Information Resilience: Countering Disinformation and Its Threat to the U.S. Alliance System

In August, Meta announced a takedown of the “largest known cross-platform covert influence operation in the world.” Information security officers removed 7700 accounts, 954 pages, and 15 groups linked to individuals employed by Chinese law enforcement. The scope of the operation was stunning. It targeted over 50 platforms and applications including YouTube, Reddit, X, TikTok, Pinterest, and Medium. The operation, part of what security professionals have named the “Spamouflage” network, focused on improving foreign perceptions of Chinese foreign policy, attacking critics of the Chinese Communist Party, and denigrating the United States and its allies. The operation is further proof of a concerning trend: the People’s Republic of China is embracing misinformation and disinformation in its influence operations, using methods and techniques traditionally employed by Russia.

These operations are now commonplace. U.S. allies and partners are under constant attack by adversary disinformation campaigns. While Russia remains the largest perpetrator of global disinformation, China executes disinformation campaigns against the United States and its Indo-Pacific allies with impunity. The Russian and Chinese governments seek to influence elections, exploit societal cleavages, and undermine trust in democratic and governmental institutions — threatening the rules-based international order itself. 

The U.S. government has done little to properly frame and prioritize this threat. Misinformation and disinformation are mentioned only once in the entire 2022 National Defense Strategy. The oversight is glaring given the gravity of the threat and the intense focus given to integrated deterrence and related concepts such as “deterrence by resilience,” a loosely defined concept that emphasizes the hardening and protection of vital networks and critical infrastructure. To protect U.S. interests abroad and uphold a system of equitable global governance, the United States should be able to protect and withstand disruption at home and throughout its alliance networks within the information domain. 

The United States should develop and champion the concept of information resilience. The United States should harden and protect its population, along with those of its allies and partners, against disinformation, adversary influence operations, and lawfare that harm democracy and the rule of law. The United States and its allies and partners should develop a shared understanding of international law and ensure that their militaries and civil servants are trained in what that law is and how to protect it from adversaries who wish to undermine it. The United States should also clear its own legal obstacles to interagency cooperation to enable it to adequately respond to disinformation attacks.

Building a Shared Commitment to International Law

America’s alliances and partnerships depend on a shared commitment to international laws and norms. Like-minded states have pre-committed to laws that reflect a shared understanding of how the world should be. These commitments provide a secure foundation for common defense and the promotion of common values. The United States relies upon law to justify its operations in support of international law. When discussing freedom of navigation operations and other actions in the South China Sea, U.S. officials famously repeat that the United States will fly, sail, and operate wherever international law allows. U.S. allies need assurance that the United States is willing and able to protect a free and open international system, and the legal framework that supports it. 

The United States often takes this “shared” understanding of international law and norms for granted. Lawyers in most U.S.-allied and partner nations receive only undergraduate training in law, not the extensive graduate-level training and demanding bar examination that American lawyers undergo. For military lawyers the training gap is often even more stark: U.S. military lawyers undergo months of rigorous service-level training, and many complete one or more Masters degrees on top of their law degrees. Law does not have the same cache or prestige in many partner and allied nations as it does in the United States, and lawyers are rarely as plentiful elsewhere as they are in the United States. As a result, in allied and partner nations, members of the public and legal professionals alike may not be trained or educated to understand legal issues that are crucial to their national survival and international security. As a result, individuals and states alike often cannot recognize when adversaries distort and undermine the international legal order. Without knowing their rights, people cannot assert them. 

Disinformation Undermines the Rule of Law

Adversary disinformation undermines confidence in the international legal order, the rule of law, and democratic norms by confusing or eroding perceptions of U.S. commitment to law and legitimacy. China routinely spreads the message that the United States flouts its own laws as well as international law. For example, Huawei filed a lawsuit claiming that the United States violated its own constitution when the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act banned government use of Huawei technology. Most law professors found the arguments laughable, and a federal court dismissed the case. However, Huawei hired two public relations firms when it filed the lawsuit, suggesting that its true objective was winning in the court of international public opinion.

