MCDP 1: "Warfighting" and the NATO Catfishing story.

“[W]ar is a social phenomenon . . . the conduct of war is fundamentally a dynamic process of human competition requiring both the knowledge of science and the creativity of art but driven ultimately by the power of human will.” -MCDP 1

A recent Wired magazine story revealed that NATO ran a “catfishing” operation on its own soldiers to determine how much they could learn from and influence soldiers conducting a field exercise. The results are generally disturbing (they were able to track troop movements and learn soldier’s sensitive personal info) and the conclusions are familiar (blame Facebook!!).

I’ve been bothered by this story since I read it earlier today. At first I thought about it as the next iteration of a trend reported by the NYT last year (here) where bad actors spread fake and manipulative stories to civilians living near NATO operations to undermine faith and trust with those NATO operations. But this seems to be of a different kind that’s much worse - it’s one thing to disrupt some civilian/military relations and it’s another to undermine a soldier’s willingness to follow orders (and likely, ultimately, a soldier’s willingness to fight). The researchers “compelled service members to engage in ‘undesirable behavior,’ including leaving their positions against orders.”

This gets right to the heart of what warfare is, at least according to MCDP 1. MCDP 1 outlines the US Marine Corps’ philosophy of warfare - a more modern, shorter “On War”. Technology has always been an important dimension of war - it has a close relationship with a fighting force’s capability to destroy people and equipment. But this NATO operation revealed something new - a technology that, instead of physical destruction, destroys a soldier’s will to fight - per MCDP 1, the “ultimate” driver of the conduct of war.

So we can blame Facebook. But maintaining a soldier’s will to fight is the responsibility of the military (its most important one, perhaps!), not social media companies. The expression “weapon, gear, body” is supposed to instruct service members their priority of maintenance in the field (don’t eat food with a dirty weapon). Maybe it should be changed “get the heck off your phone, weapon, gear, body”.