Last Thursday, the Navy awarded a new contract to five intelligence, computer and security companies to provide both hardware and “the development, integration, and test of intelligence, battlespace awareness, and information operations applications”.

In other words, the US Navy is embarking on a major new project in the area of surveillance, technology and data acquisition to provide military commanders with a detailed understanding of any conflict area.

According to the Department of Defense’s own definition “battlespace awareness” includes an area’s “environment, factors, and conditions”, “the status of friendly and adversary forces, neutrals and noncombatants” and “weather and terrain.”

The addition of “information operations” in the contract suggests the project will go beyond the remit of geospatial intelligence and may have some capability for commanders to organise messaging campaigns in an attempt to influence various actors in an area of operations.

The contract raises questions over exactly what information the US Navy is intending to collect and in which conflict areas.

The investment can be understood in the context of the influence of ‘network-centric warfare‘ on US military thinking which emphasises the value of a digitally connected force as a means of improving situational awareness and military decisions.

A press release earlier in the year from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) calling for ‘big data’ projects noted that:

“the demands for actionable information have spiked as warfighters at every level—whether at the planning table or on patrol—are called upon to make well-informed decisions”.

The battlespace awareness contract was awarded by the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center and will initially last until August 2013. The US Navy has options in the contract to extend the work to 2017.

The Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center reports directly to the Navy’s Information Dominance Systems Command.

I’ve spoken to him previously for the Frontline Club about his Frontline bloggers project. 

In this interview with David Bailey, Maj. Smyth talks in some detail about how he used social media to tell the story of British military deployments from Kosovo to Afghanistan. 

These are a few of the things that caught my eye (after I’d spent a few moments puzzling over the indoor brick wall):

1. In Kosovo, Maj. Smyth began making 2 minute YouTube videos and sending the URLs to journalists in Sarajevo to try to capture their interest. Putting these videos online meant they could also be viewed by military wives, girlfriends and families in the UK.

2. He says that in order to get coverage in national newspapers or on the BBC, he needed an "incredible story". But a blog allowed him to provide "behind the scenes" footage and to publish smaller stories for interested audiences on a regular basis.   

3. He targeted influential defence correspondents and outlets such as CNN’s i-Report spreading his news "footprint over a wider area".  

4. He describes how his blogging team inadvertently trumped the established news procedures of Buckingham Palace and the MoD Press Office.

The team had published a blog post revealing a visit by Princess Anne to Camp Bastion an hour too early. He claims the subsequent coverage of the post on the BBC and in The Times and The Telegraph "surprised a few people".

The incident is reportedly related to an internal staffing issue – AP quoted MSF worker Ahmed Ali, who claimed that a recently fired employee was responsible for the shooting. 

The news appears to have been broken by @HSMPress, a Twitter account run by Al Shabaab, the Islamist insurgent group:

A fierce battle is now raging inside #MSF office building in #Mogadishu. A gunman has stormed the building & opened fire on MSF staff inside

— HSM Press Office (@HSMPress) December 29, 2011

HSMPress continued to provide updates on the situation as it developed including information regarding the possible identities of the gunman and the victims. 

He argued that Britain’s main challenge was economic and emphasised the cultivation of strategic alliances to compensate for a smaller national military.   

He also spoke about media coverage of the UK armed forces in relation to Afghanistan:

"The operation is on track. We are succeeding and the population supports our efforts, as the latest Asia House analysis shows. Still the Taliban can play one card. They operate in the world of perceptions and convince many in the UK and elsewhere to see the operation as it was, not as it is.

"Perception lags reality by some 18 months. While we are, like a chess player, planning three or four moves ahead we cannot signal our plans openly. That leaves the media frequently, and understandably, to look only at what has happened.

"They frequently draw the wrong conclusion. If you want to see how those on the ground perceive the situation, and have a view on the commitment, resolve and optimism of the Afghan people, I commend this excellent Asia House report."

Not a particularly unusual assessment of media coverage of Afghanistan by a military representative. For what it’s worth, I’m not convinced that it is only the Taliban that operate in the "world of perceptions" and that actually the UK armed forces operate there as well with reasonable success. Distinguishing the ‘reality’ of Afghanistan from this "world of perceptions" is an exceptionally difficult task.

(I’m afraid I can’t find the Asia House report online…drop me a line if you know where I can find it.)

Today, I’ve selected another five from among the bookmarks I labelled ‘Twitter’ in my delicious account. 

Enjoy!

1. ‘Visualising the New Arab Mind‘

Computational historian Kovas Boguta visualises the Twitter influence network around the revolution in Egypt.

2. ‘The man who tweeted the attack on Osama Bin Laden – without knowing it‘

"Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event)."

The Admiral is the US Chief of Naval Operations and he gave these remarks to a Public Relations Strategic Communications Summit in June.

