Translating War’s Grammar into the Language of Peace: NATO, Disinformation, and the Future of Conflict
By Ariel Burgess and Jack Burnham
Across the Alliance, the spread of disinformation has become a rising concern in the field of information warfare and an increasingly prevalent tactic used in grey zone incursions. These disinformation campaigns, launched most often by Russia, present an unconventional and asymmetrical threat to NATO by blending in with domestically generated content and raising complex legal and political questions regarding the role of the state in intervening in privately-owned platforms. These disinformation campaigns have also increased political polarization within many NATO countries, inevitably introducing more uncertainty into military structures controlled by civilian governments.
This paper will argue that the effectiveness of these disinformation campaigns is the result of both member states’ political-legal frameworks for regulating Internet content and their divided societies. Borrowing from Carl von Clausewitz’s writings on war as a clash of wills, this paper will also argue that the proliferation of disinformation will weaken the military preparedness of the Alliance by degrading the will of its member states to use military force, a key aspect of NATO’s deterrence model. As such, this paper will conclude by offering a potential solution based on utilizing NATO’s partnerships, namely replicating Sweden’s Psychological Defence Agency across member states.
Disinformation campaigns launched by revisionist state actors, namely Russia and China, have become successful due to novel forms of communication and member states’ political-legal framework for regulating information. Further, both elements have flourished in the “gray zone” of the international system, operating below the threshold of armed conflict to compete with the Alliance without triggering an Article Five response.
While propaganda has always been a tool used against the Alliance, novel forms of communication have bolstered its effectiveness in disrupting the inner workings of member states’ democratic societies.[i] The Soviet Union continuously launched official propaganda campaigns against NATO member states with the aim of concealing reality and subtly shifting public opinion and action towards the desires of the propagandist.[ii] However, novel forms of communication, such as the open Internet and privately-owned social media platforms have grown to become significant instruments for conducting information warfare. Beyond its near-instantaneous global reach, the disaggregated nature of the Internet has allowed for disinformation to proliferate while significantly complicating the task of attributing responsibility, thus allowing for plausible deniability on the part of both state and non-state actors.[iii] Further, the algorithms utilized by social media platforms have allowed for the growth of “echo chambers” as users increasingly are surrounded by information that confirms their potentially false pre-existing biases.[iv] This environment bolsters the effectiveness of disinformation by both amplifying it through consistent repetition and excluding other sources of information that may be used to counter its message. However, beyond the use of new technologies, disinformation campaigns also rely on member states’ commitment to liberal democracy, particularly regarding Internet regulation and freedom of speech protections.
Both the open nature of the Internet and the private ownership of major social media platforms presents difficult challenges for regulation by NATO member states. Though Internet regulation has become a pressing concern across multiple Alliance members, including the EU’s privacy laws, the UK’s Online Safety Bill, and debates within the United States over reforming Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, an overall approach towards addressing online speech remains limited.[v] Further, given that the division between private and public property remains the hallmark of liberal democracy, government regulation of social media platforms remains potentially fraught with legal peril.[vi] As adversarial disinformation campaigns are often designed to operate in concert with domestically generated content and distributed broadly by unwitting social media users, an approach that only focuses on managing foreign interference will also not be fully sufficient, demonstrating the challenges posed by information warfare.
Further, the effectiveness of disinformation campaigns has represented the changing character of warfare since the end of the Cold War, culminating in both state and non-state actors’ reliance on “grey zone” tactics. As argued by Edward Luttwak, post-industrial states have embraced the concept of “post-heroic warfare”, which Luttwak defines as a style of war that emphasises the strict avoidance of casualties, even at the cost of achieving strategic objectives.[vii] Luttwak contrasts this style to the Napoleonic way of war that informed much of previous military doctrine, which emphasised the offensive momentum of massed forces as critical to achieving victory.[viii] This shift in the character of war incentivises actors to realize the policy aims traditionally achieved through armed conflict through alternative means by operating in the “grey zone” between peace and war, including by utilizing disinformation campaigns.[ix] Rather than expend significant sums of political and economic capital to launch a military operation against a foreign peer force, disinformation campaigns designed to elicit the “internal decay” of an adversary offer an often legal, relatively inexpensive, and politically palatable method of offensive statecraft.
