Information-age war
China expands its arsenals

Dr Fred Cohen, an authority on information warfare, perception management, and
disinformation, analyses the global changes over the past several years and their societal implications. In this interview with Consulting Editor Ravi Visvesvaraya Prasad, Dr Cohen minces no words about how both the US and India are losing the information-age war to a nation that wrote the book on strategy and warfare,
and how this could be endgame. The future could be bleak, indeed, unless people stand up for the truth.

Can you analyse the latest developments in the fields of information warfare, psychological warfare, media manipulation and disinformation?
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, attention turned away from pure battleground strategy and tactics to the concept of 'nonviolent warfare' — warfare without shedding blood. Such warfare comprises many facets — information, economics, culture, psychology, technology, politics, ideologies, perception, disinformation, and manipulation ofthe media.

For the Third World, the dangers associated with a highly-skilled, powerful, rich and manipulative group of people in control of information are great indeed. The decisions they make are based on the information they have. As that information is controlled, so are their opinions and their decisions.

Mahatma Gandhi, on a visit to a British radio station in the 1920s, remarked: “This indeed is Shakti (the Hindu goddess of power and strength).” Your opinion?
Actually, Mahatma Gandhi is a superb example of an information-age general. Over 2,500 ago, the Chinese military strategist, Sun Tzu, had said: "A great general is not one who vanquishes his enemy on the battlefield. A great general is one who persuades his enemy to drop his swords and flee from the battlefield without putting up a fight." Gandhi skilfully utilised all the media channels available to him to gain support for his cause. His organising of nationwide strikes is a superb example of economic warfare.

Just as Sun Tzu had said: "Get the enemy to turn his strongest weapons on himself," Gandhi skilfully used the British media and legal systems (to defeat the Raj).

There are contradictory trends in perception management today. You have immediate access to all news sources and shades of opinions through 'embedded journalists', the TV and the Internet. Simultaneously, one can also instantaneously propagate whatever propaganda or ideology one wants — hate speech, ethnic cleansing, terrorism — without any controls whatsoever.
To see the effects of these issues, one only has to look at Iran, Egypt and Turkey. There is no big ideological conflict underway between Iran and Egypt, but the differences they have over peace with Israel are as striking as can be. How is it that one Islamic nation can be at peace with Israel for three decades with no military conflict whatsoever, and no threat of such a conflict, while another Islamic nation declares that there can be no peace until Israel is dead and buried?

In the US, we have been getting mixed messages, but the most coherent voice has been that of Lou Dobbs of CNN, who has from the start of the US involvement in the "global war on terrorism" identified the conflicts underway in Iraq and Afghanistan as the "global war on radical Islamic terrorists".

But it is not the nature of Islam as a religion to be terroristic or to hate anyone. The Egyptian and Turkish regimes have shown that it is not the Islamic religion that creates the conflicts: it is the manipulation of perception through psychological methods aimed at the population of a country by its leaders that create hatred and warfare, and allows the populations to be manipulated into conflict, war, and even genocide. The German people were subjected to this in the years leading up to World War II, and the people of Iran are being led to it today.

For several years, you have been cautioning the US defence and foreign policy establishments that they are in an information-age war with China, and they don't even know about it.
Yes, China is winning the information-age war against the US, and most of the people here in the US don't even know that there is such a war going on. This war has been going on for at least 10 years. But the leadership of the US will no doubt say, just as they did immediately after 9/11, "But nobody could have ever imagined..." And most of them will believe it, because they are now so well-controlled and cowed.

The US is moving toward less support for education and science, less research money to educational institutions that are the fuel for the future economy, dogmatic religious-based reduction or elimination of research that offends a particular religious viewpoint, and less money to support the rapidly shrinking human seed that is the professorate of modern universities.

At the same time, China has moved toward more and better support for advanced education in the sciences, a broader spectrum of research, an increasing population of more highly-trained and skilled individuals, and no dogmatic cutting off of research lines with promise. This is even though China has very tight control over information, to the point of even controlling what Websites can be visited.

In the information-age war, whatprecisely would you consider a victory for China and a loss for the US?
I'll make a little list of plausible scenarios; some things will, of course, be missed.

