New Imperialists : Ideologies of Empire

212 The New Imperialists
instruction manual that he recently edited entitled Information Operations:
The Hard Reality of Soft Power.
Armistead’s text was originally conceived to educate the U.S. empire’s
next generation of military propagandists. 50 It was also conceived to
coordinate the conduct of the short-lived Office of Strategic Influence, a
Pentagon agency initially intended to produce and globally disseminate
black propaganda (official lies) to counter critical accounts of America
in foreign news organizations. Although widespread public criticism
resulted in the Office of Strategic Influence’s official dismantling (or
perhaps, its renaming as another office that has yet to be disclosed to the
public), which invalidated Information Operations’ raison d’être, 51 this
text describes how the U.S. military conceptualizes and rationalizes
American soft power, the military communication agencies that are
responsible for waging soft power warfare against non-American populations,
and the strategies and tactics of American soft power warfare in
the terror-war context.
Armistead defines soft power as “the ability of A to get B to do
something B would not otherwise do.” 52 For Armistead, soft power (or
strategic information operations) is the most effective instrument of
international politics. 53 The emergence of the global information infrastructure,
time-and-space compressive communications technology, and
digitized media has made information operations a weapon in the
arsenal of the U.S. state.
The origin of the concept of information operations resides in two
recently declassified U.S. military documents. Joint Vision 2010 54 published
in 1996, and Joint Vision 2020, 55 published in 2000, describe
information operations as the total actions employed by the U.S. state to
affect an adversary’s information and information systems while
defending and enhancing its own information and information systems.
The stated goal of information operations is to achieve full spectrum
dominance over the deterritorialized and territorial battle-space of the
global information infrastructure. Armistead agrees: “the global information
environment has become a battle-space in which the technology
of the information age . . . is used to deliver critical and influential
content in order to shape perceptions, influence opinions, and control
behaviour.” 56 The purpose and ideal effect of the U.S. control of global
perceptions, opinions, and behaviour is to win global “information
superiority,” which is defined as the U.S. state’s ability to “collect, shape,