Global Security and Intelligence Studies Volume 5, Number 1, Spring / Summer 2020 | Page 17

The Case for the Sixth Domain of War: Psychological Warfare in the Age of Advanced Technology
Such disruptions began with the invention
of mass printing in the fifteenth
century, when books became available
to large swaths of people, arguably igniting
civilization’s leap forward into the
current era, “including but not limited
to the Reformation, the Enlightenment,
the steam engine, journalism, modern
literature, modern medicine, and modern
democracy” (Marantz 2019).
While the chains that shackled
the free flow of information were coming
undone, so too did misinformation
break free as its opposite. The gatekeepers
of knowledge started to shift from
princes and priests, to new entrepreneurs
who had the financial means to
access and purchase the powerful new
technology of the printing press.
In the twentieth century, with the
advent of the internet, new liberators of
information have emerged. The dawn
of this new era was described with the
same excitement as that of the printing
press. Unlike the print media however,
where gatekeepers—and the law in
many places—had final say on what
was published and what was not, this
new means of information sharing was
unregulated/under-regulated and full
of advocates for an internet based on
the liberation of knowledge and power.
However, while stakeholders in this
era have debated the antiquities of free
speech and its nuances, what has been
ignored almost entirely is the potential
for a new kind of warfare targeting the
human mind, amplified by new technology
and tools of communication.
Over the years, while the United
States has been building up its unmatched
and largely physical military
strength, its adversaries have been
busy searching out and filling whatever
asymmetric power gaps they are able.
As we argued in our previous article,
Russian Information Warfare: Implications
for Deterrence Theory, a common
development of state actors with fewer
defense resources has led to the development
of tools of power that are low
cost and high impact (Ajir and Vailliant
2018). The United States (and many
other Western states for that matter) is
still unprepared to deal with this new
reality.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff (2014)
clearly call out the problem:
The instruments of national
power (diplomatic, informational,
military, and economic)
provide leaders in the United
States with the means and ways
of dealing with crises around the
world. Employing these means
in the information environment
requires the ability to securely
transmit, receive, store, and process
information in near real
time. The nation’s state and nonstate
adversaries are equally
aware of the significance of this
new technology, and will use
information-related capabilities
(IRCs) to gain advantages in the
information environment, just as
they would use more traditional
military technologies to gain advantages
in other operational environments.
These realities have
transformed the information
environment into a battlefield,
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