Cloud-Seeding a Revolution
Editors’ Note: This article is the third in a series of IWar transformation papers that adds supporting fires and expands lodgment in the information space. This article is intended to inform Small Wars Journal readers and contribute to an ongoing professional discussion on the Army’s transformative approach to information warfare.
Introduction
In his excellent podcast on the Pacific War, Supernova in the East, Dan Carlin referred to the Japanese attempt to use the Indian National Army to foment a broad-based anti-colonial uprising in British India as an attempt to “cloud-seed a revolution”. This is an apt description. In cloud-seeding, scientists cannot create rain but can assess favorable conditions for it and release materials into the environment to precipitate that desired outcome. Throughout history, irregular warfare practitioners have attempted to foment unrest in adversary populations. Emerging technological trends present new opportunities to subvert and destabilize adversarial regimes by exploiting rifts in their societies. This piece outlines the process through which such a campaign could be conducted, explores why states might choose this approach, identifies the relevance of this approach to the contemporary operating environment and to Special Operations Forces, and addresses the risks and limitations of this approach.
How to Cloud-Seed a Revolution
When directed by national leadership to pursue the destabilization of an adversary regime, information warfare professionals employ a phased approach. In the first phase, they characterize the information and political environment to identify rifts in civil society, susceptible demographics, key grievances, previous protest movements, and credible local voices, as well as preferred local messaging and networking platforms. With this data, they then conduct link analysis; map networks; identify narratives, themes, messages, and symbols that would resonate with the target audience; and initiate deliberate planning. After developing an operational approach, they prepare the information environment by creating and conditioning social media accounts in key demographics or identifying existing accounts they could employ for this purpose. Through the conditioning and employment of these personas, planners further develop and refine their understanding of the information environment. They amplify local voices by reacting to or sharing posted content to make it appear that the creator’s movement is larger than it is. This amplification helps spread the message to wider audiences and eventually leads to actual growth within the movement.
Once conditions are set, the next phase is to mobilize these networks to achieve an effect. This can be targeted to achieve a tactical objective, such as staging work stoppages or strikes at a critical industrial facility or protests to block or disrupt critical infrastructure by tying the target to an identified local grievance. The most critical requirement for achieving meaningful disruption is merely that the action be highly visible. The next step involves both branding this initial, visible protest and inciting other actions in other areas that share the same grievances or objectives as the first. If the initial protest has some sort of symbol, this symbol can be attached as part of the amplification campaign and copied by subsequent actions. This allows various unrelated groups with anti-regime sentiments to create the appearance of a single cohesive revolutionary movement. This symbol could be as simple as a shared garment (like the yellow vests in France), a shared color (like the Color Revolutions in the former Soviet periphery), or even a shared hashtag on social media. A nationwide anti-regime movement, especially one receiving international attention, presents a wicked problem to the regime. Inaction causes the regime to look weak and allows the disruptions caused by the protests to persist, but suppressing the protests comes with its own costs. Not only can information warfare professionals coordinate international condemnation for this suppression, but they could also use it to facilitate further rifting, such as amplifying the abuse of a particular group to members of security forces from that group. Historically, the moment that the security forces begin to sympathize more with dissidents than with the regime is the moment the regime’s grip on power becomes untenable.
Advantages
There are numerous advantages to such a strategy. First, it is a less costly and politically sensitive option to achieve maximalist outcomes like regime change than conventional operations, making it an attractive option for policymakers. Second, it is more palatable to the American public than other types of covert action because it is perceived as being more in line with American ideals. When the United States achieved regime change through covert action during the Cold War, it suffered reputational costs and loss of access and placement when it backed a coup d’état, but it suffered minimal consequences when it did so by backing a social movement. Finally, the main advantage of this approach is that it works. Throughout the Cold War, the United States fought the Soviet Union through proxy warfare, economic warfare, and political warfare. Ultimately the death blow to the USSR came in the form of the Revolutions of 1989, which were partially enabled by covert American support to social movements like Solidarity in Poland.
Relevance to Special Operations
Remotely destabilizing a regime by inciting a revolution would require significant interagency coordination with the State Department, Intelligence Community, and likely private and civil society organizations. The SOF community is well postured to play a key role in this effort. Within Army SOF, there are experts in not only waging information warfare and navigating civil populations, but also in unconventional warfare. Functionally, this approach is subversion, which is a key activity of unconventional warfare. Though practiced remotely, the objectives remain the same, as do the principles of developing and employing networks within indigenous populations to topple adversary regimes. Moreover, SOF has the intelligence apparatus and expertise gained from decades of manhunting to conduct targeting down to the individual level. This is critical when crafting targeted influence products designed to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time to inspire them to take the desired action. Finally, SOF’s ability to translate tactical effects into strategic outcomes is highly desirable when trying to shape scattered dissident movements into a revolutionary movement capable of weakening or toppling an adversary regime.
