The Risks of Virtual Societal Warfare

The last two years has seen an explosion of interest in issues of disinformation, propaganda, information manipulation and fakery, "fake news," "truth decay" and related trends. As significant as these developments have been, they may only represent the beginning of what an aggressive nation can accomplish with techniques and technologies designed to disrupt and shape the information environment of a target country. This line of research contends that, as significant as social manipulation efforts have already been, the United States and other democracies have only glimpsed the tip of the iceberg of what these approaches may someday be able to achieve. The intersection of multiple emerging technologies, from artificial intelligence to virtual reality and personalized messaging, is creating the potential for aggressors to change peoples' fundamental social reality. More broadly, advanced societies are becoming perilously dependent on networks of information and data gathering, exchange, communication, analysis and decision making. As much as it feels to citizens of advanced economies that we already live in an information society, we have in fact seen only the tip of the iceberg of this transformation. And that transition will open unprecedented opportunities for hostile rivals—state or non-state—to reach into those societies and cause disruption, delay, inefficiency, and active harm. It will open the door to a form of virtual societal aggression that will make homelands more persistently vulnerable than they have been for generations. Such virtual aggression will force a rethinking of the character of national security and steps taken to protect it.

Michael Mazarr is a Senior Political Scientist at the RAND Corporation. Prior to coming to RAND, he served as Professor of National Security Strategy and Associate Dean at the U.S. National War College in Washington, D.C. He has served as special assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, president and CEO of the Henry L. Stimson Center, senior vice president for strategic planning at the Electronic Industries Alliance, legislative assistant in the U.S. House of Representatives, and senior fellow and editor of The Washington Quarterly at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He holds AB and MA degrees from Georgetown University and a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland School of Public Affairs.