The Pentagon may have hit a speed bump in the expansion of its growing worldwide information operations…………
A speed bump for Pentagon’s information ops
The Pentagon may have hit a speed bump in the expansion of its growing worldwide information operations.
The Senate Armed Services Committee has asked Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to assess the effectiveness of a series of news and information Web sites that have been initiated by U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) in recent years in a bid to counter extremist messaging. The so-called “influence Web sites” are maintained by various overseas commands and operated by defense contractors.
For fiscal 2012, SOCOM sought $22.6 million in the Overseas Contingency Operations account — primarily intended to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — for the initiative.
Congress, over the past few years, has been pressing the Pentagon to justify the hundreds of millions of dollars spent overseas under various headings such as “strategic communications” and “information operations.”
Phi Beta Iota: No one now serving in the US Government actually has a clue what Information Operations (IO) should be, because no one now serving in the US Government can combine intelligence and integrity to get to holistic analytics with deep “true cost” data. IO is all information in all languages all the time. Secret intelligence is 10% of all-source intelligence and all-source intelligence is 10% of IO. IO includes policy, acquisition, and operations feed-back loops that must be transparent, truthful, and replete with trust–that pretty much eliminates ALL inter-agency and intra-agency information. We've learned nothing since 1992.
See Also:
2011 Cyber-Command or IO 21 + IO Roots
2011 from 1999: Setting the Stage for Information-Sharing in the 21 st Century (Full Text Online)
2008: Creating a Smart Nation (Full Text Online for Google Translate)
Paul Fernhout: Open Letter to the Intelligence Advanced Programs Research Agency (IARPA)
Search: Steele USMC C4I 1990′s
