Suffering from ED?

Oh, darn, I couldn’t type the title with a straight face…

Most of us use information to inform, in order to get a decision, to alter a behavior, to confuse, or even amuse someone.  Politicians are no different.   If one reads a lot of news sources, as I do, you’ll start to see trends.  I can hand a kid on the corner a dollar bill and before I know it, one party will say ‘he only gave him a dollar!  Cheapskate!’  The other side will sure say ‘he gave him money, enabling his family to eat for a year!’  This is politics as normal for 2012.  False, misleading and, frankly, unbelievable.

I belong to a senior group of information operations professionals. It’s a group of about 95 people, originally constituted under the original definition of IO, when it had five components.  We have members from the military information support operations community, from electronic warfare, military deception experts, an operations security expert or two and then a whole, lotta cyber folks.  Many of these folks have PhDs.  So of course they constantly question things and cause me to pull out my hair, agonizing about some answer.

The other day someone asked a question of me that caused me to think two or three leaps ahead in my logic.  His question lead me to believe he was inferring that cyber should not belong to IO.  Honestly, I can’t imagine IO without cyber, it will be the medium through which most of us operate in peace, crisis and war. So I responded with the new definition of IO:

The integrated employment, during military operations, of information-related capabilities in concert with other lines of operation to influence, disrupt, corrupt or usurp the decision-making of adversaries and potential adversaries while protecting our own.

In some ways political campaigns are exactly the same as IO.  Being the first with a statement about any situation seems to be par for the course, then cherry picking and sharp shooting holes in that argument is the counter.  If you can issue a statement that alters your opponents’ perspective, just before he or she is about to issue a press release, you might well disrupt or corrupt the basis of their argument.  If you remove a group of loyal supports from your opponent, it weakens their position.

Frankly, I believe that today’s politics is wallowing in the worst aspects of the information environment…  giving me Electoral Dysfunction.

ps. That phrase just leads to just so many possible jokes.  The application of that phrase to so many situations is almost endless.

While politically correct it really does skirt the edge of acceptability. That means I just had to use it in my blog…