equipment, interference problems ultimately should also be corrected through new types of military communications networks such as the US Army’s planned Warfighter Information Network - Tactical (WIN-T), which will help forces stay in touch with one another by more flexibly relaying data or other communications among the different users in a network. Say one squad can’t speak directly to another because of some interference; an Internet-like radio network could bounce communications from one point to another until the communications are able from some direction to reach their intended recipient. Such a network also accommodates the kind of data transmission that militaries now want for exchanging friendly and enemy location information and more, and will require new software for managing the allocation of bandwidth, so that the people most in need of communications can get the capacity they need.

Under Surveillance

Apart from communications for command and control, military forces must be effective at penetrating those of the enemy. But to do communications interception and jamming within urban areas, the problem is not just interference or noise. While military communications can be set so that they do not operate with civilian networks, as they probably would not in any case, the use of civilian networks by enemies within urban areas means forces must know how to infiltrate the networks, whether they themselves can operate on the frequencies or not. As a result, new types of military radio technology must be designed to deal with the higher frequencies on which civilian networks are likely to operate, according to Rod Brown, program manager for electronic warfare for Rockwell Collins Government Systems (Cedar Rapids, IA). “If you can’t go up to 2 GHz, you’re missing 90% of the communications signals that are there. And it wasn’t that way 10 years ago,” he said. “You also need to have special capabilities since civilian systems use frequency and time management differently than traditional military systems, so there’s some new algorithm design that’s required.” In addition, military operators obviously will need to be trained to work with such networks, Brown noted.

In a reverse from past decades, when the military tended to be the innovator in new technology and the commercial sector the benefactor, today — in the communications sphere, at least — commercial vendors lead the way in developing frequency hopping, spread spectrum, encryption, and other network characteristics that make interception more difficult. Militaries themselves benefit from the security that such technology provides them in their own radios, as well as from the development of software-defined radios like the Joint Tactical Radio System in the US, which should allow operators of different types of radios, even those on different frequencies, to turn a knob and communicate with the other person.

But the new technology also benefits enemy combatants using commercial networks like cellular, which they may use to trigger an improvised explosive device (IED) to take out a passing land convoy, for instance. Encryption and frequency hopping make it tougher for military forces to track down the enemy. The chips within cellular phones can be reprogrammed for different phone numbers — even multiple numbers. Rather like battling the multi-headed Hydra of Greek mythology, lopping off or intercepting one particular phone signal still leaves the others hissing. Cutting the creature off at the neck, though, may not be feasible. Jamming such signals presents a major dilemma for militaries, since they want to prevent networks being used to set off bombs or otherwise hurt them, but they do not want to completely jam the network, raising the ire of the local populace, impeding authorities from coordinating emergency responses, and so on. Must the entire communications network be shut down, as reportedly happened during the March 11 bombings in Madrid, Spain, when authorities knew communications signals were being used to set off explosives? Planners of military operations within urban areas hope not.

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Military trucks dedicated for communications intelligence, like the US Army Trailblazer vehicle shown here, won’t do in urban environments, where successful eavesdropping requires getting as close to the subjects as possible. Less noticeable to civilians, commercial vans equipped with the necessary equipment better allow forces to track down insurgents.

Though vendors don’t like to say exactly how their products can intercept or jam communications signals, assuredly they offer the capability. One key point made by Nati Catran, vice president of marketing and sales at Elisra Group (Bene Baraq, Israel), is that jamming is a lot simpler to do than interception and is, therefore, the more likely action to be taken by military forces looking to thwart enemy communications over whatever network they may run and in whatever form they may take. And the enemy may communicate in many ways, from cellular to satellite to traditional landlines to voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) communications. With the latter form of communications, any Internet connection could be used as a conduit for voice calls, and tracking down the IP address could be as tricky as locating a computer hacker. Thus, communications experts trying to pinpoint exactly where an insurgent may be based on IP address, which could be mobile, face a big challenge.