The general message is that the US Navy realised it could no longer afford not to participate in social media despite potential security risks and the challenges of a "dizzying" communications environment.

The speech marks a significant departure from the guidance in the US Navy’s social media handbook issued last year.

The 2010 manual discouraged Navy leaders from allowing too many individual units to set up social media accounts and urged commanders to establish a single "command presence". 

In this speech, Adm. Roughead instead argues that the Navy’s leaders need to understand that they command a "workforce of communicators".

He emphasised a transparent approach so that Navy leaders could listen to their subordinates and connect with the communities they were serving.

The Admiral cited the response to the earthquake and Tsunami in Japan as an example of how local commands could provide speedy updates on the crisis situation and reply to questions from the United States. 

He recognised, however, that the Navy has "only recently started to come to terms with the demand for radical transparency."   

The full speech is available here, but a few other sentences that I think are worth picking out:    

1. "For whether we embrace the fundamental communications changes underway today or not, our talented young workforce not only embraces them, they know nothing else. As leaders, then, it’s not enough that we keep pace with these changes – we must lead the change."

2. "I submit to you that in today’s media environment, as leaders – whether we recognize it or not – we are no longer simply leading a workforce of employees or, in my case, Sailors. We are leading a workforce of communicators."

3. "…it soon became clear to me that opting out [of engaging in social media] neither guaranteed security, nor served our interests in transparency, outreach, and advocacy. Rather than consider whether we could afford to participate, we came to the conclusion that we couldn’t afford not to participate."

4. "So we joined that conversation, and the term that I’ve used is, “we’re burning the boats.” There’s no going back. We’re committed irreversibly, and in the end it was one of the easiest decisions I’ve made as the Chief of Naval Operations."

In particular, the MoD will decide whether to free deployed commanders from aspects of existing constraints which mean their operations are usually communicated through spokespeople.

A more decentralised approach is arguably overdue but not without risk both in terms of operations security and potential political fall out which may limit the impact of any changes. 

The recommendations recognise that greater trust within the organisation needs to be built on the basis of training and the development of doctrine.

By giving staff media training and providing them with a sound understanding of the rationale behind operations, it is hoped the MoD will ‘set the music’ centrally but that their staff will be allowed ‘to find the right notes’.

The risk of empowering more communicators would be offset by discipline to a "guiding narrative".  

At the moment, members of the Armed Forces and civil servants have to obtain prior permission to communicate in public through the chain of command.

This hierarchical approval process is proving cumbersome in an age of instant digital communication.

A more decentralised approach to communication was a key aspect of a recent Joint Doctrine Note on Strategic Communication issued in March this year. 

JDN 1/11 stated:

"Our processes and philosophy must allow us to respond to feedback from audiences and to counter narratives from our adversaries in order to stay ahead in the information environment.  This will require us to decentralise some of our communication activities."  

The proposals are still under review.  

I’ve been doing some research into the coverage of the Gaza conflict (back end of 2008, front end of 2009) on blogs. One of the English-language blogs that covered the war was the Muqata blog.

The Muqata blog was started in 2005 by ‘Jameel’, a Jewish settler who had lived in Chomesh in Gaza before the Israeli withdrawal.

The blogger says his aim was to promote ‘aliya’ or ascension to Israel by promoting the ‘love of Israel, the land of Israel, and aspiration of living in Israel to the JBlogosphere’. Jameel’s friends assisted with blog postings.

During the Gaza crisis the blog provided dozens of rolling time-stamped updates on the conflict aggregating information from a variety of sources.

There was much discussion at the time about the nature of the media or information war which was running alongside and indeed as part of the Gaza conflict. 

The interesting thing about the Muqata blog was that the authors envisaged themselves as combatants in this information war. In a post on 5 January the authors said:

"We’re doing our part, to help with the war on the information front, while the [Israeli Defence Force] IDF does it’s (sic) job in Gaza."

Two days later, the Muqata bloggers suggested IDF radio could not be trusted as a reliable ally in this struggle: 

"With news sites around the world taking the Gaza side, with pro-Gaza demonstrations going on everywhere, we need to be as forceful as possible in our media reporting on behalf of Israel.

"Our soldiers in Gaza do not need to be stabbed in the back by IDF radio — they need our full and total support, and not hearing interviews with the head of the Shifa hospital, which is housing munitions, rockets, and where Hamas terrorists are dressing up as doctors and nurses."  

Not only, then, were the Muqata authors taking up the blog as a digital weapon in a media war against a perceived enemy, they were also calling out those they regarded as information traitors from within their own ranks.   

General Rupert Smith’s observation that war is now fought amongst the people ‘in every living room in the world’  appears even more prescient given the way individuals are actively deploying digital technologies to participate in media wars. 

And if the media, in the broadest sense of the term, is adjudged to have a central role to play then the distinction between civilian and combatant is becoming increasingly blurred.

Photo: Vrypan, Flickr, Creative Commons.