When is sensitive information not just a resource that enables military leaders to take a tactical or operational action, but rather a weapon of its own capable of changing conditions on a battlefield and the outcomes of a conflict? Overclassification has long been an irritant for U.S. policy-makers, both from a normative perspective of promoting transparency and from a practical perspective of preventing intelligence “stovepipes” in which the flow of information is hazardously restricted. Nonetheless, since secrecy is the norm, the media notices any time the government willfully discloses secret information.
The U.S. government’s decision to declassify intelligence on Russian decision-making leading up to Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine demonstrates the need to revisit the U.S. government’s bias toward secrecy. It is difficult to prove a causal relationship between the intelligence disclosure campaign and Russia’s poor military performance in Ukraine. Some may posit that the campaign is irrelevant because it did not deter the invasion. Yet, that stance ignores the role declassification may have played in shaping the conditions under which the invasion happened. It is prudent to consider how declassification may have shaped U.S., NATO, Ukrainian, and Russian behavior before the war.
John Boyd’s well-known observe-orient-decide-act (OODA) loop provides a useful framework for assessing how publicly disclosing an adversary’s intentions can undermine the observation and orientation stages of that model. The potential effect of preemptively declassifying intelligence to disrupt the enemy’s OODA Loop—forcing him to reobserve and reorient again and again because of a constantly fluctuating information environment—may now outweigh the marginal benefit of secrecy.
Expert commentary leading up to Russia’s reinvasion predicted that cyber operations would play a decisive role in Russia’s strategy. For reasons that have been hotly debated, this was not the case. Cyber scholars point to recent lack of obvious cyber effects on the battlefield in Ukraine to argue that “Notwithstanding any cyber vulnerabilities, it’s much simpler for Russia to launch an artillery barrage at a power substation than to hack it from Moscow.” These recent events should not cause us to overlook the shaping power of information operations on battlefield conditions. Dismissing the impact of information operations from both sides of this conflict would be learning the wrong lessons.
The Biden administration’s campaign to warn allies—especially Ukraine—has been well-covered by major news outlets. While it was unclear early in Russia’s military buildup near Ukraine’s borders in mid-2021 what Moscow’s ultimate intentions were, it became clearer to the U.S. Intelligence Community and other military observers that a reinvasion (the first being in 2014) was becoming more likely in fall 2021. In response, the Biden administration endeavored to dissuade Russia from invading Ukraine but rally partners and allies in case diplomacy fails. Senior leaders began directly engaging European allies to provide warnings that October.
The Administration’s dissemination of intelligence to the public spanned both particular and general information regarding Russian military plans. In mid-January 2022, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki publicly revealed information that Russian saboteurs were working to fabricate a pretext for invading Ukraine. On 3 February, the U.S. government exposed another attempted Russian asymmetric gambit by detailing the possible creation of a propaganda video. Retired Navy Rear Admiral Jon Kirby, then the Pentagon’s spokesman, described the video’s intent to stage a fake atrocity to undermine Ukraine and justify escalation. The President himself, as well as spokespeople from the White House and the Pentagon, regularly briefed the press on ongoing Russian activities and U.S. and allied response efforts. During briefings on 15 and 18 February, President Joe Biden publicly stated that U.S. intelligence had observed more than 150,000 Russian troops massing along the Russian-Ukrainian border.
These statements provided the public with a sense of both Russian capabilities and intentions with respect to Ukraine in the weeks and months before launching their mostly failed invasion on 24 February. These disclosures were also directed toward multiple audiences simultaneously: the U.S. public, allied governments, Ukrainian leaders and their citizens, and Russian decision-makers. The Russian military’s failure to fulfill its tactical and operational objectives can be attributed to multiple causes including poor logistics, a collapse in the morale of Russian conscripts, and the heroism of Ukrainian leaders and soldiers. Still, knowledge that Russian military and political actors were exposed and subsequently forced to revisit and remake aspects of their war agenda after U.S. declassification could have slowed and confused their efforts, provided urgency for Western countries to prepare diplomatically and militarily, and reduced international support and sympathy for the Russian cause.
