Information Dominance

Information dominance is a United States military concept, also taken up in British defence thinking, for a level of control over information going beyond “information superiority”. In a 1997 issue paper, two information operations staff at US Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) headquarters, Jim Winters and John Giffin, argued that the Army should aim for “information dominance” rather than mere “information superiority”, because “When dominance occurs, nothing done, makes any difference.” David Miller has argued that the concept is “the key to understanding US and UK propaganda strategy and a central component of the US aim of ‘total spectrum dominance’”, and titled his 2003 article on it “Information Dominance: The Philosophy of Total Propaganda Control?”

Definitions

The Winters and Giffin issue paper set out the official definitions then in use. The Army’s field manual on information operations, FM 100-6, defined information dominance as “the degree of information superiority that allows the possessor to use information systems and capabilities to achieve an operational advantage in a conflict or to control the situation in operations other than war while denying those capabilities to the adversary”. A draft TRADOC pamphlet proposed instead “A condition that results from the use of offensive and defensive information operations to build a comprehensive knowledge advantage at a time, place, and on decision issues critical to mission success.”

The authors placed dominance at the top of a hierarchy running “inferiority-parity-superiority-supremacy-dominance”. They argued that “superiority” could mean no more than “an advantage of 51 to 49, on some arbitrary metric scale”, which was “not enough of an advantage to give us the freedom of action required to establish ‘Full Spectrum Dominance.’” By contrast:

“We think of dominance in terms of ‘having our way’ – ‘Overmatch’ over all operational possibilities. This connotation is ‘qualitative’ rather than ‘quantitative.’ When dominance occurs, nothing done, makes any difference. We have sufficient knowledge to stop anything we don’t want to occur, or do anything we want to do.”

The paper went on: “Dominance implies a mastery of the situation, superiority is only an edge”; “Dominance is control oriented”; and “Information dominance means ruling the infospace.” It recommended that Department of Defense Directive S-3600.1 and the draft joint publication on information operations, JCS Pub 3-13, be changed “to reflect information dominance as the objective of information operations vice information superiority”.

A companion point paper by the same two authors, archived from the TRADOC website, stated that “Achieving ID involves two components: 1) building up and protecting friendly information; and 2) degrading information received by your adversary.” Among the steps it listed were to “deny, degrade, destroy and/or effectively blind” an adversary’s “IO/C4I/C2W capabilities” and to “Employ Public Affairs to improve public/leader understanding and influence coalition/adversary perceptions.”

Full spectrum dominance and Joint Vision 2020

The wider goal was set out in Joint Vision 2020, the Joint Chiefs of Staff statement approved by its chairman, General Henry H. Shelton, and published in June 2000. It stated: “The label full spectrum dominance implies that US forces are able to conduct prompt, sustained, and synchronized operations with combinations of forces tailored to specific situations and with access to and freedom to operate in all domains – space, sea, land, air, and information.” The document itself speaks of “information superiority” as a key enabler rather than of information dominance. Miller describes it as the “now quite well known statement” of the strategy within which information dominance sits.

US Army doctrine and Information Dominance Centers

The Army’s November 2003 field manual on information operations, FM 3-13, which superseded FM 100-6, opens with the words: “Information is an element of combat power.” It defines information operations as “the employment of the core capabilities of electronic warfare, computer network operations, psychological operations, military deception, and operations security, in concert with specified supporting and related capabilities, to affect or defend information and information systems, and to influence decisionmaking.” The published manual gives the goal of information operations as “information superiority”, which for Army forces “describes the degree of dominance that commanders have over the part of the information environment that affects their operations, and over the adversary”. Miller wrote that the military “tend not to speak about it in public” and that information dominance “doesn’t feature in the ‘approved for public release’ manual”. The phrase does appear in the manual, however, as the name of an organisation: “INSCOM’s IO capabilities focuses around the Information Dominance Center (IDC). The IDC integrates intelligence operations and IO”. The US Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) centre was normally co-located with INSCOM’s Cyber Warfare Center and two other Army computer network defence and network operations centres.

In remarks reported in October 2003, Lieutenant General Keith B. Alexander, then the Army’s deputy chief of staff for intelligence, told an Army homeland defence conference in Atlantic City that “Part of the solution” to intelligence problems the Army had found in Iraq was the formation of Information Dominance Centers. Government Computer News reported that there were 15 of them “around the United States, and in Kuwait and Baghdad”, working “to better fuse intelligence data, from the national level to the battlefield and tactical levels”.

