Prof Shazia Cheema
FIFTH generation warfare is considered as future of warfare. However, being invisible cannot be perceived as war; therefore, common people don’t know about its mechanism. It’s an ongoing war with no bullet shots and no blood being shed. It is continuous, have no time-frame and ceasefire. Unlike traditional weaponry it requires information based technologies and access to important networks, also it has blurred war boundaries as traditional wars are always fought between geographical locations by two or more visible stakeholders but information warfare provides no clear evidence who is fighting against whom. Information warfare has one major target and that is perception management.
Pakistan and India have their respective fifth generation warfare forces, (Inter-Services Public Relations) ISPR-Pakistan and (Defence Information Warfare Agency) DIWA-India, being military offshoots both agencies are controlled by central armed command. Entire strategic manoeuvring revolves around the social, cultural, political semiotics and cognition. Cognitive semiotics is the study of human meaning making process; it deals with cognitive structure such as reasoning, judging and decision-making; why we understand what we understand and how we understand. The basic crux of information warfare is maintaining perceived perception, creating target perception, recreating reinforcing target perception, attention diverting and attention focusing
It is not just India and Pakistan fighting on this front, it is a must have battalion for every military force in the world, more powerful the country will be, more lethal this war will be. Don’t forget all those propaganda Hollywood mainstream movies, starting from the pre-cold war era till date. Information warfare required ammunition in the form of meaning making tools; film, media, theatre, fine arts and list goes on and on because human cognitive system is capable of creating meanings from variety of means and all these play crucial role in perception control. Future winner will be the one who control the mind without the mind knowing that it is being controlled.
To my utter amazement a song has canvassed the short-sightedness of a few who are mocking, creating bizarre memes and writing puns about the capability of an institution. The gist of the mockery is that a war cannot be won by singing songs, I wonder who are these people, how come they are naive enough not to comprehend the simple rule of future warfare; manoeuvring and manipulation, how can they forget that America and Russia are fighting on this front for years now, spending a bashing sum of money. Who said a dispute can be settled just by one song, it was a single shot in a continuous vicious warfare. Irrelevant remarks such as ISPR should not involve in singing and dancing, if ISPR will not involve in manipulation of meaning creating tools than who else will be? This is the duty of ISPR not SSG, armoured corps, not Infantry but ISPR, I totally agree that this song could have been effective with better poetry and better music but make sure its esthetic value is not in question as it is not Mozart’s symphony, shooting with words is different from shooting with bullets, words don’t kill on spot, one has to wait and see the results. Kindly do not have any doubt that Pakistan lags behind in information warfare.
Yes! war is an ugly business; no matter what tactics are being used, words or guns, in reality we are living in this geographical location where we cannot get away with it, but do not react unjustly if in future you come across, hypothetically saying that ISPR has bought FMRI machine and please do not start making caricature of generals wearing stethoscope and white overall as a few have done this. Military forces of some countries are already using brain mapping techniques for perfecting the information manipulation, moral of the story is; if functional neoro-imaging could be a weapon in the information warfare, then it is the perfect time to switch our mind from traditional sword fight to the dark, unmarked labyrinth of fifth generation warfare, where “everything is fare in war” is not just a figure of speech but a concrete realty. War is not just about tanks and bombs any more rather it is about songs, films and theatre, get use to it.
—The writer is associated with the University of Lahore.
