[Infowarrior] - IO: DoD wages infowar on itself

[Richard Forno]

The threat from within
E-mail overload degrades military decision-making
By Col. Peter R. Marksteiner

http://www.afji.com/2008/09/3640424

If a technological or biological weapon were devised that could render  
tens of thousands of Defense Department knowledge workers incapable of  
focusing their attention on cognitive tasks for more than 10 minutes  
at a time, joint military doctrine would clearly define the weapon as  
a threat to national security.

Indeed, according to the principles of network attack under Joint  
Publication 3-13, “Information Operations (IO),” anything that  
degrades or denies information or the way information is processed and  
acted upon constitutes an IO threat. That same publication cautions  
military leaders to be ever-vigilant in protecting against evolving  
technologically based threats. Yet throughout the Defense Department  
and the federal government, the inefficient and undisciplined use of  
technology by the very people technology was supposed to benefit is  
degrading the quality of decision-making and hobbling the cognitive  
dimension of the information environment.

Commentators use terms such as data smog, informania, data  
asphyxiation, attentional overload and cyber-indigestion to describe a  
newly recognized phenomenon: information overload. Lax digital hygiene  
and the careless use of technology exacerbate the harmful effects of  
information overload. As a result, commanders and decision-makers at  
all levels are rendered less aware and less capable of resolving  
complex issues and maintaining decision dominance across the range of  
military operations.

Joint doctrine unambiguously recognizes that “information is a  
strategic resource vital to national security,” and that “dominance  
of the information environment is a reality that extends to the Armed  
Forces of the U.S. at all levels.” Though IO doctrine doesn’t  
specifically appear to address unintentional internally generated  
threats, JP 3-13’s definitions and analytical framework clearly  
illuminate an evolving IO threat to which we routinely subject our  
decision-making processes by neglecting to manage information overload.

Information overload is taking on greater prominence in academic and  
mainstream media, with coverage cast primarily on lost productivity,  
economic impacts, and worker health and satisfaction. From the  
relentless torrent of e-mail, to the Internet’s seductive capacity to  
draw knowledge workers away from productive cognitive engagement like  
intellectual crack cocaine, there’s a growing consensus that while  
information is generally a good thing, too much of it clearly is not.

IO threats come in many different forms. Maybe it’s a server-clogging  
12 megabyte PowerPoint slide with an embedded photo of a tropical  
sunset inviting you to a retirement luncheon for someone you’ve never  
met. Perhaps it’s the eighth volley of a “reply to all” e-mail  
chain recounting a discussion that’s irrelevant to you and 47 of the  
other 50 CC’d addressees. Or it could be the important deadline you  
overlooked because the task and due date were buried somewhere in the  
middle of a rambling narrative, the subject line of which failed to  
differentiate it in any way from the inescapable rising tide of  
inconsequential flotsam already choking your inbox.

We all receive too much e-mail. According to the Radacati Research  
Group, roughly 541 million knowledge workers worldwide rely on e-mail  
to conduct business, with corporate users sending and receiving an  
average of 133 messages per day — and rising. While no open-source  
studies address how the Defense Department’s e-mail volume compares  
to corporate users’, my own anecdotal experience and that of legions  
of colleagues suggests a striking similarity. Without fail, they  
report struggling every day to keep up with an e-mail inbox bloated  
with either poorly organized slivers of useful data points that must  
be sifted like needles from stacks of nonvalue-adding informational  
hay or messages that are completely unrelated to any mission- 
furthering purpose.

E-mail is a poor tool for communicating complex ideas. Text-only  
communication, or “lean media,” as it is referred to by researchers  
who study the comparatively new field of computer mediated  
communication, lacks the nonverbal cues, such as facial expression,  
body language, vocal tone and tempo, that inform richer means of  
communication. Moreover, aside from its qualitative shortcomings and  
viral-like reproductive capacity, a growing body of research suggests  
e-mail’s interruptive nature is perhaps the most pressing threat to  
decision-making in the cognitive dimension.

