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The commanding officer of the amphibious transport dock USS Green Bay (LPD-20) speaks to the local media in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. In the past, military leaders have not had to contend with an all-encompassing and politically fraught information environment. Deepfakes of tactical commanders’ communications could be elevated to international importance within minutes, demanding immediate response from senior military leaders and undermining trust in the chain of command.
U.S. Navy (Anaid Banuelos Rodriguez)

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Canceled in Combat: Get Ready for Smear War

Information Warfare Essay Contest–First Prize
Sponsored by Booz Allen Hamilton

To understand future information warfare threats, it is helpful to identify specific tactics that can be used and how they have been employed recently.
By Captain Don Gomez, U.S. Army
June 2021
Proceedings
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In the past year, tit-for-tat skirmishes have increased between the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy and the United States and its allies. Iranian gunboats routinely taunt allied patrols, recklessly crisscrossing through formations and narrowly avoiding collisions, seeking to provoke an overly aggressive response. Allied restraint prevents disaster, but the trajectory points toward conflict.

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1. To be “canceled” refers to the sudden termination of a person’s job or status because of a real or perceived transgression, often during a period when such transgressions are under enhanced scrutiny.

2. There is no joint definition of narrative. I define narrative as a dominant idea at a given moment. It is a collection of inputs that capture the collective attention and imagination of a society. Recent examples of dominant narratives are the #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter movements. Events that happen during a dominant narrative will likely be processed through the lens of that narrative.

3. Department of Defense, DOD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms (January 2021).

4. Joe Littell, “Don’t Believe Your Eyes (or Ears): The Weaponization of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Deepfakes,” War on the Rocks, 7 October 2019.

5. Operation Mincemeat was the successful World War II British deception operation that used forged documents to mislead the Axis on Allied 1943 Mediterranean invasion plans.

6. Andrea Peterson, “The Sony Pictures Hack, Explained,” The Washington Post, 18 December 2014.

7. Raphael Satter, “Russian Hackers Posed as IS to Threaten Military Wives,” The Associated Press, 8 May 2018.

8. Lucas Scarasso, “Text Messages from Hell: Restraining and Information Warfare,” War on the Rocks, 21 April 2020.

9. Robert Abrams, “Social Media: Senior Leaders Need to Get on the Bus,” From the Green Notebook, 8 October 2019; Patrick Donahue, Mick Ryan, and Tammy Smith, “Why We Tweet: General Officer Use of Social Media to Engage, Influence, and Lead,” The Strategy Bridge, 7 September 2020.

Captain Don Gomez, U.S. Army

Captain Gomez is a psychological operations officer currently assigned as an instructor of Arabic at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He has completed operational deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan in both conventional and special operations roles.

More Stories From This Author View Biography

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