Unified Quest ’05 plans information operations

By Hugh C. Laughlin/TRADOC News Service

FORT MONROE, Va. (TRADOC News Service, Oct. 15, 2004) – How do you win the “hearts and minds” of your adversary? That’s the question Training and Doctrine wargame planners were asking during the first official Unified Quest wargame event last month.

“We came together to work an issue which resulted from our last wargame, UQ ‘04, which was how do we affect the popular will?” asked Col. Robert Johnson, the chief of future warfare for TRADOC’s Futures Center.

“To address that question, we asked how we could use information operations to gain indigenous support for U.S.-led coalition operational aims – how you would communicate something to a different culture in a way they understand what we’re trying to say,” Johnson said.

The wargame planners wanted to look at just one dimension of information operations in the next round of Unified Quest experimentation and explore the issue of strategic communications in a complex military operation.

The area of information operations is broad. It can mean a number of things – from psychological operations to electronic warfare, like computer and networked attacks, Johnson said. “Essentially, we are narrowing the scope of information operations as a topic, and drill down into one aspect of it.

“We’re addressing the issue of gaining this support using the influence dimension of information operations,” said Johnson.

This is one of the insights gained from the last series of Unified Quest wargames. For exploring this idea of information operations, it was determined early that using the term “influence operations” had associated baggage, said Johnson. “We don’t want to use a term people may find offensive, then they walk in with some baggage. We don’t care what we call it. It’s the issue of gaining indigenous support.”

In this wargame scenario, “We’re dealing with adaptive, networked adversaries that are a combination of guerrillas, insurgents, terrorists and conventional forces,” Johnson described. “We have doctrine and concepts on how you deal with each one of those dimensions independently. What we’re realizing is we have to force ourselves to address the issue of how you deal with them collectively. We have all those elements present in one problem space at the same time – which is what we’re seeing, not only in our wargame, but in the real world as well.”

The view of the adaptive, networked adversary helps define the irregular warfare challenge, or complex warfare, according to Johnson.

To create the context for information operations, “We are first forcing ourselves to address the issue of what do we want the particular region to look like when we are no longer there, after the U.S.-led coalition has extracted from that environment,” he said. “We’re thinking some number of years down the road; the problem is over with, what do we want this to look like? We are working backward from there.”

The TRADOC wargame planners are redoing the scenario to look at different approaches to some of the insights from last year. “It’s important for us to keep our variables as constant as possible,” said Johnson.

“The scenario we have is so rich with the geographic challenge, the distance challenge, the weather… everything you would want for a good Joint fight, we have created that problem on a piece of ground we’ve selected,” he described. “Using that same ground, we don’t have to reinvent or invest in that overhead in creating that; we already have it. We can focus more on the issue of problem-solving using the various service concepts in that context.

“When we talk about impacting or affecting the will of an adversary, we look at it in three dimensions,” Johnson explained. “We see this in terms of an adversary’s motivation, capability and opportunity. How does the influence operation impact any of those?”

Wargame planners are asking, “Does being culturally aware help you develop a strategic set of messages that will communicate to the affected populace in a way they understand?”

“How can we impact someone’s level of motivation?” asked Johnson. “We are asking how we influence their capabilities.”

Impacting an adversary’s motivation may not be directly aimed at that opponent. “It could be on a larger system, like someone who may be selling arms to a particular adversary. We might say, ‘You may not want to do this,’ and influence the capabilities there,” he said.

With an eye on the endstate, the exercise planners are exploring what the impact of information operations are on a region after the conflict. “We’re looking at the problem and asking what does this region need to look like years from now?” Johnson said. “Given our strategic aims, we’re asking ourselves how do influence operations impact that.”

Considering the cultural impact, “We are looking at the affected cultures, and now we will continue to drill down and monitor those insights as we go into the game,” he said. “We have embedded the influence piece, looking at the messages and signals – things we want to communicate not only to the indigenous population but to the regional actors and global actors. We will be able to make a determination during the game in how successful or unsuccessful that approach has been.”

With this new dimension to the game, “We have identified people with knowledge of the culture and region to roleplay,” said Johnson. “They will be a part of the assessment team, which is a neutral party that adjudicates what each team does. In this case, we will have a team that is the population, and they will take in what each team is doing and let us know as a population which way they are swayed based on the content of the messages.”

This approach of affecting popular will is not a new idea. “The work we’re doing here is not in competition with any other work that we have out there. It is complementary to the efforts being led by the Combined Arms Center – Lt. Gen. [William] Wallace’s group, which has a team chartered to work these sphere of information operations for the Army,” Johnson said. “We’re working with them, but from a different perspective.”

For this year’s wargame, there is a Joint Forces Command initiative creating an information-component commander. The role this component commander will have in the wargame is still being developed, with one potential responsibility being strategic communication in a complex Joint military operation.

“Very quickly, people latched onto the idea of influence operations being a strategic-level concept,” Johnson said. “We found that this is a big deal, and that we don’t want to saddle a regional combat commander with this idea.”

The information-operations four-day seminar was the first official Unified Quest ’05 planning event this year. TRADOC wargame planners have 12 more events ramping up to next May’s wargame at the Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, Pa.