Inside the information war

There are so many things we don’t know about the current situation in Ukraine, I hesitate to say there is one thing I can tell you with absolute certainty, but here it is:  Pentagon press secretary John Kirby goes to a lot of meetings every day -- I mean multiple, copious, numerous, multitudinous meetings.  When you see his grim visage on your television screens with that oval crest reading “The Pentagon” behind him, you can count on the fact that he is the single most briefed individual in that building across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. where no less than 25,000 toil.

What comes out of his mouth every day is information warfare.  The words he speaks can be as effective as bullets fired on a battlefield or bombs dropped in an airstrike.  That’s why the man attends such a great number of meetings – because so much depends on the decisions made nearly every day about what he will tell the press. 

Of course, some of what he says is general information about Department of Defense policy – budgets and expenditures and COVID statistics and the like.  Yesterday, Kirby went on at some length about the number of active duty and reserve military medical personnel who have mobilized in support of civilian hospitals around the country since the onset of the COVID outbreak, and he announced that more than 1,000 additional service members had been activated and deployed to support 25 hospitals in 14 states just since January.

But that wasn’t Kirby’s emphasis on Tuesday.  What he told the press reflected how cautiously the Pentagon regards statements made by Russian negotiators and battlefield commanders when they talk about their intentions in Ukraine.  Yesterday, Kirby shot down the idea that Russian forces are “pulling back” from their positions around the capital city of Kyiv and instead called their moves “repositioning.”  By the time of the press conference, reports had come out of Ukraine that some Russian forces around Kyiv had begun to move north towards Belarus and there was a theory that they might be going there to rest and resupply and be reinforced so they could return and continue the fight for Kyiv.  Listen to how Kirby responded to a question along these lines: 

“I would say at this early stage, we see the movement more northward.  But again, it's too early to tell, Bob, what the destination is, what the final purpose is.  And you know where exactly these troops are going to go long-term.  We believe, we assess, that it is likely more repositioning to be used elsewhere in Ukraine.”

There are several points to be made about this statement by Kirby as well as others during the press conference.  Notice his use of the term, “we see.”  Kirby says “we see” repeatedly as he answers questions about Ukraine.  In this use of language, I believe he is telling the literal truth.  The Pentagon has access to gigantic piles of information gleaned from satellite surveillance and other forms of electronic information gathering.  The NSA and the CIA and the DIA are “seeing” every movement of Russian troops and tanks on the ground.  And you can count on this:  when Kirby says “we see,” it means the Pentagon has already shared what it has seen with the Ukrainian military.  Everything Kirby said at yesterday’s press conference, the Ukrainian department of defense had already been told and shown electronically. 

Kirby also used the phrase, “we know” to describe Russia’s use of missiles against Ukraine.  “We know that they’ve, since the beginning of this, launched more than 1,000.  But I don't have an exact number,” Kirby answered when questioned about how many missiles Russian forces had fired into Ukraine.  “We know” means they have counted the missile launches one by one.  That he doesn’t have an “exact number” probably means only that he hasn’t been briefed about the number of launches that Russia may have made since he saw figures that morning while preparing to meet the press.  The U.S. has the capability of tracking every missile launch, so the figure of 1,000 he used is not an estimate, and again, that number has been shared with Ukraine, as well as the U.S. estimate of what percentage of their missile capability Russia has used, because we can count the un-fired missiles as well.

Kirby went on to describe Ukrainian gains around Kyiv, saying, “We have seen the Ukrainians push back around Kyiv, particularly in suburbs to the west of Kyiv, where the Ukrainians have retaken ground…[and] to the east of Kyiv, where the Russians were on the outskirts of Brovary and the Ukrainians pushed them back then to almost more than 50 kilometers away from the city.”

Again, U.S. satellites have “seen” these movements and re-taking of territory, and Kirby was able to announce this to the press because the Ukrainian military knows very well where their own troops are and what positions they have been able to re-take. 

