Planning Ethical Influence Operations: A Framework for Defense Information Professionals

Christopher Paul

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U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) efforts to plan and conduct influence operations in an ethical manner face several challenges, including concerns regarding the appropriateness of any influence activity, a lack of explicit consideration of ethics in the influence-planning process, and decoupling the ethics of force from the ethics of influence in military operations. Currently, DoD lacks a framework to explicitly consider the ethics of an influence activity outside legal review.

Ethics scholarship reveals that the principal ethical objection to influence is its threat to autonomy. Although influence is a threat to autonomy and is thus morally fraught, this scholarship points to several situations in which influence activities might be justified.

This report includes (1) clear ethical principles that should govern the planning and conduct of influence operations; (2) clear procedures for assessing ethics and the ethical risk associated with a proposed influence operation; and (3) guidelines for creating a justification statement for a proposed influence operation based on a preliminary ethical determination so that reviewers and approvers are presented with a consistent, coherent, and nonarbitrary ethical evaluation with which they can engage and agree or disagree.

The authors offer a principles-based framework for military practitioners to determine whether a proposed influence effort is ethically permissible and guidance for preparing a justification statement that allows approvers to follow the ethical logic behind a proposed influence effort.

Key Findings

• Influence operations should be necessary, effective, and proportional.
• Military influence efforts should (1) seek legitimate military outcomes, (2) be necessary to attain those outcomes, (3) employ means that are not harmful (or harm only those liable to harm), (4) have a high likelihood of success, and (5) should not generate second-order effects beyond what is intended. Efforts that do not wholly satisfy all criteria might still be justified, but only if the expected benefit substantially outweighs the likely harm.
• The framework structuring the application of these principles should unfold in three phases: an initial screening, followed by a full ethical risk assessment (if necessary) and the preparation of a justification statement.