Digital Image-warfare:  Military and Political Perspective  

Media strategy determines how to represent the image of one's own national leadership, including how to handle cross-media platforms and respond to global crises. For example, President Biden is perceived as a leader who has endeavored to support both Ukrainian and Western interests, potentially garnering more sympathy from Western citizens.

Digital Image Warfare is not a novel concept for students of global affairs and modern warfare studies. A prominent instance in US strategic history, illustrating the implementation of its agenda through cooperative consensus building by UNSC authorization during the US-led Operation Desert Storm, was the utilization of Western media in the 1990 Gulf War.

The American airpower deployed to defend Kuwait from the Iraqi military was widely welcomed. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, both American and Western media sought to enhance the perception of US leadership on the world stage. On this particular occasion, CNN's live coverage of the battlefield became exceptionally popular, offering a portrayal of military action, and political, and strategic decision-making processes in alignment with Pentagon guidelines.

 Image warfare (Military perspective)

Throughout the First and Second World Wars, image warfare was successfully employed by manipulating the general public through print media while also creating a counter and defensive narrative.[i] The print media pages of the Russian, American, and Japanese governments were completely adorned with images of the combat zones.[ii] The Digital electro-optic and infrared sensors, High-definition (HD) has proved more useful for solving the battle data that is helpful for the soldiers to get accurate information. To sloving the problem of misguided information, the quality of high-resolution sensors attached with satellites and vast manned aircraft to smaller unmanned platforms,[iii] including the portable and manhandled devices that are also able to connect and provide the information to the particular troops or targeted troops of the ground.  

Geo-specific data is crucial for elucidating the true state of any given location[iv] during a war. This is because soldiers are under psychological strain to respond appropriately even when they receive unclear images of a particular battlefield; therefore, coordination between local location channels for fast communication, and sophisticated, real-time image processing re-evolutionary check of the images is necessary.[v] The newest generation of autonomous video trackers can also manipulate the picture in the direction, elevation, and rotating axes without requiring full rotational movement. In order to reduce the bandwidth needed for transmission and enable the user to overlay photographs with additional informational tools like a timer, GPS latitude/longitude, and map synchronisation function, some of the current processing cards also come equipped with built-in data compression.

Social Media Warfare (Impact over strategic communication)

Previously referred to as "Net warfare," social media warfare was a relatively new concept to political scientists, military strategists, and social engineering specialists 22 years ago. In Defense Affairs, Strategic Communication is a vital point where  the cognitive-affective process that explains the availability of choices, from the message to the transmission medium of communication. Later, the average impact of the communication is assessed, promoting the mutual understanding between two or more strategic communication channels.

Cognitive complexity[vi] is a crucial space where the breach of communication or misinformation can easily target the inter-dependency (frequency of information exchange might be hacked), creating misunderstandings. The validity of unlimited views,  about the one core information to increase the plausibility of understanding the accurate message in one or multiple different contexts. Incompatibility between the use of getting information and representing it demands the translation of communicated information before use, along with checking the resources with multiple other options to avoid errors.

Dynamic information complexity[vii] refers to the time constraints, efficient feedback, or changes in the process about one particular piece of information bound by the whole communication process. The time constraints are an alerting area for strategic communication channels. Sender-receiver separation at intercultural and organizational levels influences media selection, and information is exchanged between a supervisor and a subordinate quite effectively. Successful relationships require an understanding of sender-receiver connections. Common knowledge mitigates the impact of reciprocal trust on performance

A professional soldier is now indirectly connected to multiple types of social and political interests, so his professional duty and social and political identity may be psychologically targeted by third-party interests, which is more likely through social media warfare. Intercultural distance between the coordination body of communication tries to create less gap with their own efforts. As other Russian soldiers had previously shared on Telegram, he himself made a video outlining the internal issues in his battalion as well as the mobilisation of Sonder troops against the Russian Military, which was partially supported by a few Russian social media organizations.[viii] We may conclude that the Wagner Revolt group's social media warfare was unsuccessful at the influencing level.  Twitter(x)launched a successful operation in 2015 to identify accounts that were endangering and encouraging acts of terrorism. Following the conclusion of this operation, Twitter removed over 360,000 accounts that were associated with efforts to stop ISIS support campaigns.[xi]