Writing after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, retired US Army Colonel Kenneth Allard said that the war “will be remembered as a conflict in which information fully took its place as a weapon of war”. He described how in the 1990s the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the combatant commanders had promoted “a new style of American warfare in which interoperability was the key to information dominance—and information dominance the key to victory”.

UK adoption

The British Army’s values publication Soldiering: The Military Covenant (Army Doctrine Publication 5) says that future operations “include the fight for perceptions, hearts and minds implicit in information operations, including psychological operations”. In its chapter on operational trends it says: “Maintaining moral as well as information dominance will rank as important as physical protection.”

In an address to the Seapower Conference on 13 January 2000, published by the Ministry of Defence, the Minister for the Armed Forces said that “As platforms become more costly but less numerous” the armed forces would depend “not on simple numerical superiority in firepower, but on information dominance. We shall depend on being able to collect, and assess, manage and employ information more rapidly and more accurately than an opponent.” Miller also wrote that both the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office had staff assigned to “information operations”.

Miller’s analysis

Miller’s article “Information Dominance: The Philosophy of Total Propaganda Control?” was published by Scoop on 29 December 2003 and by ColdType in January 2004. A version also appeared in Yahya R. Kamalipour and Nancy Snow (eds), War, Media and Propaganda: A Global Perspective (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004). Miller argued that the term was not merely another name for propaganda. In his view it had two new elements: “the integration of propaganda and psychological operations into a much wider conception of information war”, and “the integration of information war into the core of military strategy”. He wrote that “propaganda and psychological operations are simply part of a larger information armoury”, and that the concept was “not something dreamt up by the bush gang in the White House” but “mainstream US military doctrine”.

Miller applied Winters and Giffin’s two components to the media in the 2003 Iraq war:

• Building up “friendly” information. He saw the embedding of journalists with the invading forces as “a clear means of building up and protecting ‘friendly’ information”. He pointed to the Pentagon’s Public Affairs Guidance on what could be reported and to the embedding contract’s requirement that reporters “follow the direction and orders of the Government”. He also cited a Ministry of Defence lessons report saying that a “commercial analysis” of print output had found that “90% of embedded correspondents’ reporting was either positive or neutral”.
• Denying and degrading “unfriendly” information. Miller argued that the doctrine did “not distinguish between actions of declared adversaries and those of independent media”, citing the attacks on Al Jazeera’s offices in Kabul, Basra and Baghdad. He also cited the account by retired US Army Colonel Sam Gardiner of a Pentagon Information Operations Roadmap, drafted in the Joint Chiefs’ information operations office and changed in the office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas Feith, to target “adversarial decision making”.
• Post-war Iraqi media. Miller noted that the Pentagon-funded Iraqi Media Network was supplied “not by an independent news organisation but, by a defence contractor”, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), whose website listed its expertise in “information operations” and “information dominance”. He described how the Coalition Provisional Authority under Paul Bremer then imposed controls on the network’s content and issued a list of “prohibited activity” for the media in June 2003.

Miller concluded that “it is not the expression of dissent that is a problem, but the expression of dissent which is part of a movement which challenges US dominance”, and that resistance by journalists, states, the occupied and the anti-war movement was “the only thing which can stop the US achieving final information or full spectrum dominance”. He made the same case in The Guardian on 8 January 2004, writing that information dominance “sees little distinction between command and control systems, propaganda and journalism”.

In a 2012 chapter, Miller and Rizwaan Sabir described information dominance as “the name given to the doctrine that integrates propaganda into overall US and UK global strategy”. They argued that propaganda on the home front after 11 September 2001 took place “under this conceptual umbrella”, under names including public affairs, information operations, public diplomacy and, increasingly, “strategic communication”.

See also

• Psyops
• Strategic communication
• Information Operations - Joint Warfare Publication 3-80
• SAIC
• Commando Solo

Resources

• David Miller, Information Dominance: The Philosophy Of Total Propaganda Control? Scoop, Monday, 29 December 2003, 3:17 pm
• David Miller 'The domination effect' The Guardian Thursday 8 January 2004 07.47 GMT.
• David Miller, Information Dominance: The Philosophy of Total Propaganda Control, ColdType, January 2004 (PDF, Internet Archive copy).
• David Miller and Rizwaan Sabir, Propaganda and Terrorism: Doctrine and Practice, in Media and Terrorism: Global Perspectives, Sage, 2012.