By now, it is clear that Israel is dominating the battlefield in the Gaza Strip. However, what is not certain or within the control of the Israelis is the global perception of this offensive in light of the humanitarian disaster in Gaza. There are reasons to conclude that the modern information environment may lead Israel towards a Pyrrhic victory—a victory in which it wins the battle but loses the narrative.
To understand this concept, it is essential to recognize the evolving character of military and social considerations within the modern information environment. While using information to influence populations is not new, widespread access to social media has empowered disinformation delivery techniques with unprecedented speed, reach, and access to their targeted populations’ cognitive processes. This evolution of cognitive warfare via twenty-first-century technological platforms has occurred in a little over a decade, making giant leaps akin to the shift from the musket to the machine gun. Just like the machine gun, the weaponization of social media has revolutionized the face of modern warfare. Social media and smartphones have afforded nation-states and nonstate actors unprecedented reach to employ measures that influence populations. People typically look at their phones approximately 150 times a day in the Western world, or every 6.4 minutes in a 16-hour day. This constant access to information is a profound vulnerability that can be used in political warfare campaigns.
This onslaught of information is especially important in the current age of postmodern moral relativism, where it appears that there is an absence of an absolute right or wrong. Information collection and reconnaissance are not new concepts for military planners. However, the current character of the information age may require military planners and strategists to seriously consider the impact of their actions and how they may be interpreted by the public as broadcasted in millions of tweets, Tik-Toks, videos, and posts.
Strategists and planners must consider their own offensive and defensive measures, similar to the land, air, sea, and space domains. In the wake of the social media blitz regarding the alleged bombing of Al Ahli Arab Hospital, the IDF was quick to respond with its own briefing offering its analysis and counter-narrative. Social media has demonstrated that it can fire several cognitive artillery rounds at the command of any would-be gunner armed with a smartphone. These rounds can create cognitive casualties anywhere in the world with an open internet connection. Conventional military planners and commanders conduct Collateral Damage Estimates (CDE) when developing comprehensive target lists for destruction. It may be wise for modern militaries to consider implementing a Social Media Damage Estimate for kinetic options.
Beyond the visceral human suffering in this conflict lie lessons for harnessing information measures to keep the war perceived as just. These lessons instruct nation-states to conduct themselves within the principles of reciprocity of force when engaging with nonstate actors. This is not the first time in modern military history when the portrayal of the enemy’s destruction forced a nation-state to consider the information realm. In 1991 during Desert Storm, the media broadcasted the swath of destruction on the “Highway of Death” which forced the US to deal with the growing narrative that it was mercilessly destroying fleeing Iraqis.
What is clear from the current conflict is that a nonstate actor like Hamas has been able to create a bait intense enough to elicit a response from the targeted state, which then magnifies support for its cause at the speed of likes, retweets, and shares. The payout of this effort is the legions of protestors who can directly influence political leadership, particularly in the West. These cognitive barrages can do much to threaten support among the populace of Israel’s traditional allies. It appears that the scale of internet virality for this current episode has been advantageous to Hamas. Taking a page from Sun Tzu,
“To fight and conquer in all your battles is not the supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.”
Another lesson here is that, to some extent, social media has been acting as a referee regulating the conduct of war despite power asymmetries. In some respects, the abundance of social media may have influenced Russia to limit its attack on civilian infrastructure in Ukraine. Perhaps social media is also causing the IDF to utilize some restraint and deliver humanitarian aid while it weighs additional kinetic actions in Gaza.
Warfare in the 21st century has vacillated between future war and old tricks. So far, the new millennium has shown us suicide bombers on commercial aircraft, an American blitzkrieg 2.0 in Iraq, the inherent challenges of COIN operations, little green men, UAVs, and the enduring value of trench warfare. The second decade of the 21st century made us aware of the threats presented by social media—the first “shots” fired from these evolving platforms occurred during the election influence operations of the 2014 Scottish referendum, the 2016 Brexit vote, and even the US presidential election. As for the third decade of the 21st century, it has demonstrated how social media can be harnessed by small states and nonstate actors to rally supporters to their cause, as seen with Ukraine and Hamas.
Today, the world stands at an important and dangerous crossroads in the cyber realm: any nonstate actor or state with the right social media campaign has the ability to portray a just war. The utility of social media continues to evolve in ways that were not initially forecasted in the early days of Myspace or Facebook. During the Manhattan Project, there was a point when the pioneering scientists worried that their invention would ignite the atmosphere. Although science has not done this with atomic energy, perhaps social media has ignited the ‘cognitive’ atmosphere with dangerous ideas that move as fast as the shock wave of an atomic bomb. It may take more than “might to make right” in the information age. It may also be that followers, shares, retweets, and likes “make right.”
The current chapter of the Arab-Israeli conflict has demonstrated that social media has the power to create an arsenal of support that is tremendously more cost-effective than rockets, RPGs, or anti-tank missiles. As P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking wrote in their book Likewar, “This is war by other memes.” We are at a time in history where not only “shots” are heard around the world, but social media can now amplify and echo the detonations of JDAMs, rumblings of Merkava tanks, and chants of Hamas fighters anywhere with an internet connection. Israel, like all other states, must now determine whether its blood-soaked victories on the battlefield could be transformed into Pyrrhic victories in cyberspace.
Antonio Salinas (Tony) is an Active-duty Army Officer and doctoral student in the Department of History at Georgetown University, where he focuses on climate and conflict. Tony has 25 years of military service as both an enlisted US Marine and later as an Army officer in the fields of infantry and intelligence, as well as an assistant professor of history at West Point. He has authored two books and extensively studied the weaponization of social media in his Master’s thesis on Russian political warfare against the UK.
Jitendra Bisht is a PhD scholar in History at Georgetown University, where he studies the intersection of climate history and conflict with an aim to produce policy lessons for the nature of resilience and vulnerability in modern India. He has previously worked as a policy analyst focusing on internal security and climate change in India with scholarly engagements on social media and public opinion research. His work has been featured in publications like the Energy Institute, the Observer Research Foundation, and The Diplomat, among others. He holds a Master’s degree in Conflict Analysis and Peacebuilding from Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.
The views expressed are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Main image: Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv, Israel, Oct. 13, 2023. Austin traveled to the country to meet with Israeli leaders face-to-face and underscore the unwavering support of the U.S. for the people of Israel and commitment to ensuring Israel has what it needs to defend itself. While in Israel he will also see firsthand some of the U.S. security assistance delivered to Israel.
(Chad J. McNeeley via DoD)
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