Brian Michelson
Weaponized data is the new ammunition in the coming era of hyper-personalized warfare. The ability to gather, process, and weaponize vast amounts of data on individuals is already a reality, and with every click, like, purchase, and online transaction, we have the potential to improve the information an adversary has on each of us. Fed by this vast amount of data, improving artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms will enable state and non-state adversaries to tailor large-scale digital operations to a level not previously seen.
While this phenomenon will have many unanticipated results, two trends bear especially close watching: the increasing ability of adversaries to use highly personalized digital attacks against servicemembers, their families, and their friends and the ability of adversaries to conduct large-scale psychological warfare at the individual level.
Targeting high-value military leaders has long been a common practice in war. From the 1943 precision strike on Admiral Yamamoto, commander in chief of the Combined Japanese Fleet, in Papua New Guinea to the killing of General Qasem Soleimani, head of Iran’s Quds Force, at the Baghdad International Airport in 2020, deliberate attacks on individuals have had a significant effect on military conflicts. While past operations have taken considerable time, energy, and resources to conduct, the most significant limiting factor has often been accurate intelligence on the individuals themselves.
Yet, we now live in an age in which we have abundant information that can be quickly turned into intelligence. Cell phone data is ubiquitous, even in combat zones, as we have seen in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Less obvious is how enormous amounts of data is generated on, and by, service members during a peacetime environment.
Commercially available data, numerous and massive data breaches of government, commercial, and health care sites, social media, military discount registrations, facial recognition of publicly available photographs, Alexa, Siri, GPS tracking, and other sources all combine to offer a trove of data on servicemembers, and by extension, their families, and friends.
Analysis of this data by increasingly capable AI programs will be able to produce actionable intelligence on the military community writ large. This intelligence will likely contain not only factual data, but also increasingly accurate psychological profiles with corresponding vulnerabilities. Lower-ranking service members, their families, and by extension, their friends, may quickly find themselves in the digital crosshairs of a future conflict.
While intelligence files on these individuals may not necessarily lead to lethal outcomes, they could be used for disruptive attacks against the financial, social, and mental health of the military community. These types of attacks would impact the effectiveness of the military not just during a conflict, but prior to one as well.
The important distinction between individual attacks of the last century and this one is a matter of time and cost. The planning for both the Yamamoto and Soleimani attacks involved rigorous preparation, extended planning time, and thousands of hours of work before the strikes were launched.
Current capabilities can execute an automated digital attack in milliseconds and at virtually no cost, making it both easier and more lucrative to execute these types of attacks at scale. Although not yet widespread, imagine what these attacks might look like on service members, their families, and their friends.
Personal disruptions would likely take the form of damage to a servicemember’s personal finances, social networks, career prospects, and other areas that will maximize their personal stress and pain levels and in so doing, reduce their effectiveness in their job. Losing access to financial accounts and seeing the resulting cascade of monetary issues, losing real and online “friends” due to implanted offensive posts and deep fake messaging, and having artificially created misconduct allegations brought against servicemembers will all have an operationally significant effect. The misconduct allegations can be especially dangerous as they can flag an individual as a security risk.
Attacks against family members could be the most devastating and take various forms mentioned above. During the past century, the US has had the luxury of fighting overseas with little risk to families. Most Western nations have all-volunteer forces, and knowing that families would be under attack would be a crippling moral blow to service members and their willingness to continue to serve. Attacks on friends would likely be either an effort to alienate them by manipulating social media and personal electronic correspondence, or an effort to have them express the futility of the operation.
Either way, the perceived loss of social status and friendship would have a negative impact on the service member during a period of high stress. Even if the issues described are all shown to be false and eventually resolved, all will take time and energy that will be in short supply. We must ask ourselves, why wouldn’t an adversary pursue this capability?
A second area that bears close watching pertains to how adversaries may use psychological warfare at the individual level to erode civil support for military operations. Western nations have been drifting towards postmodern worldviews and the corresponding relativistic approach to truth and morality.
This creates an easy path to arguments both about moral equivalency and demonization that can be used by both isolationist and interventionist factions respectively. Couple this with tailored messaging that is done both at scale and considers an individual’s psychological biases, and the result is an increasingly confused and polluted information environment.
In this environment, the isolationist faction of a country is of most use to an adversary. With sufficient and targeted efforts against selected individuals, it becomes easier for a society to ask, “Why are we in this conflict if our government is just as bad/evil/at fault as the other one? Why should we continue this conflict?”
While these are fair questions, what if a nation is in a justified conflict due to the necessity of defending its citizens, territory, or interests and is doing so within the bounds of the Western Jus in Bello (Just War) tradition? If an adversary can damage, break, or simply reduce civil support in their opponent by stoking isolationist sentiment to gain a strategic advantage, why wouldn’t they pursue this capability?
As we step into a future full of possibilities and risks, there are no easy solutions. A few initial steps are available to start. First, we must accept that future conflicts will be psychological knife fights in which truth will be hotly contested with increasingly capable and sophisticated digital tools.
Secondly, we can educate and inform military members and their families about the very real likelihood of them becoming primary targets in coming conflicts. We then owe them, and must develop, the tools and infrastructure they will need to quickly deal with these attacks.
Lastly, senior leaders will need to be proactive about explaining the moral nature of the conflicts we are facing and what to expect from our adversaries in terms of information warfare. While we are susceptible to the above issues, so are our future opponents. The question is, who will wield these capabilities best?
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