I Spy

As a result, human intelligence becomes correspondingly more important in urban areas than in more “traditional” battlefields, if only because of the plethora of new communications links, according to an electronic-warfare (EW) expert at Thales Land & Joint Systems (Neuilly-sur-Seine Cedex, France), which makes various kinds of equipment for interception and jamming. This gives operators an idea of where to direct their attention. In an example of how human intelligence facilitates effective use of communications surveillance and interception within urban areas, the US military, working with local authorities in Colombia to track down the notorious drug trafficker Pablo Escobar, relied on human intelligence about the whereabouts of Escobar to direct where its communications-interception team would go. Some tip on where he was, or perhaps what phone number he was using — since he was aware of the surveillance and switched his phones constantly — was needed before the communications-interception team could mobilize. Given that millions of perfectly innocuous communications clog the airwaves in urban areas, interception will nearly always require a cell-phone number, a geographical location — some type of clue for operators of communications-interception equipment to find a person.

Jamming signals within a certain range — say, several hundred meters — is more feasible and is increasingly being done for protecting land convoys against IEDs, for instance. In light of the dangers faced by troops in Iraq, various companies are supplying new products for jamming communications in such situations. EDO Corp. (New York, NY) is supplying the US Army with communications jammers for use in Iraq, and Thales last year introduced a product called the Flexible Light Electronic Attack System, which can be used to counter communications signals of various frequencies, as well as intercept signals for the purpose of surveillance. Not just forces in Iraq face IEDs, of course; the president of Pakistan was reportedly saved from one thanks to a jammer. The Border Security Forces of India, too, reportedly developed a jammer of their own that is effective at up to 100 meters.

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The airborne elements of a fighting force can serve as relays for communications for squadrons within a city, for instance, and remote commanders. With military operations becoming increasingly joint in nature, radio systems like the Joint Tactical Radio System are being developed that can operate on multiple frequencies, tying together forces that might otherwise be unable to communicate directly with one another.

Intercepting or jamming civilian communications not surprisingly means adopting some of the same technology and techniques used in non-military communications situations. Elisra Group’s Catran said an example of this might be Telecommunications Ministry employees whose job includes nabbing airwave pirates — people or businesses like taxi-cab services that use airwaves of whatever frequency without paying licensing fees. Unmarked vans, like the kind featured in movies about CIA or police stakeouts, are used to transport and serve as a base for operating the monitoring equipment. If military operations within urban areas are to be successful, soldiers must also use unmarked vehicles for their equipment.

“If you want to talk about the conversion of the battlefield into what we call the asymmetric, you’re trying not to alarm your enemy, which might be civilian-wearing as well,” Catran said. “So the equipment you are using and the vehicle you are driving should not be suspicious. Go there with your green cars, with a military shelter, or a command car or armored personnel carrier, and immediately all the world will stand in the street and clap their hands. It’ll be an Independence Day parade. On the other hand, you can just put this equipment into those commercial cars, disguise them, and use them for the same operations you’re doing in daily life.”

Because of encryption, intercepting communications is far more difficult than jamming them. Here, Elisra Group’s Catran noted, one comes to an area that is endless. Certainly, military and other types of communications experts can decrypt signals, but it is not necessarily easy. Breaking into encrypted communications is a highly mathematical, complex process, and within the commercial communications world, manufacturers are constantly looking to improve the security of communications for their customers. Enemy combatants utilizing civilian communications coincidentally benefit. Because of the extra effort required to decrypt communications, military forces are more likely to simply opt for interfering with or jamming their opponents’ communications. There may not be enough time to do more.

“You have to place your interest, priorities,” Catran said. “If you’re talking about a strategic requirement, and you have the time, you can take communications and decrypt, encrypt, do whatever you want. But if you are in an operation, a tactical situation, I believe the first priority will be triangulation, location, and identification of the network, and then the second or third priority, will be listening and understanding. In EW, there’s always counter and counter-counter. The question is, who has more money in order to go to the next step.”

Help From Above

Can satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) help, operating above all of the city clutter? Satellites certainly provide a good means of collecting imagery about a particular location and, through new projects, may even someday be able to track moving objects through networks of satellites. They also sometimes are the most reliable form of communications to commanders on the ground, who — when their radio networks are not working properly — have been known in a pinch to call their headquarters half a world away by satellite to order indirect fire.

