Berg: Fake Video "warfare" predicted in 1994 Army War College report

Those following the controversy over the strange deth of Nicholas
Berg, allegedly at the hands of Abu-Musad Al Zarqawi, will want to
read this.

In a well-known 1994 paper titled the "THE REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS AND CONFLICT SHORT OF WAR," authors Steven Metz and James Kievit (of the Army War College) glancingly discussed the use of fake videos to combat insurgencies and stir up the home front.

Here is one excerpt, which should give you a flavor of the whole:

...military use of television against foreign adversaries raises the specter of domestic applications. Even if domestic use was never contemplated, its possibility might cause greater public skepticism regarding television appearances, reducing the impact of one of the American politician's greatest communication tools. Deception, while frequently of great military or political value, is thought of as somehow "un-American."

To illustrate how the "Revolution in Military Affairs" would play out in real life, the authors create a fictional after-action "report" on the use of such tactics in Cuba:

Individuals and organizations with active predilections to support the insurgency were targets of an elaborate global ruse using computer communications networks and appeals by a computer-generated insurgent leader. Real insurgent leaders who were identified were left in place so that sophisticated computer analysis of their contacts could be developed. Internecine conflict within the insurgent elite was engineered using psychotechnology...


The attitude-shaping campaigns aimed at the American public, the global public, and the Cuban people went quite well, including those parts using computer-generated broadcasts by insurgent leaders--"morphing"-- in which they were shown as disoriented and psychotic. Subliminal messages surreptitiously integrated with Cuban television transmissions were also helpful.45 In fact, all of this was so successful that there were only a few instances of covert, stand-off military strikes when insurgent targets arose and government forces seemed on the verge of defeat. U.S. strike forces also attacked neutral targets to support the psychological campaign as computer-generated insurgent leaders claimed credit for the raids. At times, even the raids themselves were computer-invented "recreations." (These were a specialty of the Army's elite Sun Tzu Battalion.)

While the "Cuba" campaign was an excercise in future forecasting, the full article makes clear that, even ten years ago, military planners viewedthese techniques as "do-able."

The entire Metz/Kievet article is online here:

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~alb/misc/rmaWarCollege.html

-- Joseph Cannon
CANNONFIRE http://cannonfire.blogspot.com