Rise of Asymmetric Warfare
The year 2018 beats out the wildest fantasies of Tom Clancy’s political thrillers:
- Russia’s election interference and subversive influence operations are all the rage in Europe
- Skripals’ poisoning and Russian death squad activity in UK
- Bizarre Salisbury Spire’s video interview of the hit squad and subsequent failure of GRU in Netherlands
- Disappearance of Interpol Chef in China
- Alleged dismemberment of the Saudi dissident journalist in the the Saudi consulate in Istanbul
- Chinese military intelligence bugging electronic components of US critical infrastructure servers
- Kidnappings of Turkish dissidents by Erdogan’s secret service all over Europe.
Information operations and warfare, also known as influence operations, hardly a new concept, described painstakingly in Sun Tzu’s Art of War written 2,500 years ago in China. With technology advances the battle of narratives has been gradually weaponized to wage full rage troll wars affecting and challenging presidential elections in USA, shaping political landscapes in Europe and taking toll on infirm democracies. The technology dimension extends reach of Info Ops Warfare practically to each and every person with online access. At any given moment there are dozens of full burning, hot, smoking and cold infowar conflicts in the world, representing a full range of national, territorial, religious, societal and cultural conflicts:
US vs China
US vs Russia
US vs Iran
US vs North Korea
India vs Pakistan
Saudi Arabia vs Iran
Israeli vs Palestinian narrative
Israel vs Iran
China vs South China Sea contenders
China vs Russia
China vs India
China vs Taiwan
Liberals vs conservatives
EU vs Russia
Establishment vs Immigrants
Christianity vs Islam
Shia vs Sunni
The infowars are fought by governments, corporations, NGO’s, groups of interest and technology vendors are here to supply tools and ammunition in the race for minds and hearts. What used to be an obscure intelligence discipline, underfunded and seconded by other priorities, is now a powerful asymmetric warfare leveraging the battlefield for weaker players.
Spend on media intelligence information and software solutions by government agencies will surpass $2 Billion in 2020, while the corporate public relations professionals will spend about $4 Billion on SOCMINT in 2020. After a few years of double-digit growth, the social media intelligence market is expected to slow down and stabilize at the robust growth rate of about 7%.
The report emphasizes adoption of Influence Ops technology for National Security applications, especially by Intelligence Community, with massive investments in the next few years. The report provides detailed year-by-year forecasts:
by Influence Ops technology, infrastructure & service segments,
by media intelligence tools, channels, influence methods,
by national, government, corporate and NGO segments,
by mission areas.