Political Image Building (Political Perspective)

Although it is a very broad field of study, my point is too brief on how to use political image warfare to project leadership at the international level while addressing the specific interests of certain nations and international order management (South/North/Mid-Path Line). In national or domestic politics throughout the globe, social media marketing for politicians is much too common. [x] Working in the more competitive field of international diplomacy is the dismantling of the political cult personality into the single cult political figure in world politics.

Print and television media were formerly highly active on a regional and global scale during and after the Cold War, but with the US election in 2009, the digital political landscape began to shift. Both American and Western media outlets supported Obama's digital campaign to establish his legitimacy as a new global leader who can resolve various global economic crises and build international consensus.[xi] Even the divided North and South saw Obama as a symbol of hope for their respective countries.

The personality cult is linked to many states of ups and downs, as well as the degree to which a specific nation dominates the global digital order,[xii] which is crucial. At the international level, it matters how well a nation coordinates with major tech companies, information-sharing organizations, and efficacious digital diplomacy.[xiii] At the domestic level, it matters how a nation's political system controls the narratives in accordance with its own set of agendas. China and the United States are investing more than other nations at this time.

Footnotes:

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 [i] Loughlin O Ben, “Images as weapons of War: representation, mediation, and interpretation” Review of International Studies, Vol. 37( 1) Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp.71-91

[ii] Roth Zoe, “War of Image or Images of War? Visualizing History” Journal of Modern Literature , Vol. 41(1) Indiana University Press, pp 81-99, 2017

[iii] Mohsan H. & Agha S., “Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs): practical aspects, applications, open challenges, security issues, and future trends” Intelligent Service Robotics volume 16, Springer Journals,  16 Jan, 2023, pp.109-137

[iv1] Hassan A., “What is geospatial intelligence” Data Science, 6, 2023

URL: https://builtin.com/data-science/geospatial-intelligence

[v] Li, Sang & T.Ruan, “A real-time and high-performance MobileNet accelerator based on adaptive dataflow scheduling for image classification”  24 Nov, 2023, Journal of Real-Time Image Processing

[vi] Straus, S. G., & McGrath, J. E. "Does the Medium Matter? The Interaction of Task Type and Technology on Group Performance and Member Reactions," Journal of Applied Psychology (79:1), 1994, pp. 87

[vii] Diehl, E., & Sterman, J. D. "Effects of Feed- back Complexity on Dynamic Decision Making," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (62:2), 1995, pp. 198-215.

 [viii] Bergengruen Vera, “The Telegram Mutiny” Time,  27June, 2023

URL: https://time.com/6290378/yevgeny-prigozhin-wagner-telegram/

[ix] Ruvic, Dado. "Twitter Shuts Down 360,000 Accounts for Links to Terrorism.” Reuters/Newsweek. August 18, 2016. http://www.newsweek.com/twitter-islamic-state-360000-isis-accounts-terrorism-al-qaeda-491568

(x] Hendricks JA, & Denton RE, “Communicator-In-Chief: How Barack Obama used new media technology to win the White House”. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2010

[xi] Issenbergarchive Sasha, “How Obama’s Team Used Big Data to Rally Voters: How President Obama’s Campaign Used Big Data to Rally Individual Voters.” MIT, Technology Reviews, USA, 19, December, 2022

URL: https://www.technologyreview.com/2012/12/19/114510/how-obamas-team-used-big-data-to-rally-voters/

[xii] US Department of State, Federal Government of United States, “The U.S. Department of State International Technology Security and Innovation Fund” 2022, Washington DC, USA

URL: https://www.state.gov/the-u-s-department-of-state-international-technology-security-and-innovation-fund/

[xiii] Digital diplomacy, 2023

URL: ttps://www.diplomacy.edu/topics/digital-diplomacy/#types-of-technology-and-diplomacy