![\"77th](\"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/77th-Brigade.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nA\u00a0barbed-wire fence stretched off far to either side. A Union flag twisted in a gust of wind, and soldiers strode in and out of a squat guard\u2019s hut in the middle of the road. Through the hut, and under a row of floodlights, I walked towards a long line of drab, low-rise brick buildings. It was the summer of 2017, and on this military base nestled among the hills of Berkshire, I was visiting a part of the British Army unlike any other. They call it the 77th<\/sup> Brigade. They are the troops fighting Britain\u2019s information wars.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cIf everybody is thinking alike then somebody isn\u2019t thinking,\u201d was written in foot-high letters across a whiteboard in one of the main atriums of the base. Over to one side, there was a suite full of large, electronic sketch pads and multi-screened desktops loaded with digital editing software. The men and women of the 77th<\/sup> knew how to set up cameras, record sound, edit videos. Plucked from across the military, they were proficient in graphic design, social media advertising, and data analytics. Some may have taken the army\u2019s course in\u00a0Defence Media Operations<\/a><\/strong><\/span>, and almost\u00a0half<\/a>\u00a0were reservists from civvy street, with full time jobs in marketing or consumer research.<\/span><\/p>\n From office to office, I found a different part of the Brigade busy at work. One room was focussed on understanding audiences: the makeup, demographics and habits of the people they wanted to reach. Another was more analytical, focussing on creating \u201cattitude and sentiment awareness\u201d from large sets of social media data. Another was full of officers producing video and audio content. Elsewhere, teams of intelligence specialists were closely analysing how messages were being received and discussing how to make them more resonant.<\/span><\/p>\n Explaining their work, the soldiers used phrases I had heard countless times from digital marketers: \u201ckey influencers”, \u201creach”, \u201ctraction”. You normally hear such words at viral advertising studios and digital research labs. But the skinny jeans and wax moustaches were here replaced by the crisply ironed shirts and light patterned camouflage of the British Army. Their surroundings were equally incongruous \u2013 the 77th<\/sup>\u2019s headquarters were a mix of linoleum flooring, long corridors and swinging fire doors. More Grange Hill than Menlo Park. Next to a digital design studio, soldiers were having a tea break, a packet of digestives lying open on top of a green metallic ammo box. Another sign on the wall declared, \u201cBehavioural change is our USP [unique selling point]\u201d. What on Earth was happening?<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cIf you track where UK manpower is deployed, you can take a good guess at where this kind of \u2018influence\u2019 activity happens,\u201d an information warfare officer (not affiliated with the 77th<\/sup>) told me later, under condition of anonymity. \u201cA document will come from the Ministry of Defence that will have broad guidance and themes to follow.\u201d He explains that each military campaign now also has \u2013 or rather is \u2013 a marketing campaign too.<\/span><\/p>\n Ever since Nato troops were deployed to the Baltics in 2017, Russian propaganda has been deployed too, alleging that Nato soldiers there are rapists, looters, little different from a hostile occupation. One of the goals of Nato information warfare was to counter this kind of threat: sharply rebutting damaging rumours, and producing videos of Nato troops happily working with Baltic hosts.<\/span><\/p>\n Information campaigns such as these are \u201cwhite\u201d: openly, avowedly the voice of the British military. But to narrower audiences, in conflict situations, and when it was understood to be proportionate and necessary to do so, messaging campaigns could become, the officer said, \u201cgrey\u201d and \u201cblack\u201d too. \u201cCounter-piracy, counter-insurgencies and counter-terrorism,\u201d he explained. There, the messaging doesn’t have to look like it came from the military and doesn’t have to necessarily tell the truth.<\/span><\/p>\n I saw no evidence that the 77th<\/sup> do these kinds of operations themselves, but this more aggressive use of information is nothing new. GCHQ, for instance, also has a unit dedicated to fighting wars with information. It is called the \u201cJoint Threat Research Intelligence Group\u201d \u2013 or JTRIG \u2013 an utterly unrevealing name, as it is common in the world of intelligence. Almost all we know about it comes from a series of slides\u00a0leaked<\/a><\/strong><\/span>\u00a0by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013. Those documents give us a glimpse of what these kinds of covert information campaigns could look like.