What is missing from every one of Kirby’s briefings is a map of Ukraine.  He’s not showing on a map what they are seeing from the sky because maps are way too specific in their descriptive ability to show tactical information.  This means the maps you see on MSNBC or CNN showing in red areas Russian forces have taken and in green areas held by Ukraine and in stripes contested areas, reflect estimates the networks have been able to make using information provided by their own reporters on the ground, from statements made by Ukrainian government and military people, and using information gleaned from verbal statements by Kirby and other officials or sources who speak to network reporters in Ukraine and in Washington. 

Kirby doesn’t refer to the network maps, nor should he, as they don’t reflect information he has from American intelligence agencies which has probably been shared with Ukraine but is not being shared with the press.

So what we’ve got here with every Pentagon briefing is a mix of what they are willing to tell the press, and the information they have decided to withhold for strategic and tactical reasons.  Everything the Pentagon says and doesn’t say has meaning, and by putting these two indices of information together, we can come up with a fuller picture of what is going on in Ukraine. 

It is particularly interesting to look at what Kirby is willing to go into detail about.  For example, he was quite free in describing the failures of Russian forces to take various cities around Ukraine.  Some of what Kirby describes, he prefaces with “you guys have seen,” which reflects what the Pentagon has observed in reporting on television and in the print media.  He’s very free with this information, of course, because it’s already out there. 

And then he got to a point in the press conference where he just listed Russian objectives and their failures to achieve them: “You just have to look at what they tried to do in those early days to see that they wanted Kyiv.  They didn't get it.  And in the last few days, they hunkered down into defensive positions, basically stopped advancing, and now they're saying and we're seeing small numbers move away.  So, we'll see where this goes.  But step back, they also, you know, failed to take, really take and hold any major population centers.  They haven't taken Kharkiv.  They haven't taken Chernihiv.  They haven't taken Mariupol.  And while we assess they took Kherson, that's back in play right now.  So, if you count maybe Berdyansk on the on the Azov coast, you know, even that is contested.”

There is a strategy at work here as well.  Kirby would not be reporting Russian failures to the press here in the United States unless he had an interest in his reports getting back to Russia, so why is he willing to do this?  I think it’s because when all of the information the Pentagon has is taken into account – and it is WAY more than he gives to the press, as we have discussed – the Pentagon has concluded that saying out loud what Russia has failed to do will help the Ukrainians on the battlefield. 

Kirby stuck a knife in the Kremlin and gave it a sharp twist at his news conference this afternoon when he officially confirmed what everyone already suspected: that Vladimir Putin has not kept himself accurately abreast of the performance of his own military in Ukraine. 

“We would concur with the conclusion that Mr. Putin has not been fully informed by his Ministry of Defense, at every turn over the last month,” Kirby told the press.  “If Mr. Putin is misinformed or uninformed about what’s going on inside Ukraine, it’s his military, it’s his war, he chose it. And so the fact that he may not have all the context — that he may not fully understand the degree to which his forces are failing in Ukraine, that’s a little discomforting, to be honest with you.”

Quoting “other American officials,” The New York Times quickly followed Kirby’s statement with even more information about how isolated Putin has been.  “Officials believe that Mr. Putin has been getting incomplete or overly optimistic reports about the progress of Russian forces, creating mistrust with his military advisers,” The Times reported.  “Mr. Putin’s ignorance showed ‘a clear breakdown in the flow of accurate information to the Russian president,’ according to a U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the declassified, but still sensitive, material. There ‘is now persistent tension’ between Mr. Putin and the Defense Ministry, the official said.”

The word The Times omitted when quoting “officials” was “intelligence,” as the information clearly came from sources in the intelligence community, both military and civilian, and those kinds of leaks are approved at the highest levels of command.  Information about Putin’s isolation was leaked to The Times with a strategic goal in mind. There was a hint that some of the information about what Putin knows and doesn’t know evidently came from contacts with intimate knowledge about Putin and his habits, as The Times noted in its story something you almost never see in their coverage: “What American intelligence sources there might be in the Kremlin is a tightly held secret. But since Russia began its troop buildup along Ukraine’s borders last year, U.S. intelligence officials have accurately predicted Mr. Putin’s moves.”  The explanatory note both acknowledges the accuracy of U.S. intelligence about Russia and indicates that American sources within Russia should be taken with great seriousness.  

