Battles on social media will prepare the way for bullets and bombs flying in America’s next war, according to a U.S. Army intelligence adviser.
Army senior open-source intelligence adviser Dennis Eger thinks the U.S. needs to quickly come to grips with the weaponization of social media.
“In my opinion, the next two wars we’re going to fight are either in space or in this information environment, before we ever fight kinetically,” Mr. Eger said at an Association of the U.S. Army event.
Mr. Eger said the Army must change its view of influence operations, according to a post on the association’s website this week.
He warned that the Chinese and Russians view the influence operations as conflict, and the U.S. must recognize its adversaries can quickly leverage social media.
“I think if we don’t change, we’re going to look up five to 10 years from now and think, ‘What did we do wrong?’” he said at the association event.
Mr. Eger’s perspective is not isolated at the Pentagon. In 2021, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency said it would spend $59.5 million over four years on researchers making algorithms and gathering content including memes, political ads and social media posts.
The Influence Campaign and Sensemaking Awareness (INCAS) program from the Department of Defense is part of a larger effort by the U.S. government to build tools that fight enemies using social media posts and memes instead of traditional weaponry.
Brian Kettler, then a DARPA program manager overseeing the INCAS program, told The Washington Times in 2021 that researchers working with the Pentagon had an agreement to examine data from Twitter, which later became X under the ownership of Elon Musk.
In 2024, the Army wants to expand its gaze beyond X. Lydia Snider, Army Cyber Command foreign malign influence adviser, told the Association of the U.S. Army that not all of the world’s 2 billion social media users rely on X.
“We need to be mapping every country,” she said according to the association’s website. “What’s the media landscape for each country? What apps do they use?”
After identifying the app usage habits of people everywhere, the U.S. military will work to change narratives online.
“If we track what they’re doing, we can get ahead of the story,” she said.
• Ryan Lovelace can be reached at rlovelace@washingtontimes.com.