What is Information Warfare?

Humpty Dumpty could well have been talking about information warfare. There is no universal or generally accepted definition of what ‘information warfare’ means and plenty of opportunity for a nice knock-down argument over it. A bewildering variety of terms may embrace, overlap with, or form part of, ‘information warfare’. 1 These include information-age warfare, information-based warfare, electronic warfare and command and control (C 2 ) warfare, a more manageable shorthand for C 4 I (command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence). They include cyber-warfare, cyber-terrorism, hacker warfare, psychological warfare and psychological operations; intelligence-based warfare, 2 net-war, 3 and software warfare 4 — which could, perhaps, be abbreviated to ‘softwar’. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.