Part of the effectiveness of disinformation campaigns can be attributed to their ability to disrupt the internal economics and politics of NATO member states by feeding off existing divisions between groups of citizens within the state or between citizens and the state itself. The ever-changing state of modern conflicts, especially via technological tactics, exacerbates this by creating a significant divide between expectation and reality—by the time many learn about conflicts, there has already been attempts to address it.[x] This is compounded by the fact that the public is inherently removed from the immediate war efforts as non-military members, and the military complex must be cautious in releasing information about its abilities in order to maintain a ‘competitive edge’ and avoid contributing knowledge to those who may oppose the state or NATO itself. Additionally, terrorism and the ‘War on Terror’ have remained a pervasive characterization of political goals for the military in Western states since 9/11, in that the government has utilized military personnel and budgets for counter-terrorism efforts, which detracts from the sum efforts put towards supporting alliances and foreign security concerns.[xi] This narrative not only dissuades the public from inquiring into the purpose of military action, it also necessarily contributes to disinformation by providing an ‘othering’ of some members of society. The obscurity surrounding the purpose of military actions combined with new types of conflict creates distinct differences between what the purpose of a war is and the impression the public receives.[xii] The public is also influenced by their own state narrative, which often only portrays the wins of the state. This narrative often is supported by the fact that NATO states have been on the winning sides of most major conflicts in public memory. Public opinion thus views a state’s ability in terms of tactical ability rather than operational or strategic capacity, which then encourages politicians to run on defense platforms that highlight tactical issues.[xiii] The distortion means that when these politicians are elected, the decisions they make are influenced by public opposition to structural changes within the military, forcing NATO states who do not have functionally tactical militaries or who have limited operational capacity to devote resources to sentimental and ineffective initiatives rather than supporting efforts consistent with current conflict methodology and state capabilities.[xiv] The narrative supporting traditional conflict, compounded by the illusion that the military wins because of traditional strategies, creates a situation where when the military chooses alternative methods of conflict resolution, disinformation and division thrive. The confused or disappointed public can be easily led to not only undercut NATO but also believe disinformation campaigns supporting an adversary.
Another phenomenon that uses pre-existing divides to sow disinformation is the use of the military as a political figurehead. This forces it to act as both a national defense force and as a public figure. The transition of many NATO states to volunteer-based service has minimized the perceived divide between civilian and military, and therefore, the perceived need for military secrecy. There is a belief that the military and its members are then answerable and ought to be accessible to the public or political actors, despite the fact that this is not what the military is designed for. This is in direct tension with the treatment of conflict as a concern only for those in the profession of arms—the state of public safety and war may not be the public’s concern, but it is the military’s.
The effects of disinformation also pose a threat to the ability of NATO member states to engage in armed conflict should Article Five be triggered by weakening their will to launch and sustain military campaigns. This threat is highlighted by Carl von Clausewitz’s writings on war and his focus on the relationship between a belligerent’s will and the war’s outcome. As such, disinformation presents a pressing danger to the Alliance’s capacity to wage war due to its capability to undermine the societal cohesion needed for collective action during crises and poisons the information environment that underpins the relationship between governments and their citizens, thus undermining the effectiveness of civilian-controlled militaries.
For Clausewitz, the construction of war and its outcomes centres around an actor’s will to engage in conflict. Clausewitz notes in On War that war is a “clash of wills” in that the aim of either adversary is to render their opponent “incapable of further resistance” and thus in the position of having the other’s will imposed upon them, drawing the comparison of a wrestling match.[xv] Further, the role of the will is embedded within Clausewitz’s “paradoxical” trinity of governments, citizens, and militaries that form the basis of a state’s ability to fight.[xvi] In recognizing the role of the “passions” of civilians in determining a state’s ability to go to war, Clausewitz notes that conflict is fueled in part by a society’s will to engage in combat.[xvii] Clausewitz further refines this by noting that a state’s military force is defined by the product of “two inseparable factors”, those being its means and its will.[xviii] This understanding of war is echoed by Emile Simpson, who contends that war’s outcome is determined by the enemy’s acceptance of defeat.[xix] For Simpson, war is an instrument for translating a belligerent’s will, decided through its politics, into a reality that the enemy will accept, with its outcome hinging on this recognition.[xx] As such, both Clausewitz and Simpson recognize the importance of an actor’s will in determining the outcome of hostilities, a connection that remains vulnerable to disinformation.
