Trust is central to the Army’s legitimacy,[i] but trust is not easy to keep in the modern world. Because of the growth in global communications foreign actors can directly spread disinformation to erode trust between citizens, governments, and institutions.[ii] These campaigns are likely to intensify during periods of conflict, offering Australia’s adversaries a low-cost, asymmetric way to undermine Australians’ trust in Army.[iii]

The fundamental assertion of this post is that Australia’s domestic information environment is almost certain to become a contested domain during future conflicts, requiring the Army to have more proactive and open communication with Australia. While previous authors have focused on winning the ‘dominant narrative’ within the area of operations,[iv] the growing connectivity of the globe – especially social media – means the impact of operations on Australia’s information environment must be considered.[v] While Army should not lead Australia’s response to domestic disinformation, it has the leading role in informing Australia about the realities of land combat and, by doing so, inoculate Australians to the realities of modern land operations.

The Risk

How an individual understands world events is increasingly being determined by their preferred social media platform. 97% of Australians use social media, while half of them rely on social media as their primary source of news.[vi] While the increasing access to information was at first hailed as democratising the truth, this has not eventuated.[vii] Now communication is ‘post-truth,’ with so many online competing narratives that individuals can select their preferred truth.[viii] This behaviour is further reinforced by social media algorithms that present users with content that reinforces their pre-existing beliefs.[ix] Malicious actors hijack these inherent features of social media to deliver a ‘firehose of falsehoods.’[x] One example is the Chinese ‘Spamouflage’ network which employed 7,700 accounts to spread anti-US narratives across multiple platforms.[xi] This is a ‘dream scenario for a propagandist’ who uses disinformation to craft a truth utterly separate from reality.[xii]

While disinformation might not lead to strategic outcomes, it shifts perceptions of real-world events to a favourable narrative. Both Russia and China have acknowledged the use of covert media manipulation to advance strategic aims,[xiii] including use of ‘“electronic armies”, “troll farms”, or “web brigades” to spew disinformation.’[xiv] This situation will likely worsen as Artificial Intelligence further enhances these campaigns, especially as digitally manipulated media becomes easier to produce but harder to authenticate.[xv]

The Impact

The Army is a national and well-respected institution with a special significance in Australian culture.[xvi] However, as raised by Peter Barclay, Australian reflections on war primarily focus on the conduct of soldiers, and rarely on why the soldiers went to war.[xvii] So, while the members of the Army are trusted by society, this trust is not necessarily synonymous with a national will to apply land power in future conflicts. This is not unique to Australia, world-wide modern governments have resisted putting ‘boots on the ground,’[xviii] preferring to use technologies such as airpower that ‘sanitise war: to make political violence remote, risk-free, quick and clean.’[xix] So, while trust in the Army might remain high, as competition moves towards conflict, it would be hubris to think there were no vulnerabilities that disinformation actors might exploit.

The exact content of a disinformation operation is tailored to the context of the conflict and culture of the target audience, making it challenging to provide potential impacts.[xx] However, two factors will enhance the effects of future disinformation operations.

Firstly, the Army is an expeditionary force. Henry Reynolds simplifies this as, ‘Australia goes to war; war does not come to Australia.’[xxi] This remains valid, and the National Defence Strategy requires the Army to project forward into the Indo-Pacific.[xxii] While the strategic rationale for this posture is apparent to military practitioners, within broader society, these have already been labelled ‘foreign wars’ and ‘unnecessary wars.’[xxiii] Disinformation may recast Australia as an ‘instigator of conflict’ or a nation willing to ‘assert its power over unsuspecting and aggrieved Indo-Pacific nations.’[xxiv] This disinformation does not even prevent a deployment; it may prove enough to simply delay Australia’s willingness to apply land power at the required scale until open hostilities occur – undermining the concept of deterrence.[xxv]

