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WASHINGTON — Special Operations Command Pacific is running its first ever artificial intelligence boot camp this week, in an effort to familiarize officials with how it can be useful everyday, according to the organization’s commander.
“The reasons why AI adoption has been difficult for us is because we’re creatures of habit, one. A lot of us have been at this for 20 or 30 years, you’ve developed workflows and processes, and we fear change,” Maj. Gen. Jeffrey VanAntwerp said Tuesday at AFCEA’s TechNet Indo-Pacific conference in Hawaii. “We don’t want to do something differently. It seems inefficient at first. At first, potentially, we don’t even trust it. We don’t trust the results. The second one, I think is equally as big, if not bigger, is that we don’t know how. We don’t know how to do the new thing.”
f Special Forces has an “identity crisis,” it is because we misunderstood and mislabeled the problems we were sent to resolve, and applied solutions rooted in how the problems were labeled and defined, rather than for what they were. The world had changed, and revisionist actors of every ilk had stolen a march on those overly wedded to an obsolete playbook. For true change, we, as a Regiment, must first reframe the problem and then set out to reimagine more durable solutions.
In southern Lebanon, amid escalating tensions since the October 7 Hamas attack and Israel’s subsequent “Northern Arrow” military operation, Hezbollah has urgently reshaped its information warfare doctrine. Formerly a dominant political actor in Lebanon, the Shiite organization has seen its digital capabilities crippled and its propaganda networks disrupted as its political influence and combat power have waned. Now facing pressure on multiple fronts, including an intensive psychological and cyber campaign from Israel, Hezbollah’s cyber-combatants are pursuing a determined effort to modernize: leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI), foreign alliances, and digital influence campaigns to regain control of the narrative in a war that is increasingly fought online as much as on the battlefield.
The Second Front: PRC Micro-Occupation in the Philippines Part 2a described the salami-slicing of features within the Exclusive Economic Zone of the Philippines and throughout the West Philippine Sea. We presented a framework for assessing and developing operational concepts to mitigate the threat of continued PRC extraterritorial seizure of the Philippines’ territory, based on the PRC’s actions throughout the West Philippine Sea and in the Himalaya Mountains along the Line of Control with India, and the PRC’s stated objectives regarding Taiwan.
The U.S. Army’s elite 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR), better known as the Night Stalkers, has been exploring ways to ensure it can operate in more heavily defended airspace in the future. This includes making increased use of uncrewed aircraft, the employment of new electronic warfare and decoy capabilities, and just flying longer and faster. The U.S. special operations community as a whole continues to reorient itself around preparing for high-end fights, such as one across the broad expanses of the Pacific against China, after decades of low-intensity missions in much more permissive environments.
This article examines the implications of Just War Theory, an ethical framework governing the use of lethal force by governments, for the use of information warfare in the 21st century. The author posits that ethical considerations demand a robust, integrated approach to information operations, both as a means of averting armed conflict and for accomplishing strategic objectives with minimal human harm or suffering. Classical ethics theories are applied to the requirement for and application of information warfare in the modern context.
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