China leads: China's economy outstrips the US to the point where it has more global influence than the US. It is just about the same size as the US today, and is growing, while the US economy is slipping — despite what US officials say.
China leads: Better and more high-tech jobs in China, to the point where it starts to dominate global IT. Cisco just announced that it is going to move to China in a big way, Microsoft licenses or moves much of its IT capabilities to allow China to work on it, Linux and other open sources are widely adopted in China as the gold standard, chip designers have to go to Chinese cryptography, the Chinese maintain content control over what enters their market, and their market dominates.
China leads: China builds up military capabilities in a wide variety of areas without US attention or the US' ability to influence it significantly. Clearly, the Iraq and Afghanistan situations today have the US focussed so far from China that the Chinese are building up a bluewater naval capability, an ability to take over Taiwan (if and when it chooses to); China builds military information warfare capabilities and tests them in the US with plausible deniability.
China leads: The US buys lots of goods from China, boosting their economy while the US runs a trade deficit. The Chinese buy up US assets at low rates, ultimately gaining control over a significant portion of US assets, and influencing US companies and business directions. Look at the figures and you will see all of this in place already — with more on the way.
China leads: The US is so completely distracted by events in West Asia and South Asia that it doesn't notice or act to stop the Chinese strategy, with the US military's morale getting depleted by Iraq to the point where it really cannot act effectively on the same global basis as it used to.
US leads: Uh-oh...Your thoughts appreciated.

What risks does India face from China in an information-age war?
You may not have a repeat of 1962, but you just have to see how China has got the Myanmar junta regime in its grip to gain access to the Bay of Bengal, and the listening posts that it has set up in the Cocos (Keeling) Islands to monitor your missile sites in Orissa and your tri-series nuclear command in the Andamans. See how China used Nepal to outwit India in the SAARC summit at Dhaka. And China is also setting up naval facilities at Gawadhar in Pakistan.

But your generals and admirals and diplomats are so focussed on developments along the McMahon Line and the Cocos Islands and Gawadhar that they are totally blind to the 'soft war' that China has begun to wage on India, among other countries. Barring a few exceptions, I have not come across anyone writing about the 'nonviolent war' that China has launched on India. And the Chinese are winning control over your hardware and communications infrastructure. Just see how ZTE has bagged one of the largest telecom orders from Bharat Sanchar Nigam. Just take a look at the Huawei facilities in Bangalore and the ZTE factory just outside Delhi.

But (Nobel laureate) Amartya Sen thinks that India will be far ahead of China, mainly because the Indian media is free to highlight the shortcomings of its political leadership. He constantly cites the millions of deaths due to famine in China that no one knew about because there was no free media.
As a researcher in mass psychology and its use in information warfare operations, I can tell you that things go awry when the leadership fails to do its tasks well and the media cannot show it to the people to allow them to change their situation. It is the self-deception of the leaders that leads to these failures — the manipulation of their own perception by their own choice of what media to watch and listen to and what they are willing to hear, believing their own propaganda, group-think of the political leadership, and so forth. But it only works when there is no outside objective opinion that is given adequate weight — as happened during Mao's Zedong’s Cultural Revolution.

A US think-tank has developed various models of how the India-Pakistan relationship will evolve over the next few decades. How realistic are such war game simulations for a 'nonviolent' information-age war?
The war between India and Pakistan runs hot and cold, but in the information arena, it always is, always has been, and likely always will be a hot war.

In conclusion, do you see the forces of evil and violence making more effective use of new information and communication technologies than the proponents of peace and goodwill?
If history tells us anything, it is that with today's information technologies and tools, the future will be bleak indeed, unless people with the power to stand up for independent truth do so before it is too late.

Our future can be like the Spanish Inquisition, or it can be like the visions we see in fiction. It is up to us to mould it. It is ironic that in the state of Mahatma Gandhi's own birth, Gujarat, Narendra Modi has used the government media at his command to successfully convince the 90 per cent of the population, who are Hindus, that their lives are in danger from the 10 per cent of the population who are economically-backward Muslims.

Even more ironic, the Turkish and the Egyptian regimes, which are, for all practical purposes, military dictatorships, have used the media and mass psychological techniques to promote peace.

So, you can have mass brainwashing for genocide, or for peace.

But I am an optimist and I believe in the value of science and facts. I also believe in the value of a broad education. I think that the future of all nations resides, in large part, in their ability to create a large enough population of smart, well-educated, and non-dogmatic people who can overcome whatever adversities they face to advance the well-being of humanity as a whole.