Interruptions are carcinogenic to complex decision making. Cheri  
Speier, associate professor of information systems at Michigan State  
University, explains that “more frequent interruptions are likely to  
place a greater processing load on the decision-maker. Each  
interruption requires a recovery period where reprocessing of some  
primary task information occurs. Consequently, the number of recovery  
periods, the recovery time and likelihood of errors all increase as  
the frequency of interruption increases.” Gloria Mark, who teaches  
informatics at the University of California, Irvine, found that  
knowledge workers spend an average of only 11 minutes on a project  
before being interrupted.

Round-the-clock checking

According a recent study conducted by Basex Inc., an IT business  
consultancy whose work on information overload has repeatedly been  
featured in national media, “the majority of knowledge workers ...  
tend to open new e-mail immediately or shortly after notification,  
rather than waiting until they have a lull in their work.” The latest  
Basex observation comports with other study results, including AOL’s  
2007 Third Annual E-mail Addiction Survey, which found people check e- 
mail around the clock. Fifty-nine percent of those with portable  
devices check every time a new e-mail arrives. Basex says  
interruptions already consume about 28 percent of the average  
knowledge worker’s day, and e-mail-driven interruptions continue to  
increase, contributing to an estimated $650 billion a year in lost  
productivity for U.S. companies.

Several U.S. and European firms are experimenting with policies  
designed to curtail the inefficient use of e-mail and reinvigorate  
person-to-person communication. Last October, the Wall Street Journal  
reported that “growing numbers of employers are imposing or trying  
out ‘no e-mail’ Fridays or weekends.” Companies that have  
instituted such rules report positive reviews from the rank and file,  
including a Georgia-based company that found overall e-mail volume  
dropped 75 percent throughout the work week after imposing a no e-mail  
Friday policy.

 From cell phones to iPods to MySpace Web pages, as IT becomes  
ubiquitous in peoples’ daily lives, it becomes harder for employers  
to draw lines between personal and official IT use in the workplace.  
“It is typical for workers to read their personal e-mail, make  
personal phone calls and even surf the Web recreationally from their  
offices,” says Jonathon Spira, Basex CEO and senior researcher.  
“Thanks to the Internet, it is taken rather for granted now that a  
knowledge worker should have access to cartoons, games and an enormous  
variety of trivial information at any time.” If a person can send an  
instant message or answer a cell phone in the produce aisle or church  
pew, the prospect of doing so “on the clock” doesn’t seem  
unreasonable.

Consider the following statistics:

å A 2008 survey of 20 Welsh firms found that “up to 91 percent of  
workplace Internet use in Wales is spent on social networking sites  
like Facebook.”

å Investigating Internet use at the IRS, the Treasury Department found  
that 51 percent of the time an employee was online was for personal use.

å Websense, an Internet filtering and Web consultant company, reports  
that 60 percent of employees who access the Internet at work do so for  
personal reasons, such as “shopping, banking, checking stocks or  
watching sports events, playing online poker, booking travel, and  
accessing pornography sites.”

å A 2007 AOL survey reported that 60 percent of people who use e-mail  
admit to checking their personal e-mail at work an average of three  
times per day.

We don’t know whether the Defense Department work force is subject to  
the same sort of undisciplined Internet use or the extent to which  
that sort of use, if it’s going on, affects mission capability. What  
we do know is that during Minot Air Force Base, N.D.’s second failed  
nuclear surety inspection, inspectors observed as a guard played video  
games on his cell phone instead of keeping watch. Also, according to a  
Defense Information Services Agency study, of the top 10 Air Force  
user circuits, which account for one-third of all Air Force Internet  
traffic, Amazon.com was the fifth-most-frequently accessed domain.  
Sports news sites, streaming audio and video sites, banking, humor and  
Internet dating sites also numbered in the top 25.

Minimizing the time wasted on nonproductive pursuits is hardly a new  
leadership or management challenge. What’s relatively new is the ease  
with which employees can access nonproductive pursuit without leaving  
their desks and the numberless array of activities that can keep them  
unproductively occupied once they wander off task. Mark notes: “The  
ease of access compounds the distractive potential of the Internet for  
information workers.” Based on a preliminary review of a study  
she’s conducting on Internet use, she observed, “It seems to me  
that most Internet use is a distraction from work. ... It’s really  
the great distracter because it’s very easy to get wrapped up in one  
distraction that leads to another, and another.”

