TAMPA — Commanders should expect any conflict in the information age to expand far beyond the geography where missiles are flying or troops are warring, and in that environment, controlling information may become as consequential as controlling physical terrain, US Strategic Command’s top officer said Tuesday.
While regional or local wars are still fought over territory, commanders shouldn’t expect the wars to stay confined to the battlefield, Adm. Richard Correll told an audience here at the Defense Intelligence Agency’s DoDIIS conference.
“There is no such thing as a regional conflict anymore,” Correll said. “Every conflict is global in the information domain.”
That will have implications for decision-makers, Correll added. Modern deterrence, for instance, will increasingly depend on understanding events occurring far beyond the physical boundaries of any individual theater because a war may start in one spot, but its cyber operations, narratives, intelligence campaigns and political effects can circle the globe almost immediately.
The objective, Correll said, is to “constrain political decision space and shape strategic outcomes,” adding that a key goal is constraining an opponent’s political options and shaping strategic outcomes.
Correll didn’t mention the ongoing Iran War during his comments, but he pointed to Ukraine as an example of conflicts where the visible battlefield may contain 20th Century weaponry like tanks, artillery and trenches. But a hidden layer of combat is being waged simultaneously involving the electromagnetic spectrum, as forces jam signals, guide munitions, control drones and fight to control the narrative.
The problem of globalized wars in the information age is only amplified by the novel challenges being brought to bear by artificial intelligence, Correll said, as nation-states experiment with deepfakes and AI-augmented influence campaigns intended not simply to persuade populations, but to affect government decision-making.
“Frontier AI capabilities can be used by potential adversaries to enhance cyber operations, generate convincing disinformation at scale, or support targeting in ways that compress decision timelines and increase escalation risks,” Correll said. “The question is not whether AI will be present in the future conflict. It already is.”
That makes information itself part of the battlespace, with consequences for intelligence collection, command and control, and ultimately deterrence. It also creates a second challenge: ensuring that commanders and national leaders can trust the information feeding their own decisions while adversaries are simultaneously trying to distort it.
Modern military operations also connect domains in newfangled ways.
Cyber operations can support attacks against space systems. Space-based communications and sensors enable cyber and kinetic operations. And both depend heavily on access to the electromagnetic spectrum and global information infrastructure, so the US must be prepared to stymie adversaries by guarding their networks, operating through jamming and interference, and preserving the integrity of data.
“No potential adversary wants to give us the luxury of operating in a clean, uncontested environment,” Correll said. “They will attempt to fracture the joint force view of the battle space, delay or distort our decision-making, and isolate elements of the joint force from one another and from our allies.”