In addition, intelligence agencies — including the US National Security Agency and its equivalents in the UK, France, Australia, and other countries — have long been known to have the ability to tap into not just landline-related communications — submarine cables, for instance, or cell-phone towers — but also satellite communications. They can simply sift through communications passing through the air and, thanks to software, designate certain key words — a person’s name or a certain place, for example — that, automatically detected by computer systems, informs human analysts to listen in to that particular bit of communications. This is not a function that specifically relates to military operations in urban areas, but it certainly can help in tracking down important communications in urban areas, where enemy combatants may be more likely to be use civilian communications networks.In terms of communications interception and jamming, however, the primary ability of satellites and UAVs is their ability to geolocate, whether because of Global Positioning System chips within a user’s phone, or because UAVs can be used in conjunction with ground assets and radio towers to determine the location of a communications signal based on a process called triangulation. On the flip side, though, the reliance placed by militaries today on satellites for tracking positions, directing munitions, and more makes communications a potential weakness to be exploited by enemies, if they can. The Iraqi military during the first phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, reportedly attempted to jam US communications, but given Iraqi’s highly second-rate military capabilities, the jamming attempt not only didn’t help, but it actually gave coalition forces signal emissions against which to target their bombs. Would a better-equipped enemy have more luck jamming communications? “The past few engagements, we’ve basically been fighting against fourth-tier militaries,” said John Edwards, space-systems analyst for Forecast International (Newtown, CT). “But if you go up against a country like China or the like, yes.”

The reliance on communications to do everything from target and transmit information, gain situational awareness of friendly and enemy forces, and operate a mix of sensors from on the ground to below ground to overhead thus becomes a potential weakness, making the security of the network that much more important. How secure can the opposing forces make their respective communications? The outcome of the conflict may depend on the answer.

[2RHPZ]

IO in the Information Age

The Genesis and Evolution of Joint IO.

by LTC Zachary P. Hubbard, US Army (ret.)
Apr. 1, 2004

As the 20th century drew to a close, strategists began to understand how informational power might affect future military operations. The world was introduced to the so-called “CNN factor,” a term used to describe real-time, global broadcast television’s impact on national policy and diplomacy. The first 24-hour media coverage of war generated new concerns over operations security (OPSEC) and made some question whether large-scale military deception operations would ever be possible again given the ubiquitous media coverage of military operations. The world witnessed the considerable changes in warfare resulting from the technological revolution of the Information Age. With the Information Age came information operations (IO), an ostensibly new way of conducting military operations.

In Operation Desert Storm, the art and science of command-and-control warfare (C2 W) was applied to near perfection. C2 W targets an adversary’s command-and-control (C2 ) systems. Military commanders use C2 systems to coordinate and synchronize virtually every aspect of their planning and operations. Applying C2 W, the Allied coalition in Desert Storm systematically bombarded Iraq’s frontline troops with psychological operations (PSYOP), crippled Iraq’s integrated air defenses, blinded its target acquisition, shut down its propaganda machine, and totally disrupted military communications from the national to the operational level. These actions were supported by the most massive military deception operation since the Normandy invasion. Iraq’s military forces, psychologically exhausted and rendered electronically deaf and blind, were subsequently defeated in detail by relentless aerial attack combined with a lightning-swift ground campaign. The image of the crushed Iraqi forces surrendering by the thousands remains vivid today. C2 W was the genesis of the joint IO doctrine employed by the US military today.

Information operations have yet to be fully understood or embraced by the US military. Yet the military has applied IO doctrinally at least since 1998, when the Department of Defense (DoD) first published Joint Publication (JP) 3-13, Joint Doctrine for Information Operations. The military applied IO tactics, techniques, and procedures operationally as early as the end of 1995, when the US first introduced ground troops into Bosnia. The Unified Combatant Commanders have all formed IO cells on their staffs, and the military services have each developed unique approaches to applying IO in their daily operations and planning. JP 3-13 defines IO as “actions taken to affect adversary information and information systems while defending one’s own information and information systems.” The vagueness of this definition to a large degree reflects the inability of the military services to agree on a definition for IO, even though it has been over three years since the publication of JP 3-13. They have only recently agreed on what will be come a consensus definition of IO. Joint IO doctrine divides IO into offensive and defensive capabilities and related activities. These include the capabilities of psychological operations (PSYOP), OPSEC, military deception, physical attack, electronic warfare (EW), and computer-network attack. Additionally, there are two related activities that directly support IO: civil affairs and public affairs. In virtually every joint combat operation, US military forces employ EW against enemy air defenses. Other IO capabilities are employed as the situation warrants.