<\/span><\/p>\n According to the slides, JTRIG was in the business of\u00a0discrediting companies<\/a><\/strong><\/span>, by passing \u201cconfidential information to the press through blogs etc.\u201d, and by posting negative information on internet forums. They could change someone\u2019s social media photos (\u201ccan take \u2018paranoia\u2019 to a whole new level\u201d, a slide read.) They could use masquerade-type techniques \u2013 that is: placing \u201csecret\u201d information on a compromised computer. They could bombard someone\u2019s phone with text messages or calls.<\/span><\/p>\n JTRIG also\u00a0boasted<\/a><\/strong><\/span>\u00a0an arsenal of 200 info-weapons, ranging from in-development to fully operational. A tool dubbed \u201cBadger\u201d allowed the mass delivery of email. Another, called \u201cBurlesque\u201d, spoofed SMS messages. \u201cClean Sweep\u201d would impersonate Facebook wall posts for individuals or entire countries. \u201cGateway\u201d gave the ability to \u201cartificially increase traffic to a website\u201d. \u201cUnderpass\u201d was a way to change the outcome of online polls.<\/span><\/p>\n They had operational targets across the globe: Iran, Africa, North Korea, Russia and the UK. Sometimes the operations focused on specific individuals and groups, sometimes the wider regimes or even general populations.\u00a0Operation Quito<\/a><\/strong><\/span>\u00a0was a campaign, running some time after 2009, to prevent Argentina from taking over the Falkland Islands. A slide explained \u201cthis will hopefully lead to a long-running, large-scale, pioneering effects operation\u201d. Running from March 2011, another operation aimed for regime change in Zimbabwe by discrediting the Zanu PF party.<\/span><\/p>\n Walking through the headquarters of the 77th<\/sup>, the strange new reality of warfare was on display. We\u2019ve all heard a lot about \u201ccyberwarfare\u201d \u2013 about how states could attack their enemies through computer networks, damaging their infrastructure or stealing their secrets. But that wasn\u2019t what was going on here. Emerging here in the 77th<\/sup> Brigade was a warfare of storyboards and narratives, videos and social media. An engagement now doesn\u2019t just happen on the battlefield, but also in the media and online. A victory is won as much in the eyes of the watching public as between opposing armies on the battlefield. Warfare in the information age is a warfare over information itself.<\/span><\/p>\n Propaganda published on Facebook by Russian PR firms in an attempt to affect the 2016 US presidential election (allegedly).<\/p><\/div>\n Over a decade ago, and a world away from the 77th<\/sup> Brigade, there were people who already knew that the internet was a potent new tool of influence. They didn\u2019t call what they did \u201cinformation warfare\u201d, media operations, influence activities, online action, or any of the military vernacular that it would become. Members of the simmering online subcultures that clustered around hacker forums, in IRCs, and on imageboards like 4chan, they might have called it \u201cattention hacking\u201d. Or simply lulz.<\/span><\/p>\n In 2008, Oprah Winfrey warned her millions of viewers that a known paedophile network \u201chas over 9,000 penises and they\u2019re all raping children.\u201d That was a 4chan Dragon Ball-themed in-joke someone had posted on the show\u2019s messageboard. One year later, Time magazine ran an online poll for its readers to vote on the world\u2019s 100 most influential people, and 4chan used scripts to rig the vote so that its founder \u2013 then-21-year-old Christopher Poole, commonly known as \u201cmoot\u201d \u2013 came first. They built bots and \u201csockpuppets\u201d \u2013 fake social media accounts to make topics trend and appear more popular than they were \u2013 and swarmed together to overwhelm their targets. They started to reach through computers to change what people saw, and perhaps even what people thought. They celebrated each of their victories with a deluge of memes.<\/span><\/p>\n The lulz were quickly seized upon by others for the money. Throughout the 2000s, small PR firms, political communications consultancies, and darknet markets all began to peddle the tactics and techniques pioneered on 4chan. \u201cDigital media-savvy merchants are weaponising their knowledge of commercial social media manipulation services,\u201d a cybersecurity researcher who tracks this kind of illicit commercial activity tells me on condition of anonymity.