Special number of the review Panoramiques on the war of information :
The information war from the position of the weak facing the strong.
Article by Christian Harbulot - Publication in spring 2001.
The ten last years were marqued by the disappearance of the principal Soviet threat. This fundamental change of basis induced in Occident a double phenomenon : the deterioration of the concept of state and and nation through the universalization of the exchanges and an attenuation of the concept of the ennemi.It is this point which seems to me most determining insofar as it makes pass in the second zone the search for power which rates the history of the international relations since the origin of time. The reflexion on the ratios of force in our country was always dominated by a question: who is the ennemi? the majority of the authors who wrote on this subject consider that the war is the element which takes it over on all the others to measure the level of confrontation. This speech seeks to impose today a dominant vision of the writings on the war compared to any reflexion on the strategy. In a developed world where geostrategie is today equal play with the geoeconomy, such an orientation of spririt can generate an misleading or even erroneous reading of ratios of force between powers.
If one cannot answer the question any more: who is the ennemy, it is necessary on the other hand to study with much care the line of demarcation which differentiates punctually or durably, in global or local way, in an industrial sector or a geographical area, a military ally from an economic adversary. This input in the analyse of the complexity is not a sophist work but enters. well in the definition of a new grid of reading.
The new dimension of the power.
The absence of a main adversary modifies the attributes of the power. The military threat is not any more the determining factor which defines the superiority of the empire dominating over its vassals. L'influence économique et culturelle fait souvent jeu égal avec le pouvoir des armes. Economic and cultural influence often makes equal play with the capacity of the weapons. This inversion of values is real but already old. Another succeeds to him already with Internet in the line of sight. In this new context, the great difference between the military world and the civil world are due at the same time to the need the speed and brittleness of alliances of circumstances.
In this specific dimension of the relation ally/competitor, the dominating role of the strong is expressed by its capacity to create and make circulate knowledge on a world level in a logic that one could qualify habituation.
It relates to the following points:
- to familiarize the elites of the emergent economies to the durable development made in the USA,
- to format the tools of control and operation of the market economy (notation, to that, audit, consulting, marketing, business intelligence, competitive intelligence, knowledge management),
- to tally the moral debate on the exchanges (fight against corruption, promotion of the democracy, safeguarding of l.environnement, health of the consumers……
In these operations of indirect influence, the superiority of the offensive management of the open sources on the traditional operations of information became an obviousness. Vis-a-vis to this hegemonic will of the fort, the margin of movement of the weak is generally reduced to the role of disturber. For this reason, the destabilization by the open sources became a cheap weapon quasi without colatéral effect and nonlethal. The progressive mutation from the old to the new economy will not be without effects on the definition of the criteria of power.
Until a recent period, the power of a country was evaluated according to its military force, of its diplomatic influence and the safeguarding of the major interests in the economic field (energy resources, strategic industries, finances and insurances).
The new economy generates other priorities which could be indexed in the following way:
- to control the rules and the securisation of the electronic trade,
- to be a leader in the economy of knowledge,
- to keep the initiative in the creation, the fusion and the diffusion of knowledge and the educational standards,
- to consolidate the geoeconomic points of support,
- to influence by the law and the culture.
These requirements are expressed in a more or less clear way in many American official speeches since 1994. Such a hegemonic will causes the rise of a spirit of resistance in Europe and Asia. Little by little a counter-speech outlines to slow down the claims of the super power.
For the concerned countries, these criteria of resistance are the counterweight of the criteria of domination of the superpuisssance:
- to fight against the domination on the trade electronic,
- to take up the challenge of the economy of knowledge,
- to develop its strong points in this field,
- to benefit from geoeconomic awkwardnesses of the super power,
- to support the intercultural dialogue.
The crisis of rejection of the statute of vassal is a logical evolution in the history of the reports of force. It leads the most tricky ones to develop spaces of movement while resorting systematically to the indirect strategies of against-influence. We are hardly at the beginning of this new stage of the international relations. One will see there cohabiting an official speech politically correct, held by representatives of the nations as by researchers, and a war of larger information carried out as well by actors defending of the national or transnational interests as currents d.opinion resulting from the civil society.
Methodologies of the information war.
This new chess-board induces a change of the rules of the game. The evolution of the criteria of power is identified since a certain number of years by the security services. And its this way the the service responoble for the protection of the territory indexes the new possible targets of the foreign powers in the protection of the inheritance. This active economic security finds its limits in the universe of Internet. How to define an effective protection of the immatériel? If intrusion and hacking constitute reprehensible infringements by the law, the operations of influence and of manipulation by knowledge reduce to the congrue portion the efficiency of traditional defensive processes. Within the framework of an ally/competitor report, the confrontation does not have to appear publically. The expulsion of the agents of the CIA by Charles Pasqua is an exception which confirms the rule. But nobody doubt on this point.
The American super power anticipated this reality by inventing the concept of perception management. The translation of the official definition given by the American Defence Department needs to be read with more attention. Perception management covers the actions consisting in providing and/or camouflaging selected information and indices with foreign audiences in order to influence their emotions, their motivations and their reasoning objective. For the secret services and the decision makers of all levels, these actions consist in influencing the official evaluations to manage into final to return the behaviors and the foreign official intrigues favorable to the objectives of the transmitter. In several ways the perception management combines the contribution of authentic informations with operations of security, dissimulation and intoxication and psychological operations.
This concept can be declined under an offensive angle:
- to manipulate the competitors systems of knowledge,
- to mislead the adversary,
- to push a target to commit a fault,
- desinform, decredibilize.