I think the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence have watched Russia waste so many of its combat assets including soldiers, tanks, ammunition and energy, they’re engaging in a form of rope-a-dope figuring they can help the Ukrainians by goading the Russians into further wearing themselves out without a chance of making any gains beyond what they have already achieved on the battlefield.  According to Kirby, they haven’t gained much at all.

The key thing here is that information is just as powerful as secrecy when it comes to military strategy.  Normally in a war, you don’t want your enemy to know what you’re going to do next and where you’ll do it, so you keep that secret.  But there are times when telegraphing your intentions and capabilities works to your advantage.

One of those times was during the days immediately after we invaded Iraq in March of 2003.  For several days, I watched something curious unfold.  The New York Times was running a very detailed map of the battlefield in Iraq every day on the back page of the front section.  The map revealed the movements of every American unit and showed how far they had advanced and indicated, if you paid close enough attention, where they expected to be the following day.

This was unprecedented.  The most important American newspaper was publishing very up-to-date military information daily, information that clearly the Iraqis had as much access to as I had sitting in my living room in Los Angeles.  I knew that the American press was embedded at every level of the American military effort, from down in infantry squads right up to reporters accompanying generals leading major U.S. Army units, like General William Scott Wallace, overall commander of the army’s Fifth Corps, and General David Petraeus commanding the 101st Airborne Division under him.  Both commanders had reporters in close enough contact with them that Petraeus was quoted early in the conflict lamenting, “somebody tell me how this ends,” and Wallace was quoted complaining that his forces were not receiving resupply of MREs fast enough.

So I knew that the maps were based on real-time accurate information.  The question was, why was the Pentagon clearly cooperating with the press in revealing what would ordinarily be top-secret maps of U.S. Army positions on a day-by-day basis?

Then it came to me:  they wanted the Iraqi army commanders to see how large the American force was and how fast they were coming at them.  The Pentagon was allowing the maps to be published to intimidate the Iraqi army and cause them to surrender as early as possible.  The contrast between what everyone could see on their TV screens and see on the New York Times maps, and the happy-talk garbage being spewed by the Iraqi military spokesman who was known as “Baghdad Bob” was striking because what he said was so transparently false.  The Times map was showing American forces closing in on Baghdad on the day Baghdad Bob announced, “They're not even [within] 100 miles [of Baghdad]. They are not in any place. They hold no place in Iraq. This is an illusion ... they are trying to sell to the others an illusion."

The Iraqi army of course knew exactly where the Americans were, and as the Pentagon had hoped, the Iraqis were taking off their uniforms and disappearing from the battlefield – planning on returning to fight an insurgency, as it happened, but that would be another story for another day.

Something of the same thing seems to be going on with Pentagon briefings about Ukraine, albeit without the maps.  At least in part the Pentagon seems be acknowledging that the wide coverage of the war can work to their, and Ukraine’s, advantage.  A calculation seems to have been made by senior American military leaders, no doubt with the approval or at least the acquiescence of the Ukrainian military, that showing Russian failures to achieve their objectives in Ukraine works to that country’s advantage, not Russia’s.  It’s yet another case of more is better when it comes to revealing what heretofore would have been military secrets to the press.  Russia’s army has been shown to be piteously unprepared, incompetent, and in disarray.  They may be laying waste to multiple Ukrainian cities and killing horrific numbers of civilians, but Russian forces have failed to achieve their objective of annexing Ukraine, as Kirby put it yesterday.  With Russia completely isolated from the rest of the world – which Putin did by incurring sanctions and banning foreign media and censoring his own – he is losing the information war as well.