Somalia

Although there was no DoD IO doctrine in 1992, the US military made extensive use of a number of IO capabilities during its ill-fated operations in Somalia. Somalia began as a humanitarian mission to end a famine resulting from years of civil war, exacerbated by unprecedented flooding across large portions of the country. Any technological infrastructure Somalia might have had was long destroyed by the time the US intervened. For that reason, the “soft science” of perception-management operations prevailed during the operation. The US used a combination of PSYOP and public affairs to pass selected messages and themes to the Somali people and leaders. The persuasive words were reinforced by the actions of civil-affairs teams, whose coordination of relief projects did much to ease the massive human suffering. The humanitarian crisis was essentially relieved during the first days of the mission.

Virtually all of the perception-management success in Somalia was negated when the military mission changed from humanitarian relief to peace enforcement. The new mission included a requirement to capture the warlord Mohammed Farah Aideed. This resulted in armed engagements between US and Somali forces, erasing any semblance of US neutrality and virtually destroying the credibility of subsequent perception-management efforts by the military. Aideed himself was a master of perception management. His forces filmed themselves dragging the dead body of a US pilot through the streets of Mogadishu and then passed the video to the international news media. The film aired across the globe and ultimately precipitated a withdrawal of US forces from Somalia and a reversal of US national policy in the Horn of Africa. The CNN factor, in this instance, clearly demonstrated that information had become an element of national power that, when properly employed, could prove as effective as military, economic, and diplomatic power.

Haiti

Perception-management operations were employed extensively in Haiti prior to the introduction of US ground forces in Operation Uphold Democracy in 1994. The aim of the United Nations-backed operation was enforcement of the Governors Island Accords, which laid the framework for the return to power of the democratically elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Aristide had been overthrown by a coup in 1991, the same year he was elected. A government led by the parliamentary majority party and the Haitian military replaced him. General Raul Cedras led the Haitian military. The US Atlantic Command had created Joint Task Force Haiti Assistance Group (JTF HAG) to lead the movement of US forces into Haiti. The JTF was embarked aboard the USS Harlan County, an amphibious transport ship. It was structured for an assistance mission to help restore stability to Haiti, not for peace enforcement. Upon arriving at Port-au-Prince harbor, the commander of the Harlan County discovered a Cuban tanker blocking his assigned berth; an angry, drunken mob at the piers; and Haitian Navy gunboats with an aggressive attitude. Already gun-shy from the Somalia experience, the Clinton administration was reluctant to enter into a peacekeeping effort with a show of force. The Harlan County eventually was recalled, and CNN broadcast its departure, describing the Harlan County as being “thrown out of Haiti.” The Haitians interpreted the departure as a lack of US resolve, and once again, the CNN factor had influenced US national policy.

Planning for the introduction of forces into Haiti included both permissive- and forcible-entry operations. Prior to the introduction of forces, military aircraft broadcast PSYOP messages by radio and TV directly to the Haitian People. One theme discouraged the Haitians from attempting to flee to the US during the upcoming operations. Other messages from deposed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide explained the situation and declared that the mission of US soldiers was to restore democracy. The US dropped 10,000 portable radios to enable the Haitian citizens to monitor the Commando Solo broadcasts by the 193 Special Operations Group, Pennsylvania Air National Guard. Other perception-management operations were aimed directly at Haitian military leader General Raul Cedras and top civilian leaders. The messages urged the Haitian civilian and military leadership to peacefully relinquish power. They eventually succumbed to the immense pressure. Cedras and other top military leaders were allowed to depart the country to live in exile in Panama.