Techno creep

Militarily, our reliance on IT-based asymmetrical advantages in the  
sensor-to-shooter, logistics and service-delivery arenas occupies  
continuing prominence in strategic planning and resourcing discussions  
at the highest levels. However, our institutionally injudicious use of  
IT in support of the business end of Defense Department operations has  
fostered a culture among action officers, planners and decision-makers  
that accepts efficiency-choking and cognition-degrading data smog as  
just another aspect of modern bureaucracy. The ease with which  
information is accessed, generated and distributed has also  
facilitated a sort of IT-enabled mission creep — techno creep. Techno  
creep is the misplaced reliance on abundance of information to improve  
the timeliness and quality of decision-making, instead of focusing  
energy and resources to ensure decision-makers have the right  
information on which to act. The result is unintended or unaccounted  
for costs that degrade rather than enhance an organization’s  
cognitive output capacity. The problem is so ubiquitous as to be  
almost unrecognizable as a threat. Though academia and the business  
world have taken notice of the economic consequences of information  
overload, the threat to the cognitive dimension of the information  
environment doesn’t appear to have been taken up as a national  
security matter.

The notion that battles are won and lost in the cognitive dimension is  
not limited to decisions about target selection or battlefield  
execution. Decision dominance is a doctrinal mandate at all  
organizational levels and across the spectrum of conflict, wherever  
humans observe, orient, decide and act. Time-tested axioms inform  
military thinking that technological advances present not only  
evolving and novel opportunities but also evolving and novel threats,  
and contemporary IO doctrine sternly cautions us to be ever-vigilant  
to identify and respond to those threats as they present themselves.

Though the Internet and e-mail provide incredibly convenient ways to  
access, generate and transmit massive amounts of information to nearly  
numberless recipients, that same level of convenience may also be the  
paramount challenge of the information age.

The first step in countering the threat presented by information  
overload will require organizations to adopt and enforce a sense of  
what David Shipley and Will Schwalbe, authors of “Send: The Essential  
Guide to E-mail for Office and Home,” refer to as “digital  
mindedness” with respect to e-mail.

Sensible e-mail policy

While volumes have been written on fixing the e-mail problem, at the  
risk of overgeneralizing, the nuts and bolts of a sensible e-mail  
policy should include the following:

å Any tasker or suspense transmitted via e-mail must include (1) a  
word such as “task” or “suspense” or some other service- 
specific buzz phrase that informs the recipient the correspondence  
requires action, and (2) a clearly identified date by which the  
response is due.

å If the text of the e-mail is four lines or more, it must include a  
“bottom line up front (BLUF)” or “summary” or similar phrase,  
no more than two lines, that gives the recipient a general overview of  
what the correspondence contains. For example, a lengthy note  
requesting an opinion on a draft regulation or publication might  
contain a BLUF, right under the salutation, which reads: “request  
your input(s) on attached draft regulation NLT 15 Sep 08.” Details of  
the request, format of the desired response, etc., can then follow in  
additional narrative.

å A recipient should never have to open an attachment to discover what  
the substance of the correspondence is. For example, a lunch  
invitation or proposed organizational course of action described in a  
PowerPoint slide must be accompanied by text in the e-mail that  
describes who, what, when, where, etc., so that the recipient can  
prioritize the correspondence without having to open one or more  
attachments.

å Transmitting via “reply to all” or to address groups should be  
done sparingly, and correspondence should never be forwarded to  
address groups without a short BLUF or overview that allows recipients  
to assess very quickly whether additional attention is required. For  
example, award solicitations for all sorts of categories of personnel  
are routinely group forwarded to entire installation address groups  
with introductions such as “FYSA” or “for your attention.” A  
subject line and BLUF saying something such as “solicitation for  
pilot of the year award” would minimize the cognitive interruption  
visited on nonflying recipients of such correspondence.

