Normative- Empathetic Warfare

by Chris Lapp

"Normative-Empathetic warfare" is the combat mode of the twenty-first century. The method involves adopting an empathetic view of the victim, parsing his value schemata, and then creating a situation where his value schemata bias him in favor of an action that can later lead to the victim's control by the adversary, and/or ultimately his destruction.

For theory, it is based on the writings of Karl Mannheim and Jurgend Habermas (_Sociology of Knowledge_, and _Knowledge and Humand Interests_). For practice, it refines the art of "dirty tricks" to an empirical science.

Let's take a practical example to illustrate how a normative-empathetic attack on a three-letter intelligence community employee might occur. Let's for the sake of argument assume we don't know who the intelligence community employee is, i.e. we have no idea of his name, his address, his personal life, his income, etc. The only thing we know of are his values, and the fact that he investigates "anomalies" in the political and social life of say, the United States. Here is how it would be approached.

1. Like any good war, the goals of the endeavor need to be thoroughly planned out before the operation begins. Let's say, for the purpose of this discussion, that the object is to produce the forced retirement of a group of particularly effective intelligence agents, as a purely internal disciplinary measure on the part of the intelligence agency.

2. In order to do this, some knowledge of the internal auditing and counterintelligence resources deployed internally in the agency needs to be at least theoretically assumed. Since similar operations tend to have similar controls, the adversary's counterintelligence policies would do nicely as a model for the victim's controls. The goal then, is to create enough of a prima facie case against the agents that an internal audit and counterintelligence effort is undertaken. The key is that a one-time application of this approach is inadequate, rather, using a variety of channels the prima facie evidence must appear again and again, so that the more effort the agents expend in trying to do a good job, the greater the investigative resources the internal auditors will deploy against them.

3. Let's, for the sake of argument, design an attack against the crews monitoring nuclear forces in the USSR. How would the USSR discredit the Free World analysts of satellite data? Remember, they don't know who they are, only what the analysts do. The only advantage the USSR has is that it >controls< the input, i.e. what the satellites see. The U.S. analysts must write about what they see, and therein lies the rub.

4. Here's how a normative empathetic attack against Satellite Analysts might proceed:

Day One: The phrase "WE PAY $20,000 TO YOUR ACCOUNT" is spelled out using truck and missle equipment normally hidden in siberia, in a message several hundred yards long. The satellite analysts spot it and report it up the command chain.

Day Two: Twenty thousand dollars in cash suddenly turns up in packets delivered to U.S. Embassies across the world.

Day Three: A satellite suddenly veers off course, and drops a small parachuted package into a sparsely populated portion of Colorado, near a strategic command center. The package has a strong radio beacon attached to it. When the authorities find it they discover it contains a bottle of high quality imported scotch, with a U.S. price tag on it. It has the fingerprints of the Secretary of State, and the President on it.

Day Four: All of a sudden, encryption on the Soviet Diplomatic Communications Channels ceases, and arguments over the best local restaurants, vodka, personal marriage problems, confessions of loneliness, complaints about embassy food, apartments, furniture, and clothing are broadcast in plaintext.

Day Five: A plainload of schoolboys from Moscow lands in Washington D.C., each with a diplomatic passport. Their luggage consists of a single attache case, with twenty-thousand dollars in small, worn bills in it. They are hustled aboard a bus, have lunch at the Soviet Embassy, and are put on the next AEROFLOT flight back to Russia.

Day Six: Everything returns to normal. The events described above are not repeated. The fun begins.

5. The normal conceptualization and processing of intelligence data would cease, and the experts would have to report a crisis to their superiors. Because of the money, booze, and plaintext messages, the U.S. would be forced to conclude that somebody with access to this anomalous information had gone bad. A major counterintelligence investigation would ensue, into the most sensitive areas of the U.S. Government. Repeating this process using different actions, timed and placed for different targets would effectively throw the intelligence community into a loop!

Chris Lapp