Disinformation has the potential to undercut an actor’s will to engage in combat by undermining the societal cohesion needed for collective action and poisoning the information environment that both governments and citizens require for the proper functioning of democracy, a phenomenon that may degrade the effectiveness of civilian-controlled militaries. The disinformation campaigns launched by adversarial actors within NATO member states are designed primarily to undercut their social-political foundations by both driving an increase in polarization and damaging their citizens’ sense of a shared reality.[xxi] This tactic has been displayed by past Russian disinformation efforts and military exercises such as the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the creation of an “information fog” during the 2017 Zapad exercise in which misinformation, falsehoods, and forgeries were used to subvert the information space within bordering NATO members.[xxii] Further, the poisoning of member states’ information environments by the Alliance’s adversaries will inevitably affect its civilian-controlled militaries by weakening the government’s legitimacy and its trustworthiness, both critical assets for effective crisis response, along with potentially artificially eroding the political support needed to launch military operations.
Rather than lead to greater peace, however, the degradation of NATO member states’ resolve to fight will lead to the heightened probability for conflict as such a development would harm the Alliance’s deterrence model. Due to the design of Article Five, this decline would also create conditions in which it becomes probable that NATO may “lose” a conflict as it will no longer be able to muster the forces required to achieve its desired political-military outcomes, significantly weakening the effectiveness of the Alliance as a collective defence organization.
Both conventional and nuclear deterrence rely upon the credibility, communication, and capabilities of the deterrer, a strategy that may be disrupted by the rise of disinformation campaigns within NATO member states. For one rational actor to deter another, its threats must be communicated clearly, backed by sufficient forces, and understood as being credible as to prevent uncertainty that may lead to miscalculation.[xxiii] These elements highlight that deterrence is both a military and social process and relies upon the perception of both the deterrer and the deterred in order to be effective.[xxiv] Further, this model of deterrence between rational actors also posits that it will fail if communication falters or becomes disconnected from an actor’s perception of reality or its credibility cannot be reliably established, whether due to erratic or unpredictable behavior or a lack of capabilities.[xxv] Examples of deterrence failure due to these conditions include the threat of ground warfare in Kosovo as Slobodan Milosevic perceived a gap between the credibility and capabilities of NATO and continued to fight before the NATO air campaign achieved its strategic objective.[xxvi] Rather than underline commitment-capability gaps, however, disinformation poses a threat to deterrence by undermining member states’ communications and credibility. The increasing volatility of the political processes of democracies, heightened by disinformation, along with a lack of a coordinated response to grey zone incursions, will continue to weaken the credibility of the Alliance as a deterrer. This volatility will also threaten the communication of deterrence when information environments become polluted, identifying when adversaries cross “red lines” may become blurred, even for member states’ intelligence communities, allowing for states’ communication to become separated from verifiable reality and rely solely on skewed perceptions.
Further, the decline of effective deterrence will also irrevocably harm NATO’s core mission as a defense organization. Deterrence, when preformed through clear, credible communication, backed by the necessary capabilities, serves as the foundational element of NATO’s strategic thinking, whether in deploying the enhanced Forward Presence battle groups stationed in the Baltics or the basis of Article Five itself.[xxvii] Rather than seeking to entrap member states into a conflict involving two superpowers, i.e., the United States and Soviet Union, Article Five was designed to ensure that such a conflict would be deemed irrational and thus not worth the incalculable loss for all belligerents. Further, the deterrence of Article Five also revolves around its applicability to each NATO member state equally, constituting NATO’s extended deterrence as the Alliance’s great powers, including the United States, have communicated their willingness to sacrifice Washington for Warsaw.[xxviii] However, the loss of deterrence due to disinformation campaigns would represent the end of this relationship, allowing for adversaries to effectively present NATO with a fait accompli along its Eastern flank, a scenario that would mean the end of the Alliance in its current form and made frighteningly real in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The issue of disinformation is not an easy one to solve, however, it cannot remain unaddressed due to the dangers it poses to NATO. Rather than trying to form an entirely new program under the NATO umbrella, NATO should leverage its existing partnerships in order to formulate an overarching program that members can adopt, one which includes proven techniques and structures to fight disinformation. Sweden, for example, has developed a Psychological Defense Agency that is focused specifically on combating disinformation through both offensive and defensive techniques.[xxix] Two main branches of the Agency include the Operations Department, which specializes in the identification and countering of malign information influences while also actively developing technology which aids these efforts, and the Capability Development Department, which provides support to the Swedish population and its infrastructure in various forms, including knowledge development and research funding related to psychological defense.[xxx] This two-pronged approach allows the Agency to actively counter disinformation while building resistance to disinformation within its population. If this program could be scaled up and deployed within NATO states, a whole of society approach could be adopted in order to prepare member states to counter information warfare.
