I’ve got to admit I’m a little puzzled at the reaction to my piece on information warfare below.<\/p>\n
Look, I’m hardly shocked to catch<\/a> a few elbows<\/a> from the progblogs (hi, Matthew<\/a>!). But the misreading of the intent of the post is consistent enough to make me wonder if I flatly wrote it wrong. <\/p>\n When someone uses words like “conundrum,” (as I did) I’d assume that they are talking about a problem with no ready solution. In this case, the collision of values between defending political discourse in a democratic republic from overt manipulation by the government on one side, and wanting to win a conflict using the tools of counterinsurgency – which include the manipulation of opinion – on the other. That seems like a very real conundrum to me (although I see one possible path out of it, suggested by Boyd).<\/p>\n My intent in writing the piece was to make two points: First that it’s amusing that the usual suspects are shocked, shocked! that this is happening – given that it is a part of the counterinsurgency playbook, and I assume the folks in the Pentagon read that and more, plus given the historical record here in America and pretty much everywhere else – much as if they were shocked – shocked! that in combat our troops fire real bullets.<\/p>\n Less amusing to me is the deeper question which is how, exactly, we can do information warfare in the context of keeping it from irremediably damaging our own polity. That’s a damn serious question, and the one I intended to trigger some discussion of in my earlier post, and to discuss in the next few days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Armed Liberal wonders why people don’t know what a ‘conundrum’ is…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1721"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1721"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1721\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}