Joint Publication 3-13, Information Operations - The Global ...

Chapter VII
employed in IO as well as appropriate planning processes, procedures, tools, and the legal and
policy basis for the conduct of IO.
d. Senior military and civilian DOD leaders require an executive-level knowledge of the
information environment and the role of IO in supporting DOD missions.
3. Information Operations Training
a. Joint military training is based on joint policies and doctrine to prepare joint forces and/
or joint staffs to respond to strategic and operational requirements deemed necessary by combatant
commanders to execute their assigned missions. The basic joint IO training task is to educate
those personnel and organizations responsible for planning and conducting joint IO in the
doctrine found in this and other joint publications.
b. IO training must support the IO career force and be consistent with the joint
assignment process. Joint IO training focuses on joint planning-specific skills, methodologies
and tools, and assumes a solid foundation of Service-level IO training.
c. The Services determine applicable career training requirements for both their IO
career personnel and general military populations, based on identified joint force mission
requirements. Joint training requirements related to IO include both those recommended by
the nature of the information environment and those specific to the planning and execution of
IO.
(1) Service-wide training of military personnel should account for the nature of
the information environment and the fact that the actions of individual personnel can affect
the perceptions of foreign populations. The Services are responsible for sensitizing the entire
military population to the potential impact of their individual and collective actions on the
perceptions of foreign populations, particularly when visiting or assigned to overseas locations,
where cultural values and institutions differ substantially from the US norm. Prior to deployment
to locations outside the US, military personnel should receive cultural-specific
indoctrination. The objective of such indoctrination should be to prevent inadvertent
misperceptions of US forces’ actions and conduct by foreign populations at the deployed
location. Personnel expected to operate at length or covertly among foreign populations must
receive more extensive cultural training.
(2) Language and cultural skills are critical to IO. Language training in the past
has focused on intelligence requirements. Additionally, the requirement for cultural training is
increasing. IO requires not only that appropriate messages and themes be translated accurately,
but that joint forces have the language and cultural skills to understand how their actions and
messages, intended and unintended, are being perceived by the populations among which they
operate. Misperception and misunderstanding are complicated and reinforced when joint
forces do not have sufficient language and cultural skills to communicate effectively among
the populations where they operate. The burden of acquiring proficiency in a foreign language
and culture cannot be placed primarily on the foreign population’s ability to learn English and
VII-2
JP 3-13