Why Now?
We are living in the Information Age. Internet access has proliferated globally with roughly 70 percent of the world’s population enjoying access. This has enabled the sharing of ideas across borders with an ease that was never possible before. It has also enabled political ideologies to proliferate at a rapid rate and allowed state and non-state actors to engage in subversion on a scale that was previously impossible. The Islamic State’s “Global Caliphate” would not have been possible before the Internet. Soviet subversion during the Cold War involved a time and resource-intensive penetration of sympathetic elements of American society, but this pales in comparison to what Russia can do today using online propaganda and disinformation to exploit political and identity-based rifts in American society.
America’s adversaries are not only practitioners of this new form of subversion, but they are also deeply concerned about their own vulnerability to it. Russia has been volubly outspoken about their suspicions that the pro-democracy Color Revolutions that rolled back Russian influence in the former Soviet sphere were sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency. China directs one of the largest surveillance apparatus in world history towards their own population out of fear of the “Five Poisons”, their collective term for Uyghur, Tibetan, and Taiwanese independence movements, Falun Gong, and the Chinese Democracy movement. They fear these movements could be exploited to fracture the Communist Party’s control of the country. Iran’s “Quiet Revolution” protests alternated between simmering discontent and widespread unrest that threatened the regime’s control for years. Iran’s theocratic regime brutally suppressed the movement they blamed on Kurdish nationalists, the CIA, and the Mossad. The degree to which these adversary regimes blame internal unrest on malign foreign influence suggests how vulnerable they believe they are to such a strategy.
Limitations and Risks of this Approach
This piece is not an attempt to sell this approach as a panacea or silver bullet. Remotely subverting an adversary regime is still fundamentally a form of warfare and should be employed only with an understanding of its limitations and risks. Its primary limitation is that a social movement cannot be created “out of whole cloth”. For it to succeed requires suitable conditions, such as a civil society with internet access and with existing rifts to exploit. For example, a homogeneous population with very limited internet access like North Korea or a state with a weak civil society like Afghanistan would be a poor use case for this strategy. The other major limitation is that social movements alone may not be sufficient to topple a sufficiently entrenched regime. The regime would then be motivated to brutally suppress the movement unless prevented from doing so by external forces, as occurred in Iran.
The risks of this strategy are primarily reputational. If the United States encourages citizens to rise but then takes no action when the regime brutally suppresses the uprising, it could damage American credibility and strengthen the regime’s grip on power. This risk can be partially mitigated by exploiting reprisals to provoke international condemnation and/or recruitment into the dissident movement. However, policymakers should be cognizant of the fact that this strategy still involves pitting real people risking their lives against a desperate regime fighting an existential threat to retain power. Second is the risk of delegitimization. If an authentic local movement is found to be backed by the United States, it risks losing credibility or being viewed as an American puppet. This is a harder risk to mitigate, but any messaging should emphasize that the United States supports the locals in their struggle and should not imply any American control over the movement. Finally, the greatest concern is linked to lack of control. Revolutionary social movements are prone to mob violence and often conduct reprisals upon seizing power, as seen in the Syrian government’s retaliatory violence against the Alawites after the fall of the Assad regime. This risk is best mitigated by establishing ties with the movement early to shape post-regime outcomes by making offers of aid and support contingent on the movement’s actions.
Conclusion
In 1970, media studies philosopher Marshall McLuhan posited that “World War 3 is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.” Now, in the 21st century, not only is this form of information warfare possible, but America’s adversaries are already waging it. The United States has an inherent advantage in this war of ideas as it supports freedom and democracy, while its adversaries support authoritarianism and ethno-nationalist objectives. The United States must be aggressive, however, in recognizing the ability of its information warfare capabilities to generate disruptive and even decisive effects in the strategic deep area. America’s adversaries know that it is unlikely to employ conventional military forces against their homeland, either because of the nuclear deterrent or because of the political sensitivities of engaging in another costly cycle of war and nation building. Their greater fear is being overthrown by their own people. By cultivating and honing this capability, the SOF community can provide a valuable tool to the U.S. government in fighting and winning this global “guerrilla information war”.
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