å If the rules continue to permit e-mail use for unofficial purposes,  
such as digital water-cooler discussions or unofficial lunch  
invitations, those e-mails should be highlighted with the little blue  
down arrow provided in Microsoft Outlook, or some other immediately  
recognizable identifier that tells the recipient, “If you don’t  
read this, there will be no mission impact.”

Stick to the mission

The second step will require organizations to restrict Internet use to  
mission-related purposes. IT policymakers are beginning to impose  
variants of “black list” or “white list” rules governing  
Internet use. The black list prevents users from accessing certain  
sites or domains; the white list permits users to visit only approved  
sites or domains. A one-size-fits-all rule isn’t the answer.

Personnel working in different career fields require differing mission- 
related access to information. For example, knowledge management- 
centric functions, such as intelligence, criminal investigation or  
legal work, require unrestricted access to myriad and constantly  
changing sources of information, making the “white list” system  
unresponsive. Other less information-dependent functions may not  
require that same level of access. Blanket rules are conceptually easy  
to manage but fail to account for varying mission requirements. Overly  
permissive rules and policies, such as those currently in effect, do  
little to prevent cognition-degrading Internet abuse. The complex  
nature of the threat requires a complex, carefully tailored fix.

For all career fields, there’s value in allowing employees to attend  
to limited personal business without leaving their workplaces. In  
order to balance that interest against the Internet’s distractive  
potential, Defense Department organizations should impose strict rules  
permitting users to engage in such nonmission-furthering activities  
only before or after the established duty day or during an approved  
lunch period.

fog and friction

Information overload is the digital age’s fog and friction. Misused  
and overused e-mail degrades the quality of decision-making and denies  
knowledge workers access to the right information because the  
unstructured environment forces them to attempt to digest so much  
information. The scope of the impact of information overload is  
difficult to assess, but the fact that it’s having an impact — a  
profoundly negative one — seems incontrovertible. Though not  
specifically invoking the term “information overload,” the 9/11  
Commission noted that “the U.S. government has access to a vast  
amount of information. ... But the U.S. Government has a weak system  
for processing and using what it has.” We don’t know whether the  
same sort of informational forest-and-tree problem contributed to the  
headline-grabbing misrouting or mishandling of sensitive military  
components in recent months, but it’s difficult to conceive how such  
oversights could occur in a healthy, efficiently running 21st century  
information environment.

Addressing the information overload threat will require sustained,  
uninterrupted attention and some complex, high-functioning, i.e.,  
nondegraded, decision-making. When business enterprises idly permit  
the hobbling of their collective decision-making capacities, they  
sacrifice competitive advantage and risk eventual insolvency. When  
governments and military organizations permit unchecked proliferation  
in threats to the cognitive dimension, they risk much, much more.

Maxwell’s mail overload moment

In an ironic demonstration of the reason the U.S. Defense Department  
needs stricter rules for e-mail use, Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala.,  
suffered an internally generated data smog outbreak in the middle of  
the annual Air Force Cyber Symposium, which it hosted July 15-17. More  
than 200 experts from across the Air Force and the Defense Department  
gathered to “identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and  
threats to the Air Force in the cyberspace domain,” according to the  
symposium Web site. That same week, New York City hosted the inaugural  
meeting of the Information Overload Research Group, a team of  
international academic and industry experts, whose charter is to  
“work together to build awareness of the world’s greatest challenge  
to productivity, ... and help make the business case for fighting  
information overload.”

Just as both conferences were getting underway, an e-mail from a well- 
intentioned but digitally undisciplined user announcing an opportunity  
to participate in what the sender called “the funniest card/dice  
game” was sent to several recipients’ Air Force e-mail accounts.  
The ensuing barrage of “please take me off your list” requests —  
sent to huge address groups on two installations — swelled in boxes  
all over Maxwell, the very installation hosting the cyber conference.  
It would be difficult to concoct a timelier example demonstrating the  
need for more exacting rules regarding the use of e-mail.

■
COL. PETER R. MARKSTEINER is director, Air Force Legal Operations  
Agency, Legal Information Services, at Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala.  
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not  
necessarily reflect those of the Air Force or Defense Department.