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s like an assembly line,\u201d he continues. \u201cThey prepare the campaign, penetrate the target audience, maintain the operation, and then they strategically disengage. It is only going to get bigger.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n A range of websites started selling fake accounts, described, categorised and priced almost like wine: from cheap plonk all the way to seasoned vintages. The \u201cHUGE MEGA BOT PACK\u201d, available for just $3 on the darknet, allowed you to build your own bot army across hundreds of social media platforms. There were services for manipulating search engine results. You could buy Wikipedia edits. You could rent fake IP addresses to make it look like your accounts came from all over the world. And at the top of the market were \u201clegend farms\u201d, firms running tens of thousands of unique identities, each one with multiple accounts on social media, a unique IP address, its own internet address, even its own personality, interests and writing style. The lulz had transmogrified into a business model.<\/span><\/p>\n Inside the base of the 77th<\/sup>, everything was in motion. Flooring was being laid, work units installed; desks \u2013 empty of possessions \u2013 formed neat lines in offices still covered in plastic, tape and sawdust. The unit was formed in a hurry in 2015 from various older parts of the British Army \u2013 a Media Operations Group, a Military Stabilisation Support Group, a Psychological Operations Group. It has been rapidly expanding ever since.<\/span><\/p>\n In 2014, a year before the 77th<\/sup> was established, a memo entitled \u201cWarfare in the Information Age\u201d flashed across the British military. \u201cWe are now in the foothills of the Information Age\u201d the memo announced. It argued that the British Army needed to fight a new kind of war, one that \u201cwill have information at its core\u201d. The Army needed to be out on social media, on the internet, and in the press, engaged, as the memo put it, \u201cin the reciprocal, real-time business of being first with the truth, countering the narratives of others, and if necessary manipulating the opinion of thousands concurrently in support of combat operations.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Then the business of lulz turned into geopolitics. Around the world, militaries had come to exactly the same realisation as the British, and often more quickly. \u201cThere is an increased reliance on, and desire for, information,\u201d Nato\u2019s Allied Joint Doctrine for Information Operations,\u00a0published<\/a><\/strong><\/span>\u00a0in 2009, began. And it reached the same conclusion as the British military memo: wars needed to have an \u201cincreased attention on Info Ops\u201d. Simply put, information operations should be used to target an enemy\u2019s will. \u201cFor example, by questioning the legitimacy of leadership and cause, information activities may undermine their moral power base, separating leadership from supporters, political, military and public, thus weakening their desire to continue and affecting their actions,\u201d the document explains.<\/span><\/p>\n Russia, too, was in on the act. The Arab Spring, the revolutions in several post-Soviet states, Nato\u2019s enlargement \u2013 each of those had chipped away at the crumbling edifice of Russian power. Russia had a large conventional army but that seemed to matter less than in the past. The Chief of the Russian General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, began to rethink what a military needed to do. Warfare, he argued in an article for\u00a0Voyenno-Promyshlennyy Kurier\u00a0(The Military Industry Journal), was now \u201chybrid\u201d \u2013 blurring the lines between war and peace, civilian and military, state and non-state. And there was another blurring too: between force and ideas. \u201cMoral-psychological-cognitive-informational struggle\u201d, as Gerasimov put it, was now central to how conflicts should be fought.<\/span><\/p>\n We now know what Russian information warfare looks like. Moscow has built an apparatus that stretches from mainstream media to the backwaters of the blogosphere, from the President of the Russian Federation to the humble bot. Just like the early attention hackers, their techniques are a mixture of the very visible and very secret \u2013 but at a vastly greater scale.