Information warfare
Based on Wikipedia: Information warfare
In January 1999, American Air Intelligence computers detected something strange. Someone was probing their systems, extracting data, moving through networks like a ghost. Investigators traced part of the intrusion to a Russian mainframe. But here's the unsettling part: they couldn't prove it was actually Russia. The attackers might have been Russian state actors, or they might have been criminals who happened to route their traffic through Russian servers. In the world of information warfare, you often can't tell who's attacking you, when the attack started, or whether it ever really stopped.
This is the defining feature of information warfare—and what makes it so different from the conflicts humans have waged for millennia.
What Information Warfare Actually Is
Information warfare is the manipulation of information that a target trusts, conducted in such a way that the target doesn't realize they're being manipulated. The goal isn't to destroy your enemy's army. It's to get them to make decisions that serve your interests while thinking they're serving their own.
This is fundamentally different from cyberwarfare, though the two are often confused. Cyberwarfare attacks computers, software, and command systems directly—think of it as digital sabotage. Information warfare is subtler. It attacks minds.
The term has been around since at least 1970, when journalist Dale Minor published a book called "The Information War" about propaganda and news manipulation during the Vietnam conflict. But its formal military usage dates to 1976, when Thomas Rona, an engineer at Boeing, wrote a company report for the Office of Net Assessment that referred to "information war" as a distinct military capability.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, defines it with characteristic directness: "Information war is an operation conducted in order to gain an information advantage over the opponent."
Simple enough. But the implications are anything but simple.
The Toolkit of Modern Information Warriors
Information warfare takes many forms, and understanding them helps clarify why this kind of conflict is so difficult to defend against—or even detect.
Television, radio, and internet transmissions can be jammed or hijacked. Instead of destroying a broadcasting station with a missile, you simply take it over and use it to spread your own message. The infrastructure remains intact; only the content changes.
Logistics networks—the systems that track where supplies are, where they need to go, and how to get them there—can be disabled. A modern army without functioning logistics is just a large group of hungry people with expensive equipment they can't resupply.
Communications networks can be spoofed, meaning attackers can make messages appear to come from trusted sources when they don't. Imagine receiving what looks like a legitimate order from your commander, but it actually came from your enemy.
Stock exchanges can be sabotaged through electronic interference or by strategically leaking sensitive information—or fabricated information that looks sensitive.
Drones, surveillance robots, and webcams can be compromised to feed false information to their operators, or to feed accurate information to adversaries.
And then there's the organized use of social media: the deliberate, coordinated effort to shape what millions of people believe by controlling what they see and read online.
The United States Air Force Goes Digital
The United States Air Force has operated Information Warfare Squadrons since the 1980s. This isn't a side mission or an afterthought. The official mission statement of the U.S. Air Force is now "To fly, fight and win... in air, space and cyberspace."
That last part—cyberspace—refers specifically to information warfare.
The logic is straightforward. Traditionally, if you wanted to disable an enemy's communications infrastructure, you had to fly aircraft over hostile territory and drop bombs on it. This risked pilots, cost enormous sums, and destroyed infrastructure that might be useful after you won the war.
Information warfare offers an alternative. Disable the enemy's communications network with software instead of explosives. No pilots at risk. No physical destruction. And when you eventually occupy the territory, you can switch the network back on immediately rather than waiting months to rebuild what you bombed.
The first large-scale application of these techniques came during the Gulf War in 1991. American forces used electronic methods to disable Iraqi communications networks, demonstrating that wars could be fought—at least in part—without firing a shot at certain targets.
But the Gulf War also revealed the darker possibilities of information warfare. Dutch hackers allegedly broke into U.S. Defense Department computers and stole information about American troop movements. They tried to sell it to the Iraqis.
The Iraqis thought it was a trick and turned them down.
Russia's Information Campaigns
Russia has emerged as one of the most active practitioners of information warfare in the 21st century. Their approach illustrates both the power and the disturbing subtlety of these techniques.
Before invading Ukraine, Russia spent years building a narrative that claimed the Ukrainian government was committing violence against Russian-speaking citizens. This wasn't just propaganda broadcast on Russian television. It was a systematic campaign to flood the internet with this narrative until it appeared in search results on platforms like Google News. The goal was to make the alternate version of reality seem like the mainstream view.
In 2022, after the invasion began, Ukraine turned information warfare techniques back against Russia in a clever way. Russian forces had such poor communications equipment that many units were forced to use Ukrainian cellular networks to communicate. Ukrainian forces allowed them to connect—and then listened to everything they said, cutting off communications at crucial moments in conversations.
Russia's interference in foreign elections has become perhaps the most widely discussed example of information warfare in recent years. American intelligence agencies concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 United States presidential election. According to Microsoft, Russia also interfered in the 2024 election. NBC reported Russian disinformation campaigns targeting Joe Biden during that same election cycle.