Next is simply the brutality of modern conflict. As exposed during the Ukraine conflict, war remains a violent clash of national wills, already occurring in a highly ambiguous information environment. Disinformation might amplify the impact of isolated tactical defeats typical in campaigns to feel like strategic losses, giving rise to a feeling of futility. At a more visceral level, displaying burned-out Australian vehicles and bodies of Australian soldiers through social media is a real and confronting possibility in modern conflict.[xxvi] Disinformation actors amplify these losses' impact to sap support for the conflict and disincentivise individuals from joining the military,[xxvii] potentially even using Australia’s trust in the Army to question why Australian soldiers' lives are being “wasted” overseas. These realities of modern land combat are confronting for a nation where conflict has not been a feature of most Australians’ lives for generations,[xxviii] but we cannot let disinformation turn these harsh realities into despair and pessimism.

None of this is new. Propaganda has influenced Australians in conflict since WW1.[xxix] Still, in previous conflicts, the debate was between Australians with differing views on the conflict; now, the global connectivity enabled by technology allows foreign actors to interfere in this process. This is absurd at its core – the enemy should not have a say in how Australians fight – but because these disinformation operations can be waged through networks of false identities that mimic authentic debate, it is far more challenging for Australians to understand when, and often why, they are being manipulated.

The Response

In preparing then to counter disinformation, Army’s communication policies must adapt to the pace and volume of disinformation likely to confront Australia during conflict. While Army is not the leader in countering disinformation within Australia, as the institution responsible for applying land power, it has a role in educating and informing about the realities of the conflict, as part of Defence’s communication strategy.

This is most prominent in Army’s role in debunking and pre-bunking. Debunking is the direct response to disinformation, such as countering claims of human rights violations, while pre-bunking is proactive campaigns against disinformation.[xxx] Currently, this is a challenge of Defence, which favours a consistent strategic narrative and, with it, the necessity for media to be coordinated and centrally authorised. This is likely unwieldy during a conflict because, as Michael Kelley, writing for the US Army War College, puts it: ‘in the age of 24-hour news cycles and memes that seize attention and fade quickly, velocity matters.’[xxxi] Centralised communication makes sense pre-conflict, but in conflict it hands the initiative to disinformation agents who can create disinformation faster than it can be debunked.

This decentralisation is occurring in Ukraine. While Ukraine entered the conflict with a ‘One Voice’ policy to respond to Russian propaganda, it has now adopted a decentralised ‘beehive’ approach where public comment is authorised at far lower levels of authority – often down to the individual unit level.[xxxii] This accepts that responding to disinformation coordination is less critical than a rapid response, even if not all messages align perfectly with the strategic narrative.[xxxiii]

While there is a need for velocity, information quality remains important. While pre-conflict, there is a need for operational security, within conflict, the ability of the enemy to release operations details – recast in a favourable light – diminishes the advantage gained by classification. Army has an inherent advantage over disinformation because it can broadcast the reality of the situation. The value of selective declassification to convey the realities of conflict is already being demonstrated, such as releasing footage of Russian “intercepts” of US drones to show Russia was actually attempting to damage them.[xxxiv]

When these releases occur at the tactical level it reminds audiences of the human face of war. Ukrainian headcam footage of the front has been hailed as ‘reminding [citizens] of the war, its costs, and Ukraine’s tactical victories every time they scroll through Twitter or TikTok.’[xxxv] While Defence is responsible for how the conflict is communicated to Australians, and declassification is not without risk, there is a need for Army to convey the realities of land combat to Australians, and demonstrate the importance of the land force in achieving Australia’s national aims.

The Future

This post has advanced the idea that Army should consider the domestic information domain as something that will be contested during conflict. While this has always been true to some extent, the increased connectivity of the world, coupled with the ability to maliciously use social media, has meant the barriers to influencing the domestic information environment have been eliminated. In modern conflict, it is almost certain that Australians’ views on the Army’s operations will be manipulated somewhat by foreign agents, irrespective of their pre-conflict trust in the Army. While Army should not lead Australia’s response to domestic disinformation, it has the leading role in inoculating Australians to the realities of modern land operations.

End Notes