Operation Uphold Democracy succeeded in restoring democracy and stemming the massive flow of illegal immigrants to the US. However, the US military was caught unprepared for the Harlan County incident and suffered an initial loss in the perception-management effort from which it had difficulty recovering. The military must be able to respond to unfavorable events before the adversary can use them for his own propaganda. US military planners did not anticipate the Harlan County incident, and the Haitians were quick to claim that they had defeated the US Navy. This fact was not lost on the Haitian military leadership.

In reality, serendipity may have played as big a role in the eventual peaceful entry of forces into Haiti as did planning. While every effort was made to maintain OPSEC throughout planning and executing the deployment of US forces, it proved impossible to hide the fact that the US Army’s 10th Mountain Division had embarked on the aircraft carrier USS Eisenhower. Television coverage of this event was readily available to the Haitian leadership. The clear threat of force might have been just what was needed to persuade them not to resist. Unfortunately, this consideration had not been factored into the perception-management operations. The US was just lucky to have avoided the necessity for a forcible entry.

After the introduction of forces, the perception-management effort continued. Public affairs continued to explain the presence of UN forces and sought to prevent any hostile acts against those forces. Civil affairs led the efforts to restore electricity and other infrastructure. Civil affairs also served as expert advisors to as many as 12 government ministries.

Bosnia

The first large-scale application of IO as a US military doctrine was in Bosnia-Herzegovina. NATO’s mission in Bosnia was peace operations — i.e., enforcing the agreements of the Dayton Peace Accords. The Bosnian Serbs had been driven to the negotiating table as a direct result of NATO’s Deliberate Force air campaign, conducted from August 29 to September 14, 1995. Deliberate Force focused on eliminating the Serbs’ integrated air defenses and the Bosnian Serb Army’s operational command and control. The operation was so successful that afterwards the combined Croat and Muslim forces of the Bosnian Federation were able to rout the shaken Serb forces in central and western Bosnia.

NATO’s peacekeeping force, called the Implementation Force (IFOR), begin entering Bosnia in December 1995 as part of operation Allied Force. Their entrance was preceded by an extensive PSYOP campaign to inform and prepare the former warring factions for their arrival. The Air Force’s Commando Solo was the primary means of disseminating the PSYOP messages. The peacekeepers made extensive use of civil affairs and public affairs to support their perception-management operations. The aim of the civil-affairs projects was to restore order to the daily lives of the Bosnian citizens and to win their support for NATO’s presence in their country. Public affairs informed the Bosnian public about NATO’s intent and emphasized the positive influences caused by NATO’s presence in Bosnia.

The US Army, as a long-term, stay-behind force, relies heavily upon perception management to support its operations, particularly to enhance force protection. NATO’s US Army-led Multinational Division North (MND-N) made extensive use of IO. The Army published Field Manual 100-6, Information Operations, in August 1996, some two years before JP 3-13 was published. MND-N’s IO-planning capability was augmented by a Field Support Team (FST) from the Army’s then new IO center of excellence, the Land Information Warfare Activity (LIWA), based in Ft. Belvoir, VA. The IO executed by MND-N focused heavily on perception management using the PSYOP and OPSEC, supported by civil- and public-affairs operations. The LIWA FST was organized to provide the full spectrum of offensive and defensive IO-planning and -execution support. This is the first instance we find of a military structure developed specifically to support the application of full-spectrum IO. Even NATO eventually joined in, forming the first NATO IO Cell in the Stabilization Force (SFOR) headquarters in Sarajevo in late 1996.

Operations in Bosnia revealed the potential value of the integrated and coordinated application of IO. Perhaps the most important lesson learned was the utility of public affairs, civil affairs, and PSYOP as non-lethal weapons. Civil affairs played a tremendous role in Bosnia, with troops coordinating the massive humanitarian relief effort and assisting in the establishment of government functions and services in the newly formed Bosnian government. Civil affairs and PSYOP troops engaged in a massive public-information effort aimed at mine awareness to reduce the number of casualties from the thousands of mines that had been spread across the country during the years of civil war. Public affairs supported these efforts and worked in parallel with the PSYOP efforts to persuade the former warring factions to refrain from further fighting amongst themselves or from attacking coalition forces. Radio IFOR and later Radio SFOR broadcast entertainment, public information, and narrowly focused PSYOP messages to the Bosnian citizens and leadership. The SFOR continues to employ IO in Bosnia today.

