• The confusion generated by narrowing media and military professions poses an epistemic threat to our very understanding of threats and security.


• Examples of journalism used as information warfare include the Office of Strategic Influence, the 9/11 Commission recommendation to grant the Broadcasting Board of Governors larger resources and the creation of the al Hurra satellite network for the purpose of improving America's image abroad.


• The conflation of information war and public diplomacy collapses the distinction between military operations and journalism as well as between combatant and non-combatant.

INFOWAR: Information warfare, aka 'infowar', is essentially a struggle of intelligence over force, of signs over weapons, of mind over body. Notorious for its many definitions, the meaning of infowar shifts with escalating phases of violence. In its most basic and material form, infowar is an adjunct of conventional war, in which command and control of the battlefield is augmented by computers, communications, and intelligence. At the next remove, infowar is a supplement of military violence, in which information technologies are used to further the defeat of a foreign opponent and the support of a domestic population. In its purest, most immaterial form, infowar is warring without war, an epistemic battle for reality in which opinions, beliefs, and decisions are created and destroyed by a contest of networked information and communication systems.

Unlike other threats in this matrix, an act of infowar can undermine the very notion of what constitutes a, security threat through manipulation and reconstruction of the mediated projections of identity labels at the heart of so many contemporary conflicts. Furthermore, if the international system or state and other political group interests may be regarded as social constructions, then enemies can also be seen to, in part, create each other through mediated projections of danger, fear and even conflict itself.

The full political potential of the so-called “narrowing of professions” between military and journalism remains unexplored. Some of its more insidious effects have been observed in such practices as embedded reporting, the selective release of intelligence about Iraqi weapons capabilities by the Bush administration, and the creation of Office of Strategic Influence in 2002, for the purpose of setting up policies for information operations and warfare that will then be carried out by military specialists which included the planting of deliberately misleading stories in the international media to influence foreign public opinion and improve America's image abroad (and the name has changed the operation remains the same). In Iraq the line between infowar and public diplomacy has become particularly blurry in acts like the 9/11 Commission recommendation to counter the “threat posed by Islamist terrorism—especially the al Queda network, its affiliates, and its ideology” by giving the Broadcasting Board of Governors larger resources to continue “promising initiatives in television and radio broadcasting to Arab world, Iran, and Afghanistan,” as well as the establishment of the American-funded al Hurra satellite channel.

The conflation of information war and public diplomacy collapses the distinctions between war and journalism, domestic and foreign, combatant and non-combatant. It is especially dangerous at a time when journalists and soldiers rely on the same information technology to fulfill their respective duties. With the narrowing of means, it is especially important to re-examine journalistic ethics as well as increased government and military involvement in the reporting as well as collection and distribution of information.