Learning Information Warfare

While Turkey Hunting

Information contests are fundamentally about making and maintaining contact with the adversary. In these conflicts you each want to receive data about the other, making it difficult to move unobserved, forcing each of you to maneuver on micro scales the aggregation of which creates macro movements. In these ways and others, information warfare is the mirror image of conventional or nuclear conflict. I recently learned these facts while chasing Merriam’s turkeys around the Wolf Mountains of the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana. Let me explain.

In the spring, turkeys attract mates by making loud yelps and gobbles that travel hundreds of meters. If another turkey hears and responds to the call, one or both moves toward the other. When hunting turkeys, you imitate the female’s (hen’s) yelp in an attempt to elicit a gobble from a nearby male (tom). When a male gobbles, you have established contact, and each of you know generally where the other is at.

In my most recent adventures, I noticed that the gobble was an important but unreliable bit of information. On one occasion, every time I yelped, the turkey gobbled but moved closer at a very slow rate. Eventually the turkey emerged from a thicket of ponderosa-pine saplings. This new data point provided me with very little additional information because I knew by his continuous gobbles roughly where he was at, which was just out of range of my shotgun. According to Claude Shannon’s Information Theory, this decline in the value of new data is referred to as information entropy. All I knew was that I needed to move closer to the turkey but if I did, he would see me and have all of the information he needed to maneuver out of harms way. Eventually, the turkey went out of sight and I was able to move above him, and reestablish contact at which point the turkey came toward me at a trot. Luckily for the turkey, I missed my shot and he escaped.

The next engagement was much different. I spotted a turkey strutting in a meadow. He was with several hens and would not return my call. Having learned earlier that the toms seemed more inclined to move up hill toward a potential mate than laterally, and, since we weren’t in contact yet, I used the terrain to my advantage and moved above and to within 60 meters of the gobbler. I then hit the hen call a couple of times. Still no response. After about five minutes I peaked over the ridge to see if I could find the turkey. To my surprise he was about five meters away and very unhappy to see me. However, like earlier that morning, I missed again. Still, I was learning. While its better to be engaged or in contact with your adversary during a information contest, you can break contact but only if the data you collected to that point leads you to believe that you can maneuver to a better position.

By the time this second hunt ended, it was midday a notoriously slow time in the social lives of breeding turkeys. My dad - an eternal optimist and by now a hunting observer rather than participant - pushed me to keep calling and hunting even during this habitually unproductive period. Another interesting thing about data is its uncanny utility at small and large scales. For instance, our best computers predict weather with great accuracy out to a couple of days, but struggle to predict weather patterns more beyond a week. However, coarse grain data sets such as average weather patterns on a specific day provide relatively reliable information. The same is true with turkeys. Although you do occasionally get a response from gobbler in the heat of the day, it is rare.

That said, my most recent turkey hunt was different. This time, at about noon, a tom responded to my hen call. Once again, because I was at the same elevation, he would “talk to me” but not come to the call. So, I tried to move above him. But, not being as young as I once was, he moved up the hills as fast as did. Although, I was climbing as fast as I could and he was just feeding along. A bit frustrated and winded, I decided to call him again. Again he answered. This time, he strutted back and forth in a twenty meter opening across a small gulch from where I sat. If I moved, he would be able to see me. If I stopped calling he might lose interest. When he went behind a large tree, I moved, hoping that I could crest the ridge behind me before he stepped from behind the obstruction. It worked, and, once again, I moved above the turkey. Once again I called from an elevated position, and the turkey came trotting toward me.

While these engagements may sound like those of conventional conflicts, I think they show much different trends. Although I used observation and listening tacitcs and intervisibility lines to maneuver just like in conventional conflict, I broke contact with my adversary only when absolutely necessary. My first priority was not defeat of the enemy but acquisition of data that improved my understanding of his trends and patterns so that I could make better informed decisions in current and future engagements. Once I established contact, it was difficult to move except during limited windows. The potential for a charge deep into my opponents rear - regardless of the deception operations I might run - would have given him a lot of valuable information about me, which he could then rapidly acted on. Finally, the combination of small maneuvers on multiple adversaries made it easier to manage maneuver at a macro scale, where I increasingly put myself in a position of advantage by learning from the habits of a specific type of adversary under specific conditions. In chess or other strategy games this macro maneuver is referred to as the Nash equilibrium. Under these conditions, each player adopts the optimal tactics in a given situation and observes the other’s reaction. If the other adopts a suboptimal counter-strategy, the first player can slowly exploit his/her adversary, boxing them in to an increasingly bad set of decisions.

Note: one of the interesting things about information age tactics is their scalability or lack thereof. As noted above, information tactics seem to work at a granular or large scale but do not work well in between. For instance, Douhetian strategy failed until the advent of the nuclear bomb. When the known devastation (quality data) of nuclear war was paired with the terror tactics described by Julio Douhet, it ended wars before they started. However, conventional tactics seemed to have lost their value since Shannon published his information theory in 1949. Since then, elite special forces units have been employed to great effect against threat networks. Yet their seems to be no way to scale these forces or results. Finally, and similar to the Douhet example above, the Soviet doctrine of sowing division along ethnic, cultural, religious and political lines, as outlined in the “Long Telegraph,” seemed to have failed during the Cold War. With the scalability of social media and networks, the Russians and Chinese seem to be applying the division strategy to great effect today.