Kosovo

Unfortunately, NATO’s peacekeeping efforts in Bosnia-Herzegovina did not resolve the wider regional crisis in the Balkans. Serbia’s leader, Slobodan Milosevic, was determined to crush a separatist movement by the majority ethnic Albanians in Serbia’s autonomous southern region of Kosovo in order to prevent any further break-up of the former Yugoslavia. Kosovo is the traditional seat of Serbia’s Orthodox Church and the site of the “Field of Blackbirds,” where outnumbered Serbs refused to surrender to the invading Ottomans in 1389 and suffered a crushing defeat. This site has been called “Serbia’s Alamo” and is a symbol of intense national pride amongst Serbs.

The Kosovo crisis began in early 1998 when large-scale fighting broke out, resulting in the displacement of some 300,000 people. A ceasefire was agreed to in October 1998, which enabled refugees to find shelter, thus averting a potentially massive humanitarian crisis over the winter. A Verification Mission was deployed under the auspices of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). However, violence continued, and the situation worsened significantly in January 1999. A peace conference, held in Paris, broke down on March 19 with the Yugoslav delegation’s refusal to accept a peaceful settlement. Milosevic, who controlled the news media with an iron fist, would prove a formidable adversary in the realm of information warfare.

Operation Noble Anvil was the US portion of NATO’s larger Operation Allied Force, in which the NATO allies determined to quell the Kosovo crisis by expelling Serb forces from Kosovo. Some have called Kosovo the first “net war.” Besides using the Internet for public-affairs and propaganda purposes, Serbs also used it to conduct information attacks against NATO countries. In the first week of the bombing, one Serbian individual sent over 2,000 virus-laden emails a day into the NATO computer system. The Alliance’s website also came under cyber-attack during the second week, as Serbian computer users managed to temporarily disable the site by bombarding it with ping attacks that overwhelmed the system with more queries than it could handle simultaneously.

The US European Command (EUCOM) made use of the Internet for its own purposes. The Balkan Information Exchange was a EUCOM-sponsored website established to provide a source of unbiased, international reporting on the Balkans region as a means of countering Serbian propaganda. EUCOM hired the Rendon Group, an international media-marketing firm to develop the website. The website offered Balkan news in nine regional languages and still exists under EUCOM sponsorship as the Southeast European Times.

Although many of the details still remain classified, Noble Anvil revealed the new possibilities technology offers in the realm of perception management. In an effort to weaken support from Milosevic’s closest followers, direct, personalized PSYOP messages were delivered to them by electronic means, including telephone, cell phone, fax, and email. In the Information Age, a list of adversary telephone numbers, fax numbers, or email addresses can be a goldmine.

President Clinton’s decision not to employ ground forces to eject the Serb army from Kosovo limited the possibility for employing military deception at the operational level. It also meant that air power became the focus of the operation. The formidable Serb integrated air-defense threat meant that bombing would be conducted from high altitude, making both targeting and bomb-damage assessment (BDA) more difficult. It also limited the utility of Commando Solo broadcasts, as the aircraft was forced to operate at a safe stand-off distance from the Serb air-defense umbrella.

The IO lessons learned from the US experience in Kosovo were many. Allied OPSEC was less than adequate during Noble Anvil. As Lieutenant General Michael C. Short, NATO’s air-component commander, noted, “NATO placed its own air crews at increased risk by taking certain steps to reduce civilian casualties, such as bombing bridges only on weeknights between 10 pm and 4 am — a regular schedule that made NATO planes more vulnerable to anti-aircraft fire.”

