Two days ago I discussed, in semi-satirical mode, an article by David Miller about information control as a part of contemporary US and UK military strategy. The emphasis of Miller’s piece was on ‘information dominance’ with respect to the media:
In the past, propaganda involved managing the media. Information dominance, by contrast, sees little distinction between command and control systems, propaganda and journalism. They are all types of “weaponized information” to be deployed. As strategic expert Colonel Kenneth Allard noted, the 2003 attack on Iraq “will be remembered as a conflict in which information fully took its place as a weapon of war”.
I expressed some scepticism about Miller’s general line, but didn’t go any further than that. But a reader, who did go further, has sent me this link – to the piece by Kenneth Allard from which comes his statement, ‘Gulf War II will be remembered as a conflict in which information fully took its place as a weapon of war’. Any reader of Miller will assume that he is claiming Allard’s authority for his own argument. But if you follow the link, what you will find is that Allard was talking about battlefield tactics and not about dominance of the media at all. He was talking of ‘unmanned aerial vehicles loiter[ing] over the battlefield for hours’; ‘aerial surveillance platforms’; ‘precise navigation’; ‘information-sharing quite literally from the foxhole to the Pentagon’.
David Miller is the editor of Tell Me Lies: Propaganda and Media Distortion in the Attack on Iraq.