In order to degrade the U.S. alliance system, the Chinese Communist Party’s disinformation campaigns portray the United States as an instigator of conflict, perpetrator of human rights violations, and a hegemonic power that asserts its power over unsuspecting and aggrieved Indo-Pacific nations. Concurrently, the Chinese government justifies its own actions through lawfare and interpretations of international law that are incorrect or not agreed upon by other nations. Chinese diplomats and legal professionals are masters at injecting their own preferred language and legal constructs into international discourse, subtly undermining international law. They routinely engage in semantic lawfare by inserting words and phrases into international forums, negotiations, and outcome documents that serve to erode international human rights law. By using phrases like “international human rights cause” in place of “human rights law” in U.N. forums, China implies that human rights are an optional cause that a state can choose to adopt or reject, rather than a set of well-established obligations to which states are legally bound.

In instances where the Chinese government blatantly violates international law or infringes on the sovereignty of its neighbors, messaging networks amplify official Chinese government statements and dubious legal arguments that attempt to portray the Chinese government’s actions as operating within the confines of international law. For example, the U.S. Department of Defense released a video of a People’s Liberation Army warship moving within 150 yards of a U.S. destroyer during a joint U.S.-Canadian operation in the Taiwan Strait on June 3. The United States said that the Chinese naval vessel’s “unsafe interaction” violated international maritime law and raised military risk. China shot back that the maneuver was “lawful” and “justified” by U.S. provocation in the Taiwan Strait, which it considers under its jurisdiction. However, under the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, to which China is a party, beyond a coastal state’s 12-nautical mile territorial sea lie international waters that do not fall under the sovereignty of any state. China’s so-called “jurisdiction” over the Taiwan Strait has no basis in international law. Yet the Chinese government challenges vessels and aircraft in the Taiwan Strait and much of the South China Sea by asserting that it has jurisdiction over those areas and demanding that others ask permission to enter.

To better combat disinformation, the United States and its allies should build stronger information resilience. The U.S. government and its allies should be able to rapidly identify and respond to adversary misinformation and disinformation, and build a shared understanding of both the rules-based international order and the international law that serves as its foundation.

Currently, poor interagency coordination stymies the U.S. government’s response to disinformation, and renders long-term, proactive information campaigns nearly impossible. Under the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center is tasked with directing the federal government’s efforts to identify and counter adversary disinformation, but it has struggled to fill that role. The center, staffed mostly by diplomats and data scientists, has defaulted to an analytics-heavy approach that does an admirable job at characterizing adversary disinformation, but provides little in terms of coordinating an interagency response. In 2022, the State Department inspector general concluded that the center’s “role in countering disinformation was limited to supporting various U.S. government efforts rather than leading and coordinating a whole-of-government approach.” A plethora of counter-disinformation agencies have sprung up across the federal government, including the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s Foreign Malign Influence Center, the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and the Defense Department’s new Influence and Perception Management Office. The relationship between these entities and the level of coordination between them is hardly transparent, and should be reviewed by Congress. The Biden administration and Congress should also evaluate whether the State Department (given the Title 22 authorities under which it operates) is the best place from which to lead the fight against disinformation.

Similarly, the State Department’s organization often means that embassy public affairs sections are unequipped to combat adversary disinformation. Embassy country teams are designed to handle day-to-day embassy operations and host-nation relationships, not long-term adversary disinformation campaigns and acute disinformation crises. On that front, there is significant opportunity for increased collaboration between the Department of State and the Department of Defense.

Military information support operations professionals are trained to characterize adversary propaganda, and craft culturally relevant messaging designed to influence foreign audiences. Under specific programs, these messages must be approved by the U.S. embassy responsible for delivery and consumption by foreign audiences. Unfortunately, most military information planners and embassy public affairs personnel have either little or no experience working together. And while military information planners speak in terms of target audiences, effects, and desired behavior change, embassy personnel are more comfortable discussing audience engagement, reach, and two-way communication. A lack of standardized processes and objective alignment result in many country teams being reluctant to partner with the military on messaging. 

