Abstract: America’s adversaries are waging a decades-long information war calibrated to advance their national interests at the expense of the United States while avoiding direct and decisive conflict with the US military. Key to their strategy is exploiting ubiquitous, high-speed connectivity to directly access the American people, a national center of gravity. Simultaneously, the US government is poorly organized to engage in information conflict, lacking a unified theory, definition, doctrine, and organizational structure for Information Warfare (IW). This four-part essay develops a theory of IW using first principles of information theory. It presents a novel IW definition, taxonomy, attack vectors, and theory of victory to inform how the United States thinks and competes within the information environment and concludes with recommendations for how the United States might compete in the information war through military and civilian action. This first of four essays establishes a historical basis for thinking about information warfare as a key component of conflict from the earliest recorded battles to today.
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