<\/span><\/p>\n Far less visible to Western eyes, however, were the outbreak of other theatres of information warfare outside of the English language. Gerasimov was right: each was a case of blurred boundaries. It was information warfare, but not always just carried out by militaries. It came from the state, but sometimes included plenty of non-state actors too. Primarily, it was done by autocracies, and was often directed internally, at the country\u2019s own inhabitants.<\/span><\/p>\n A Harvard\u00a0paper<\/a><\/strong><\/span>\u00a0published in 2017 estimated that the Chinese government employs two million people to write 448 million social media posts a year. Their primary purpose is to keep online discussion away from sensitive political topics. Marc Owen Jones, a researcher at Exeter University\u2019s Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies,\u00a0exposed<\/a><\/strong><\/span>\u00a0thousands of fake Twitter accounts in Saudi Arabia, \u201clionising the Saudi government or Saudi foreign policy\u201d. In Bahrain,\u00a0evidence<\/a><\/strong><\/span>\u00a0emerged of spam-like operations, aiming to stop dissidents finding each other or debating politically dangerous topics online. In Mexico, an estimated 75,000 automated accounts are known locally as Pe\u00f1abots, after President Enrique Pe\u00f1a Nieto, flooding protest hashtags with irrelevant, annoying noise burying any useful information.<\/span><\/p>\n Disinformation and deception have been a part of warfare for thousands of years, but across the world, something new was starting to happen. Information has long been used to support combat operations, but now combat was seen to taking place primarily, sometimes exclusively, through it. From being a tool of warfare, each military began to realise that the struggle with, over and through information was what war itself actually was about. And it wasn\u2019t confined to Russia, China or anyone else. A global informational struggle has broken out. Dozens of countries are already doing it. And these are just the campaigns that we know about.<\/span><\/p>\n On their shoulders, the soldiers of the 77th<\/sup> Brigade wear a small, round patch of blue encircling a snarling golden creature that looks like a lion. Called an A Chinthe, it\u2019s a mythical Burmese beast first worn by the the Chindits, a British and Indian guerrilla force created during the Second World War to protect Burma against the advancing Japanese Army. An army of irregulars, the Chindits infiltrated deep behind enemy lines in unpredictable sorties, destroying supply depots and severing transport links, aiming to spread confusion as much as destruction.<\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s no accident that the 77th<\/sup> wear the Chinthe on their shoulder. Like the Chindits, they are a new kind of force. An unorthodox one, but in the eyes of the British Army also a necessary innovation; simply reflecting the world in which we all now live and the new kind of warfare that happens within it.<\/span><\/p>\n This new warfare poses a problem that neither the 77th<\/sup> Brigade, the military, or any democratic state has come close to answering yet. It is easy to work out how to deceive foreign publics, but far, far harder to know how to protect our own. Whether it is Russia\u2019s involvement in the US elections, over Brexit, during the novichok poisoning or the dozens of other instances that we already know about, the cases are piling up. In information warfare, offence beats defence almost by design. It\u2019s far easier to put out lies than convince everyone that they\u2019re lies. Disinformation is cheap; debunking it is expensive and difficult.<\/span><\/p>\n Even worse, this kind of warfare benefits authoritarian states more than liberal democratic ones. For states and militaries, manipulating the internet is trivially cheap and easy to do. The limiting factor isn\u2019t technical, it\u2019s legal. And whatever the overreaches of Western intelligence, they still do operate in legal environments that tend to more greatly constrain where, and how widely, information warfare can be deployed. China and Russia have no such legal hindrances.<\/span><\/p>\n Equipping us all with the skills to protect ourselves from information warfare is, perhaps, the only true solution to the problem. But it takes time. And what could be taught would never keep up with what can be done. Technological possibility, as things stand, easily outpaces public understanding.<\/span><\/p>\n The Chinthe was often built at the entrances of pagodas, temples and other sacred sites to guard them from the menaces and dangers lurking outside. Today, that sacred site is the internet itself. From the lulz, to spam, to information warfare, the threats against it have become far better funded and more potent. The age of information war is just getting started.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/a>