全球智库信息集成服务系统

• National security will increasingly rely on a resilient information environment and, even more fundamentally, a strong social topography. These elements likely require classic forms of information security as well as strong mediating institutions and a population continuously inoculated against the techniques of social manipulation.
• The barrier between public and private endeavors and responsibilities is blurring; national security will rely on the cooperation of private actors as much as public investments. The technologies and techniques of this form of conflict are increasingly available to a wide range of actors. Private power in this realm matches and, in some cases, exceeds public power.
• Conflict will increasingly be waged between and among networks. State actors are likely to develop such networks to avoid attribution and strengthen their virtual societal warfare capabilities against retaliation. It will be much more difficult to understand, maintain an accurate portrait of, and hit back against a shadowy global network.

The evolution of advanced information environments is rapidly creating a new category of possible cyberaggression that involves efforts to manipulate or disrupt the information foundations of the effective functioning of economic and social systems. RAND researchers are calling this growing threat virtual societal warfare in an analysis of its characteristics and implications for the future.

To understand the risk of virtual societal warfare, the authors surveyed evidence in a range of categories to sketch out some initial contours of how these techniques might evolve in the future. They grounded the assessment in (1) detailed research on trends in the changing character of the information environment in the United States and other advanced democracies; (2) the insights of social science research on attitudes and beliefs; and (3) developments in relevant emerging technologies that bear on the practices of hostile social manipulation and its more elaborate and dangerous cousin, virtual societal warfare. The authors then provide three scenarios for how social manipulation could affect advanced societies over the next decade.

The analysis suggests an initial set of characteristics that can help define the emerging challenge of virtual societal warfare, including that national security will increasingly rely on a resilient information environment and a strong social topography, and that conflict will increasingly be waged between and among networks. Although more research is urgently required, the authors conclude by pointing to several initial avenues of response to enhance democratic resilience in the face of this growing risk, including by building forms of inoculation and resilience against the worst forms of information-based social manipulation and by better understanding the workings and vulnerabilities of emerging technologies.

• Chapter One

  A New Form of Conflict

• Chapter Two

  The Evolving Infosphere

• Chapter Three

  Insights from Social Science

• Chapter Four

  Emerging Technologies

• Chapter Five

  Future 1: The Death of Reality (2025 Scenario)

• Chapter Six

  Future 2: Silos of Belief (2024 Scenario)

• Chapter Seven

  Future 3: The Rise of the Algorithms (2026 Scenario)

• Chapter Eight

  The Emerging Risk of Virtual Societal Warfare