Read again and corrected by C4iFR , it can be also declined under an against-offensive angle:
- to avoid the trap of the justifying speech,
- to be able to dissuade by information,
- to counter-attack with the same weapons as the agressor,
- to take support on certain currents of protestors of the civil society.
This diversion of the concept is not a fruit of the reactivation of the thought on the revolutionary war born from the war of Indochina and Algeria. It's.more a process of fusion of knowledge between soldiers and civils to start a non-ideological reading from subversive know-how. It is sufficient to read again the texts written in the United States on the question of information warfare to seize at which point it is difficult for a soldier or an American civil expert to seize the operational subtleties hidden behind the set language of the military writings of Mao Tsé Toung or Giap. In a dialogue tied with the persons in charge of the « Ecole de Guerre Economique » , the journalist Claude Angéli, chief-writer at the « Canard Enchaîné » , had underlined the importance of the dissuasive value of information used in a report of weak to strong.Such a step can not be excluded on the level of a corporation and even a state seeking to contain the appetites predators of the most aggressive competitors on the market.
Contributions of the subversive cultures.
An indirect attack by information obliges the targeted countries to answer by not offensive not revendicated initiatives.
The principles of this war of information in a report of weak to strong are relatively simple:
- to circumvent and take with reverse,
- to attack where you are not awaited,
- to weaken (in a real or felt way) and to dissuade,
- counter-argue (with a concept of anticipation) rather than desinform.
The origins of this war of information are very old (see Sun Zi and the Greek thought preceding Aristote). But its key factors of success could be checked during XXème century in practice of the international communist movement.
Four currents of thought were particularly innovating in these fields:
- kominternienne school ( mondialist approach, agit-prop technics),
- soviet school (misinformation, handling of the elites, cases of resonance),
- trotskyste school trotskyste (entrism, coring),
- maoist school (combat of weak to strong, investigation work, counter-information).
These methods of combat by information were employed in an ideological objective of propaganda. One of the best examples is the campaign for peace in the world launched within the framework of the call of Stockholm in 1950. Several tens of million people signed the petitions against a use of a nuclear weapon. The United States were at this moment the only power able to use it. In order to diabolize Uncle Sam in the opinion of the public world, Soviet mobilized the Communist Parties and their mobilities to preach the right words.
The lessons to be learnt from this event are relatively simple. In opposition to the strong which has the financial and human means without forgetting the means of pressure on its vassal, the weak one can count only on its own forces. He must thus concentrate all his energy on the identification of the weaknesses and of the contradictions of the adversary by targeting its points most vulnerable in order to l.user by strike informational repeated. The strong wants to crush or be obeyed. The weak one can only contain, weaken and possibly dissuade.
The first confrontations by the means of Internet (debate on the withdrawal of Multilateral Aggreement on Investissement, blame of the negotiations of Seattle, claim of the Tobin tax by the association Attac) rest on the principle of the strategy of the sand grain. Vis-a-vis to the road roller of the world market, the networks protestaires adapted old subversive receipts to the new virtual chess-board of the society of information.
The ideological ground changed but the claims preserve the moral form used by the orchestring heads of the democratic campaigns supported by the international communist movement:
- to oppose the qualities of the mind to the defects of the profit,
- to oppose the constant humanitarians (human, even humanistic values) to the economic variables,
- to mobilize the intellectuals against the monopolistic commercial interests.
The difference between these two types of war of information of the weak to the strong is precisely the strategic piloting of the action. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was generally under the supervision of the Eastern Block of. Today, it can burst in several points of the sphere and that does not inevitably mean that their ideological base is well defined.
But the principal rules of combat are always the same ones:
- to privilege as much as possible the principal contradiction of the adversary compared to secondary contradictions (in certain strategies, to attack on the secondary level makes it possible to measure the reactivity of the adversary and to possibly l.endormir by a defeat envisaged),
- to encircle in an encerclement (to lock up the adversary adversary in a justifying speech),
- to avoid to the maximum a frontal attack.
The change relates especially to the communication and the procedures. At the time of the Comintern, the war of information from the weak to the strong was carried out by the avaialble axis of communication, the maritime way and the railroad. The ports and the railway stations were the first militant points of support which sought to draw up the activists of the third Internationale.
Times have really changed. As this is the time of the electronic, the points of support are today the forums of discussion and the sites on the Net. This new geography of the circulation of the messages upsets the processes conceived at the time of the roneo Viet and the dazibao. Instead of creating restaurants in the commercial ports to make discuss the sailors on the topics of communist propaganda as this has been the case at the beginning of the Twenties, the current protesters groups pass by Internet to articulate the debates with the traditional militant actions. On the other hand, there is a continuity in the operational step as with every point of support, there is always to privilege the exemplary actions with strong media resonance by exploiting to the maximum the legal framework of intervention.
The change of the basis intervened after the fall of the Berlin Wall reactivated a war of information from the weak to the strong that was believed to be disappearing in Occident since the nuclear arms race. This form of confrontation, non-existent for the ultralibal economists and the psychorigides of the speech on the war, has not finished surprising us. It gives again relief with manners of fighting which seemed relegated to the ray of the accessories. The weapons of the weak, which means trick and the art of the polemic, take a new dimension with Internet. Their uses are not limited to the protesters of the civil society. The sharing of the geoeconomic zones of influence, the search for supremacy in the new economy and the uniformisation of the ways of life create in fact new surfaces of confrontation via information of which it is quite difficult at the moment to predict the evolution.