Individual states could theoretically indigenously develop methods to handle disinformation; however, this does not appear to be the best course of action. Rossbach notes in his review of Swedish defense capabilities that, “if the tasks of psychological defense become the responsibility of many different government agencies, there is a risk that psychological defense will devolve into disparate efforts and become nobody's responsibility”.[xxxi] On the international stage, this risk becomes paramount and ought to be avoided at all costs, or NATO will continue to suffer malicious disinformation campaigns while having few, if any, effective countermeasures. Another reason to discourage individual development is that due in part to existing disinformation campaigns, NATO is already seen by many as an untrustworthy organization—within Greece and Turkey, for example, only 33% and 23% of citizens, respectively, approve of NATO, and 20% of Americans oppose NATO.[xxxii] The government’s implementation of a psychological defense agency on behalf of NATO may appear to those who are in opposition to the organization as a form of brain-washing, government overstep, or inappropriate surveillance, which may lead to a censorship-based approach in dealing with disinformation. By applying a broad-spectrum approach, however, there is an opportunity to present NATO as an institution that embraces innovative international security techniques and an open society, something which may help counter the current negative rhetoric while avoiding issues like censorship. Seeing such a widespread effort may also help ease public concerns about the level of NATO influence on their specific government, reducing anxieties about things like surveillance.
Disinformation is a threat to the Alliance not primarily due to its effects but because of what it reveals about the state of Western liberal democracies entering an era of renewed great power competition. Fundamentally, disinformation’s effectiveness is predicated on the weaknesses present within democratic governance and alliance politics, including the division between public and private enterprise, political polarization, the relationship between post-industrial states and war, and the credibility required to sustain extended deterrence. Further, these issues are not technical but social in nature. They cannot be solved by new technological or military solutions but by steady political commitment, supported by innovative solutions that centre around the relationship between the individual and their community as the basis for a healthy society worthy of protection. NATO should remind itself that its greatest strength is its commitment to the principles of democracy rather than a line item in a defence budget.
About the Authors
Ariel Burgess is a third-year political studies major at Queen's University, with a minor in philosophy. She focuses on international political economics, defense studies, and health policy. She is also an Undergraduate Summer Research Student Fellow with Queen's University.
Jack Burnham is a fourth-year politics student at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. His interests include Canadian foreign policy, Middle Eastern security, and American politics. Jack's work has appeared in the NATO Association of Canada and the Atlantic Forum, covering the Canadian Armed Forces and NATO Headquarters. When not writing about security and defense, Jack is also a staff writer for the Queen's Journal, one of the oldest student newspapers in North America. A current resident of Kingston, Jack enjoys playing ice hockey and fishing on Lake Ontario.
Notes
[i] Elizabeth Braw, “The Unorthodox Weapon We Need to Defend Democracy,” Politico, January 16, 2022, https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/01/16/russia-ukraine-gray-zone-warfare-autocrats-democracy-527022
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Shelley Boulianne et al., “Right-Wing Populism, Social Media and Echo Chambers in Western Democracies,” New Media & Society 22, no. 4 (2020): 684.
