One does not have to pry open the Cold War history books to find evidence that the instruments of national power have been leaning in the information-centric direction for decades. In 1999, after witnessing the projection of U.S. Military power during the First Gulf War, two Chinese Army officers published a lengthy and widely read thesis entitled Unrestricted Warfare.

The authors recognized the U.S. Military was uncontested in the existing domains of war (air, land, and sea). They further concluded that if China were to remain competitive, it must target and destabilize the U.S. more comprehensively through non-military ways and means, including forms of economic, psychological, cyberspace, and information warfare. Proof that these recommendations were heeded by the People’s Republic of China is evident in the most recent White House report on the matter.

That same year (1999), after its first bloody information war with Chechnya, the Russian Security Council drafted sweeping legislation to strengthen the federation’s offensive and defensive capabilities in the information and cyberspace domains. Vladimir Putin approved these measures the following year. Leigh Armistead, former instructor in information warfare at the Joint Forces Staff College, surmised that the language in this document was, among other things, designed to counter “the use of information for manipulating the mass consciousness of society.”[7]

While much of the western world relished the Cold War’s end and later focused on combating the support networks of globalized insurgencies based in the Middle East, competitors saw vulnerabilities. Russia and China used the interwar period between the First Gulf War and the Global War on Terrorism as an opportunity to sharpen their competitive edge in emerging domains of warfare, rather than blunting it as western nations are prone to do between wars.

U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis is wise to have recognized these challenges in the 2018 National Defense Strategy, which offers a fitting subtitle: “Sharpening the American Military’s Competitive Edge.” In its pages, Secretary Mattis maintains that, if left unaddressed, the use of information warfare by America’s adversaries “will challenge our ability to deter aggression.”

Western leaders now face the challenge of responding to these threats without implementing counterproductive policies that restrict freedom of speech and cripple public access to information. Unfortunately, this seems to be the preferred response.

Don’t Play the Game

It is important to note that government overreach is an intended reaction to disinformation campaigns, much as it was for the socialist revolutionaries in Tsarist Russia who sought to cultivate support for their movement by provoking the royal family’s hand, or the Soviet intelligence officers who demonized 20th century officials in the Middle East who parlayed with the west.[8] Inciting authoritarian policies that vindicate existing anti-government narratives has been the hallmark of disinformation campaigns for centuries.

In response to the growing prevalence of false and misleading news, Germany and France have already taken bites of this low-hanging fruit by proposing laws of questionable compatibility with traditional liberal values. One such proposal would allow French political candidates to solicit courts to order “the immediate halt to the publication of information deemed to be false in the three months leading up to an election.” French President Emmanuel Macron supports the motion.

Further East, Germany has already enacted legislation that punishes social media giants for failing to remove false information from their platforms. Punishments can run to the tune of €50 million, and have already led to a deluge of erroneous administrator blocks as tech companies scramble to avoid costly litigation. The fact that this law lumps spreading false information into the same category as supporting terrorism should give readers pause. Proposed legislation in the United States that seeks to criminalize the spreading of false information knowingly is now leaning in the same direction.

Rather than pursuing initiatives that use denial of access to control the public’s receipt of information, policymakers should instead aim to improve upon their internal messaging without subsidizing private sector journalism. One resource already available to western decision makers is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) Strategic Communications (STRATCOM) Center of Excellence (COE) in the Baltic city of Riga, Latvia.