The Good and Bad Effects of Selective Declassification
The decision to declassify and disseminate intelligence on Russian intentions and preparations before the invasion is best understood in the OODA loop context. By publicly revealing what the Russians were considering before they decided to invade resulted in a short-circuited OODA loop. In following the OODA loop model, a combatant “generate[s] a rapidly changing environment” and “inhibit[s] the adversary’s capacity to adapt to such an environment.” The disclosures stole the initiative from the Russian military, forcing Russian leaders to have to constantly reobserve and reorient to what was occurring in the information environment.
This bought valuable time for Ukraine and NATO to prepare for the impending invasion. However, the adversary’s OODA process is only half the equation. While impeding the enemy’s progression through the cycle, friendly forces must also accelerate their own observation, orientation, decision, and action. While such disclosures did not ultimately change Russia’s decision, they did facilitate the allies’ progression through the OODA loop. The most senior U.S. leaders publicly backing their intelligence helped get NATO members, and other allies and partners, on the same page.
In the past, high-level intelligence was kept secret to preserve the sources and methods used to derive that information. With the explosion of private-sector intelligence sources, many intelligence sources are no longer unique to the government. Declassifying and publicly sharing intelligence bears considerably less risk when there are multiple other potential sources of the same information. The private sector has become a highly credible alternative source of pivotal information in conflicts and crises.
While information warfare has long been heralded as the future of war, the dangers of a more aggressive approach to declassification also merit discussion. After all, the declassification of Western knowledge about Russian intentions and preparations for the invasion did not ultimately alter Russia’s decision. Faith in a model for “deterrence by disclosure” would be misplaced based on this case study. Overrelying on intelligence disclosure to attempt to drive outcomes also risks adversely affecting the intelligence apparatus that collects and exploits this information in the first place.
Prior to the Ukraine war, the track record of declassification to achieve some policy goal is mixed. Most infamously, the George W. Bush Administration’s selective declassification related to the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program is often used as a textbook case for the “politicization” of intelligence, where intelligence judgments are intentionally shaded in service of a broader policy goal. The declassification of the key judgments of the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq’s WMD program is assessed by political scientists to have directly impacted the Senate’s vote on the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF).1 Intelligence produced to generate effects against an adversary would be inherently exposed to analytic bias. The goalpost for the intelligence community would move from providing decision advantage to generating effects—a fundamental and perilous shift.
The allure of declassifying for effect also must not encourage a cavalier attitude toward sensitive sources and methods. It is not clear—and will not be for some time—whether the wealth of open-source information available about the Russian military is a result of enduring trends in the information domain or mere Russian incompetence. The low morale and poor training of Russian conscripts has generated an abundance of publicly available insight into the operational failures of the Russian military. It would be wishful thinking to expect other adversaries to be similarly poorly disciplined.
A Balanced Approach
Strategic declassification is not a panacea that will herald an era of nonkinetic battles over narratives that replaces conventional combat. The primary lesson observers and leaders should learn is that information can be a potent tool when employed in concert with other policy tools. In the case of the Russo-Ukrainian war, information alone was not decisive, but it did augment NATO and partnered support for Ukraine, train and equip the Ukrainian military, and sustain public and congressional approval of U.S. support of Ukraine against Russian aggression.
For the intelligence community, Russia’s war in Ukraine also is a helpful reminder of the true breadth of competition in the information domain. Too often, information operations are referred to in terms of ones and zeroes; while technical expertise is a vital component to information dominance, it is not alone sufficient. Answering leaders’ demands for decision advantage requires deep knowledge of the adversary and his intentions and capabilities.
Intelligence analysis must support decision advantage, but decision advantage is a relative rather than absolute concept. While the clearest possible operating picture surely improves the friendly decision-making process, information dominance also necessitates undermining the adversary’s decision-making. There will undoubtedly remain cases in which keeping knowledge of the adversary’s intentions secret is the most prudent course of action. However, in some cases, revealing the adversary’s plans will thwart their designs and give the United States and its allies the ability to observe, orient, decide, and act faster and more effectively than the adversary.
1. Sasha Dudding, “Spinning Secrets: The Dangers of Selective Declassification,” Yale Law Journal 130, no. 3 (January 2021): 733.