[v] “Online Safety Bill: New Offences and Tighter Rules,” BBC, December 14, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59638569; Woojeong Jang and Abraham L Newman, “Enforcing European Privacy Regulations from Below: Transnational Fire Alarms and the General Data Protection Regulation,” Journal of Common Market Studies 60, no. 2 (2022): 285; Benjamin W. Cramer, “From Liability to Accountability: The Ethics of Citing Section 230 to Avoid the Obligations of Running a Social Media Platform,” Journal of Information Policy 10 (2020): 123.
[vi] Ibid.
[vii] Edward N. Luttwak, “Towards Post-Heroic Warfare,” Foreign Affairs 74, no. 3 (1995): 3.
[viii] Ibid.
[ix] Maren Leed, “Square Pegs, Round Holes, and Gray Zone Conflicts: Time to Step Back,” Georgetown Journal of International Affairs 16, no. 2 (2015): 136.
[x] Andrew Mumford, “Proxy Warfare and the Future of Conflict”, The RUSI Journal 158, no. 2 (April 2013): 43.
[xi] John Mueller, “Public Opinion on War and Terror: Manipulated or Mainpulating?”, (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2021), 4-8, https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2021-08/mueller-public-opinion-on-war-and-terror-white-paper.pdf.
[xii] Stephen Biddle, “Victory Misunderstood: What the Gulf War Tells Us about the Future of Conflict”, International Security 21, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 175.
[xiii] Edward N. Luttwak, "Post-Heroic Warfare and its Implications." In International Symposium on Security Affairs, October 7–8, 1999: “War and Peace in the 21st Century: Reflections upon the Century of War. 1999, 130, accessed March 13, 2022 http://www.nids.mod.go.jp/english/event/symposium/pdf/1999/sympo_e1999_5.pdf.
[xiv] Edward N. Luttwak, "Post-Heroic Warfare”, 130-132.
[xv] Carl Von Clausewitz, On War, eds. Michael Howard, Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 75.
[xvi] Clausewitz, On War, 89.
[xvii] Ibid.
[xviii] Clausewitz, On War, 77.
[xix] Douglas Ollivant, “War from the Ground Up,” Foreign Policy, January 16, 2014, https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/01/16/war-from-the-ground-up/.
[xx] Ibid.
[xxi] Elizabeth Braw, “The Unorthodox Weapon”.
[xxii] Andrea Ventsel et al., “Discourse of Fear in Strategic Narratives: The Case of Russia’s Zapad War Games,” Media, War & Conflict 14, no. 1 (2021): 27; Elizabeth Braw, “The Unorthodox Weapon”.
[xxiii] Stephen L. Quackenbush, “Deterrence Theory: Where Do We Stand?” Review of International Studies 37, no. 2 (2011): 742.
[xxiv] Maria Mälksoo, “A Ritual Approach to Deterrence: I Am, Therefore I Deter,” European Journal of International Relations 27, no. 1 (2021): 57.
[xxv] Peter Vincent Pry, “Ideology as a Factor in Deterrence,” Comparative Strategy 31, no. 2 (2012): 116.
[xxvi] Frank P. Harvey, “Getting NATO's Success in Kosovo Right: The Theory and Logic of Counter-Coercion,” Conflict Management and Peace Science 23, no. 2 (2006): 146.
[xxvii] Maria Mälksoo, “A Ritual Approach to Deterrence”, 54.
[xxviii] Maria Mälksoo, “A Ritual Approach to Deterrence”, 61.
[xxix] “About Us”, The Swedish Psychological Defense Agency, last modified February 28, 2022, accessed March 12, 2022, https://www.mpf.se/en/about-us/.
[xxx] “About Us,” The Swedish Psychological Defense Agency.
[xxxi] Niklas H. Rossbach, “Chapter 6” in Strategic Outlook 7: Perspectives of National Security in a New Security Environment, ed. Cecilia Hull Wiklund, Daniel Faria, Bengt Johansson and Josefin Öhrn-Lundin (Stockholm: The Swedish Defense Research Agency, 2017), 49.
[xxxii] Sedrik Pocuch, “What Does the World Think About NATO?”, NATO Association of Canada, last modified August 1, 2019, accessed March 12, 2022, https://natoassociation.ca/what-does-the-world-think-about-nato/.
