Evidently the political information war isn’t all that we’re losing. Here is Bill Gertz writing at The Free Beacon about the cyber war:
New strategies, tactics needed to fight influence, propaganda warfare threats, Senate told.
The United States faces a growing threat of information warfare attacks and needs new strategies and organizations to counter it, national security experts told Congress this week.
John C. Inglis, former deputy director of the National Security Agency, said cyber attacks are only one form of influence, propaganda, and disinformation attacks being waged in the cyber war of ideas.
“Cyber warfare, in my view, is not a standalone entity,” Inglis told a Senate subcommittee hearing Thursday. “When you’re talking about information warfare, it’s at that top-most stack, and it does not necessarily comprise of an exchange of tools or an exchange of literal warfare. It is, in fact, a conflict of ideas.”
Inglis called for a new approach to information threats.
“We need to stop reacting well and thinking that we’ve therefore done good and start to drive and perhaps lead in this space and at least anticipate well or track well,” he said during a hearing of the Senate Armed Services subcommittee on cyber security.
The United States must aggressively tackle the problem, Inglis said.
“We can use the techniques that have been used against us, but we should never compromise our values, and there’s a distinct difference between those two,” he said.
Rand Waltzman, a specialist on information warfare with the RAND Corp., told the subcommittee the U.S. government needs to review and revamp laws and polices in the information warfare realm in order to better fight influence warfare.
“Operations in the information environment are starting to play a dominant role in everything from politics to terrorism to geopolitical warfare and even business, all things that are becoming increasingly dependent on the use of techniques of mass manipulation,” Waltzman said, adding that information warfare operations “occur at a speed and at an extent previously unimaginable.”
Read more: The Free Beacon
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