But Russian information warfare extends beyond elections. Researchers have documented a broader conflict between Russia and Western nations fought entirely in the information domain. Russia believes the West is trying to undermine its leadership by encouraging the overthrow of authoritarian governments and promoting liberal democratic values. In response, Russia promotes anti-liberal messages: content designed to amplify racism, antisemitism, homophobia, and misogyny in Western societies. The goal is to make American democracy appear to be failing.
In 2024, The Telegraph reported that China and Russia were working together to promote pro-Palestinian social media influencers as a way to manipulate British public opinion. NBC reported that Russia was using the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to draw attention away from its invasion of Ukraine, including content designed to delegitimize American police operations against pro-Palestinian protests. Russian media activity increased by 400 percent in the weeks following Hamas's October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
America Plays the Same Game
The United States is not merely a victim of information warfare. It conducts these operations too.
According to a Reuters investigation, the United States ran a propaganda campaign to spread disinformation about Sinovac, the Chinese COVID-19 vaccine. The campaign used fake social media accounts to spread the false claim that Sinovac contained pork-derived ingredients, which would make it forbidden under Islamic law—haram, in Arabic.
The primary target was the Philippines, and the campaign used a Tagalog-language hashtag meaning "China is the virus." It ran from 2020 until mid-2021.
Officials described the campaign as "payback" for Chinese disinformation about the origins of COVID-19 that had been directed against the United States. The primary contractor was General Dynamics IT, which received $493 million for its work on the project.
This example illustrates something important: information warfare is not something that only authoritarian countries do to democracies. It's a capability that major powers increasingly consider a normal tool of statecraft.
The Moral Maze
For centuries, philosophers and military thinkers have developed frameworks for thinking about when wars are justified and how they should be conducted. This body of thought is called just war theory.
Information warfare breaks just war theory in fundamental ways.
Traditional warfare involves clear risks. If you attack someone, they might attack you back. This creates a natural restraint on aggression—the fear of consequences. But in information warfare, the risk to the attacking nation is dramatically lower. You can launch attacks from the safety of your own territory, often without your enemy even knowing you're responsible. This makes it much easier for governments—and for terrorist or criminal organizations—to conduct attacks more frequently than they ever could with conventional weapons.
Information and communication technologies are so deeply woven into modern civilian life that it's virtually impossible to separate military targets from civilian ones. Your grandmother's smartphone uses the same cellular networks as military communications. Hospital databases run on the same internet infrastructure as intelligence agencies. Financial systems that ordinary people depend on for their paychecks are the same systems that could be attacked to destabilize an enemy economy.
This creates profound ethical problems. Defending against information warfare often requires monitoring civilian communications and infrastructure. But this directly conflicts with the right to privacy. The more thoroughly a government protects its networks, the more it intrudes on its citizens' private lives.
Then there's the attribution problem we encountered at the beginning of this essay. In traditional warfare, you generally know who's shooting at you. In information warfare, you often don't. And without knowing who attacked you, how can you respond proportionately? How can you hold anyone accountable?
When robotic weapons and automated systems are involved, accountability becomes even murkier. If an autonomous system makes a decision that kills people, who is responsible? The programmer? The commander who deployed it? The machine itself?
The Legal Void
Lieutenant General Keith Alexander, who served as commander of United States Cyber Command under President Barack Obama, wrote to the Senate Armed Services Committee about a troubling gap. There was, he noted, a "mismatch between our technical capabilities to conduct operations and the governing laws and policies."
In other words: we can do things that we haven't figured out whether we should do, or how to do responsibly.
One key concern is the targeting of civilian institutions. General Alexander promised to maintain a mindset similar to traditional warfare, seeking to limit impact on civilians. But the nature of information warfare makes this extraordinarily difficult. When civilian and military infrastructure are the same infrastructure, how do you attack one without affecting the other?
Legal scholars and policymakers are still grappling with these questions. The laws governing armed conflict were written for a world of tanks and aircraft carriers, not botnets and social media manipulation campaigns. Updating these frameworks for the information age is proving to be one of the great legal challenges of our time.
The Boundaries We've Lost
Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of information warfare is that it has no clear boundaries.
Traditional wars begin and end. Someone declares war; someone surrenders; treaties are signed. You can point to dates: World War II began on September 1, 1939 and ended on September 2, 1945.
Information warfare doesn't work this way. When did Russia's information campaign against Western democracies begin? Is it ongoing right now, as you read this? How would we know if it stopped?
When you can't tell when a conflict starts, when it ends, or how damaging it is, the traditional concepts of war and peace begin to blur. We may be living in an era of permanent, low-level conflict—a kind of shadow war that never fully escalates but never fully resolves either.
The information you consume every day, the news articles you read, the social media posts that shape your opinions, the search results that determine what you learn about any topic—all of these are potential battlegrounds. And unlike a conventional battlefield, you can't see the armies, can't hear the gunfire, can't know whether you're standing in a combat zone.
This is the peculiar nature of information warfare. It's a war fought for your mind, and often without you ever knowing there's a battle underway.
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