New Imperialists : Ideologies of Empire

MIRRLEES: American Soft Power 213
process, and disseminate an uninterrupted flow of information while
exploiting or destroying an adversary’s ability to do the same.” 57
Information operations are thus conceived as an ideological instrument
of American foreign policy. “Informational capability,” contends
Armistead, “more than any other component of power, is truly crucial to
effective [American] foreign policy in this new era”; 58 “information is
rapidly assuming a place of primacy in the conduction of [American]
foreign policy . . . and it must be understood for what it truly is: a
weapon.” 59 Armistead believes that the sooner the U.S. state develops
information weapons to control and manipulate the flow of information
(as military intelligence, propaganda, electronic wavelengths, and
computer data streams) the more successful it will be in winning future
international struggles and achieving global information superiority.
Armistead provides a detailed overview of the U.S. government
agencies, offices, and councils that can play a role in the American
state’s offensive and defensive information operations. In addition to
recommending better intra-agency and government coordination of
information operations, Armistead outlines a number of defensive and
offensive informational operations strategies. Defensive information
operations involve intelligence gathering, counter-intelligence, and
surveillance, so that the American state can know, monitor, and debilitate
the actions and informational strategies of its adversaries. 60 Offensive
information operations are more complicated, and involve five strategies.
Armistead recommends a computer network attack (C.N.A.) as the
first offensive information strategy. C.N.A. is “any information strategy
that disrupts, denies, degrades, or destroys information that is resident in
the computer networks of an adversary, or the computers and networks
themselves.” 61 After addressing how “space plays an integral role in all
aspects of [American] military operations,” 62 Armistead discusses the
second strategy of offensive information operations: the deepened militarization
of space by the U.S. state and the continued commodification
of space by U.S.-based transnational media, surveillance, and technology
corporations. The goal of this project is to “develop a better strategy for
handling the availability of space technology overseas while maintaining
the nation’s domination in space.” 63 The third offensive information
strategy proposed by Armistead is electronic warfare, or, the U.S. state’s
direction or use of electromagnetic energy to control or attack the
electromagnetic field of an adversarial entity. 64