From the RAND Corporation, August 11, 2023:
Planning Ethical Influence Operations
A Framework for Defense Information Professionals
Key Findings....U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) efforts to plan and conduct influence operations in an ethical manner face several challenges, including concerns regarding the appropriateness of any influence activity, a lack of explicit consideration of ethics in the influence-planning process, and decoupling the ethics of force from the ethics of influence in military operations. Currently, DoD lacks a framework to explicitly consider the ethics of an influence activity outside legal review.
Ethics scholarship reveals that the principal ethical objection to influence is its threat to autonomy. Although influence is a threat to autonomy and is thus morally fraught, this scholarship points to several situations in which influence activities might be justified.
This report includes (1) clear ethical principles that should govern the planning and conduct of influence operations; (2) clear procedures for assessing ethics and the ethical risk associated with a proposed influence operation; and (3) guidelines for creating a justification statement for a proposed influence operation based on a preliminary ethical determination so that reviewers and approvers are presented with a consistent, coherent, and nonarbitrary ethical evaluation with which they can engage and agree or disagree.
The authors offer a principles-based framework for military practitioners to determine whether a proposed influence effort is ethically permissible and guidance for preparing a justification statement that allows approvers to follow the ethical logic behind a proposed influence effort.
And many more. We find RAND to usually be commonsensical with that last post being an exception that borders on farce.RAND: "Truth Decay Is Putting U.S. National Security at Risk"
This is pretty funny. The following essay expounds on the fact that there is a lack of trust in the country and somehow manages to avoid mentioning the lies of government agencies and the lies of the media for the last seven or eight years.It's akin to, and as crazy as, Barbara Fried saying the prosecutors have ruined her family's reputation. Sam and Gabe and herself and Mr. Bankman. Reputations ruined.