The Departments of State and Defense should work through these issues in order to address the scope and scale of the disinformation problem. Both entities should work to streamline approvals for cross-border information operations to allow narrative competition to occur in real time. Shared understanding and interaction are key. The Global Engagement Center should expand its analytical exchanges with military information planners, and partnerships with representatives at geographic combatant commands to improve collaboration. The Department of Defense should work to expand military information support teams — groups of military planners who work side-by-side with their diplomatic counterparts at a U.S. embassy to expand government messaging. 

Both the Departments of State and Defense should prioritize exchanges involving military information support operations, staff judge advocates, State Department lawyers, and other civilian agency experts in international law, and can host similar exchanges and training events to ensure that partners can identify and publicize violations of international law. Maritime law experts will be especially critical for the Department of Defense and Coast Guard’s increasing maritime domain awareness efforts with partners and allies. Violations of international law demand immediate messaging campaigns designed to inform regional and international audiences of adversary involvement. To that end, the United States and its allies and partners should develop a corps of military and diplomatic professionals who are versed in both law and information operations. 

Once Department of State public diplomacy and Department of Defense military information support operations professionals have expanded their interaction and coordination mechanisms, they can create training programs that build ally information capabilities while reinforcing democratic governance and human rights. Subject matter exchanges and training events on law, lawfare, and disinformation will be critical to building a shared understanding of rights, laws, and norms. The State Department should make legal education a focus of educational events and conferences through embassies and bureaus. The Department of Defense should make law a critical part of its regular training and subject matter exchanges with partners and allies and include related topics such as countering propaganda, target audience analyses, and narrative development. These topics would create shared understanding with military and law enforcement partners across multiple subject areas. 

U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s Counter-Lawfare Program is an excellent resource to build awareness of Chinese legal violations. It includes dialogues and shared forums designed to develop shared memoranda of understanding on emerging international legal issues with allies and partners. The program is a strong start, but should be expanded and synchronized across combatant commands by the Joint Staff or Office of the Secretary of Defense, and integrated with the work of legal attachés in U.S. embassies. Leveraging and expanding similar programs with American allies would increase awareness within key audiences — political decision-makers and civil society leadership, who in turn can promote information resilience.  

Conclusion

These solutions will require dedicated time and resources, and are vital to developing the information resiliency necessary to protect U.S. alliances. U.S. adversaries are adept at responding quickly, and at enormous scale, to messaging that portrays them in a negative light, bolstering their own legitimacy while undermining U.S. narratives. Through proper interagency coordination, training, and education, the United States can counter these efforts and bolster the rules-based international order that its adversaries seek to erode. The United States should proactively promote the rule of law, support allies and partners in doing the same, and rapidly respond to disinformation. When adversaries’ lies travel around the world, the United States can ensure the truth is waiting to counter them. 

Dr. Jill Goldenziel is a professor at the College of Information and Cyberspace at the National Defense University, where she teaches classes on lawfare and information operations; law and governance of the information domain; and information warfare. She advises special operations forces on lawfare and helped develop and implement the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command Counter-Lawfare Program. She is a non-resident fellow at the NATO ACO/SHAPE Office of Legal Affairs, which awarded her the 2022 Serge Lazareff Prize for her work as a scholar/practitioner of legal operations (lawfare). 

Maj. Daniel Grant is a Marine Corps officer and advanced information operations planner. He has previously served as staff intelligence officer and Indo-Pacific Command support team lead for the Marine Corps Information Operations Center, information warfare officer for Marine Special Operations Company Lima, and as an intelligence planner for Marine Corps Forces Pacific. He is currently serving as commanding officer, India Company; Marine Cryptologic Support Battalion.

Image: Photo by Cpl. Sarah Snedden