A draft briefing circulated on the Internet and attributed to Admiral James Ellis, the Commander of Allied Force and JTF Noble Anvil, describes IO as “at once a great success...and perhaps the greatest failure of the war.” The briefing cites many IO successes, including the formation of the first IO Cell at the JTF level, effective employment of PSYOP, and the availability of IO tools. On the other hand, it cites missed IO opportunities, a general lack of IO understanding by warfighters, and a resounding defeat in the public-affairs “battle.” Ellis cautioned the military to ignore public affairs at its own peril, observing: “The enemy was much better at this [public affairs] than we were...and far more nimble. The enemy deliberately and criminally killed innocents by the thousands, but no one saw it...we accidentally killed innocents, sometimes by the dozens, and the world watched on the evening news. We were continuously reacting, investigating, and trying to answer ‘how could this happen?’”

Admiral Ellis also warned us of the perils of information saturation and staffs being controlled by information rather than vice versa. He failed, however, to mention the susceptibility NATO forces displayed to Serb deception and denial (D&D) activities. The Serbs employed the old Soviet art of “maskirova,” or tactical deception, with great success in Kosovo . Aviation Week & Space Technology in July 1999 reported that NATO had dropped 3,000 precision-guided munitions, had hit 500 decoys, but had destroyed only 50 tanks. The actual number of Serb combat vehicles destroyed is still a matter of considerable debate and controversy, with some claiming that the massive US aerial bombardment did little damage to the Serb Army’s combat vehicles. This controversy attests to the success of the Serb D&D operations. The Serbs made extensive use of combat-vehicle decoys, as had Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War, when he employed inflatable Scud missile look-alikes. The Serbs used smokepots to degrade laser designation of targets and feign damage in order to deceive NATO’s attempts at BDA. We must learn from the many hard lessons of Kosovo.

The Global War on Terrorism

After the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the US began the Global War on Terrorism. One of President Bush’s first efforts was to begin seizing terrorists’ financial assets and electronically tracing their cash flow in order to disrupt their logistics network. By all reckoning, the War on Terrorism is still in its early stages. After a short time, it became evident that Al Qaeda is a sophisticated enemy, using the Internet and encrypted communications to plan and command and control its operations and having a sophisticated financial network backing it. Poor OPSEC, combined with the relatively open communications infrastructure of the US and other Western nations, provides fertile ground for Al Qaeda’s information gathering and target acquisition. While there has been much speculation about Al Qaeda’s potential to employ cyber-warfare against the US, the capability has yet to be confirmed. That is not to say that the potential threat has been taken lightly. Given Al Qaeda’s goal of severely damaging the US economy, cyber-threats, particularly those against critical infrastructure, must be constantly evaluated. This became very evident in the wake of the large electricity blackout in the northeast US on August 14, 2003.

The enemy faced by US and allied forces in Afghanistan was technologically unsophisticated, so IO focused on non-technical capabilities. Early in the war, the US moved to establish a public-information office in Islamabad, Pakistan, to present the US side of the military action in Afghanistan in order to counter the spin put out by Arabic-language television news. The influence of the Qatar-based Al Jazeera, which has been called the “Arab CNN,” cannot be overstated. Al Jazeera beams its message across the Middle East and is reported to reach 35-million to 40-million viewers. It has been accused by some of being a mouthpiece for Osama bin Laden, airing recorded messages from bin Laden that some believe are used to pass cryptic messages to his followers. Regardless of its motives, Al Jazeera is a market competitor for US PSYOP and public-affairs broadcasts in the region.

Some have argued that the inability of the US to win the United Nations’ approval for military operations to oust Saddam Hussein was a direct result of losing the international media campaign. In addition to the “Al Jazeera factor,” at least part of this problem can be attributed to the failure of the Pentagon’s “Office of Strategic Influence,” or OSI. The office was formed to plant so-called “black propaganda” — i.e., disinformation — in foreign media. The OSI was formed as a direct result of the Global War on Terrorism. The Pentagon may not place black propaganda in US media, but it is not prohibited from doing so in foreign media, including in allied countries. The office was controversial from the beginning, with some fearing that even hinting at black propaganda would ruin the US military’s credibility. The controversial office was dismantled nearly as quickly as it was established, but Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has suggested that its programs remain essentially intact.

Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban maintained a stranglehold on printed media and broadcast radio, their primary means of information dissemination. During the early operations in Afghanistan, US bombing destroyed the Taliban’s radio-broadcast capability. The information vacuum was then filled with PSYOP and public-affairs messages broadcast by Commando Solo aircraft and ground-based transmitters. These were augmented with leaflet drops. The themes were simple, telling the Afghan people the truth about Osama bin Laden and the Taliban and letting them judge for themselves. Drops of humanitarian rations along with the leaflets aimed to further muster public support for US operations. Once the Taliban had been forced from the populated areas, civil-affairs teams on the ground began coordinating the massive humanitarian relief efforts in the most populated areas and helped increase the flow of relief supplies to levels five-times those prior to the September 11 attacks.

All in all, the US still has an incredible IO task ahead in the War on Terror. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that much of the conflict is being waged on US soil. The Posse Comitatus Act immediately comes into play. How much involvement may the US military have on the domestic scene? Furthermore, law has yet to catch up with the technology of the Information Age. The Title 50 authorities of the Intelligence Community do not fully address new, domestic intelligence-collection requirements. Many things need to change. Many of the required changes will stir considerable debate and controversy.

Gulf War II

It is difficult to assess the effectiveness of IO just prior to and during the major combat operations in Iraq during Gulf War II. Many of the details are still under close hold by the DoD. Much of the outcome of IO has yet to be determined. However, from what information is available, it is evident that much of what occurred followed the classic C2W pattern of Operation Desert Storm. There was extensive use of EW against the Iraqi integrated air defenses and of PSYOP leaflets and broadcasts targeting Iraqi ground forces. Each of these capabilities was augmented with large doses of high explosives aimed at the same targets. As occurred in the war in Kosovo, direct PSYOP appeals to high-level Iraqis were made by telephone, email, and facsimile. It appears that the extensive use of cyber-warfare, as many armchair generals had anticipated, never materialized. This may have been due to the remarkable speed with which the major combat operations were concluded. Lieutenant General David D. McKiernan, the land-component commander for Operation Iraqi Freedom, expressed his opinion that the effectiveness of the IO campaign may have been responsible for the fact that the Iraqis did not fight with all of their capabilities against coalition forces. As in the operations in Afghanistan, the Al Jazeera news service proved troubling to the US, broadcasting scenes of dead and captured US and British soldiers. They also aired audio messages purported to be from Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein prior to his capture by US forces in December 2003.

An interesting aspect of Gulf War II was President Bush’s direct appeal to the Iraqi people and the Iraqi military in the days preceding the war. Bush’s Iraq policy address on March 18, 2003, was translated into Arabic and beamed to the Iraqi populace and military via Commando Solo and terrestrial-based broadcasts. Bush’s message assured the Iraqi people that the United States’ fight was with Saddam’s regime and not the Iraqi people; he warned Saddam’s Ba’ath Party loyalists about possible prosecution for war crimes; and he implored the Iraqi military not to fight and waste their lives for a dying regime.

Now that Gulf War II has reached the difficult stabilization phase, much of the IO burden will fall on PSYOP, supported by civil and public affairs, to help promote a return to normalcy. The complexity of the problem is immense and will likely require years of commitment as in post-war Bosnia and Kosovo. However, achieving stability and a return to normalcy in Iraq is even more critical than in the Balkans, due to the greater instability in the Middle East and the ties to the ongoing Global War on Terrorism. The IO tasks ahead are monumental. Fortunately, the US military’s ability to conduct IO has improved considerably since the Balkans crisis. Since the end of the Kosovo War, the DoD has given the commander of the US Strategic Command responsibility for DoD IO. This includes responsibility for computer-network operations and integrated, full-spectrum IO. The secretary of Defense has declared that IO will become a core competency for the DoD. The military services have finally agreed on a common definition for IO. The DoD is establishing an IO roadmap that will guide IO policy, planning, and modernization in the coming years. The future of DoD IO appears bright.

LTC Zachary P. Hubbard, US Army (ret.), directed the Information Warfare faculty at the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, VA, from April 1998 to June 2001, where he earned distinction as a Master Faculty Member. He is currently employed by Zel Technologies LLC and serves as the Senior Information Operations Analyst at the Air Force Command and Control & Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Center (AFC2ISRC) on Langley AFB in Hampton, VA.