Graduate Certificate in Information Warfare

Overview

Information warfare is not new, but the delivery is. What once required a printing press, a radio transmitter or a sympathetic journalist now requires an account and a budget, and the effects land on populations who have no idea a campaign is running. Nation states, organized groups and individuals all have access, and the asymmetry is the point.

This certificate treats that seriously across two graduate courses.

The first builds the foundation: what information warfare is, how different nations conceptualize it, how it evolved, and the threats posed today by state and non-state actors. It covers the doctrine and the historical examples, then the role of cyber-enabled capabilities including artificial intelligence and foreign malign influence. Students analyze the information warfare capabilities of specific adversaries and the strategic implications for the United States.

The second goes operational. How information is weaponized and exploited in contemporary societies, worked through historical case studies and then through the twenty-first century technologies that deliver the effects. Students learn to construct and profile an adversary's influence strategy, tactics and infrastructure; to identify an entity's vulnerabilities to influence operations and build mitigation strategies; and to apply Threatcasting, a structured methodology for predicting future adversarial capabilities and tactics. The course ends with an experiential exercise: students produce an influence campaign for a selected threat actor against a selected target in a future year.

Norwich teaches this as an institution designated by the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security as a Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense.

What you will learn

By the end of the certificate you will be able to:

• Define information warfare as the field actually defines it, and explain how different nations conceptualize it differently
• Trace its historical evolution, and recognise current techniques as variations on older ones
• Assess the information warfare capabilities of specific state adversaries and of violent extremist organizations, and what each implies for the United States
• Account for the role of cyber-enabled capabilities, including artificial intelligence and foreign malign influence
• Profile an adversary's influence strategy, tactics and infrastructure from observable activity
• Identify an organization's or a population's vulnerabilities to influence operations, before someone else does
• Develop mitigation strategies against those vulnerabilities, which is the defensive point of the whole exercise
• Apply Threatcasting, a structured methodology for forecasting adversarial capabilities and tactics that do not exist yet
• Model a campaign end to end in the final experiential exercise, building out an influence campaign for a selected threat actor against a selected target in a future year

Visit our Admissions page for your next steps.

_{The appearance of U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) visual information does not imply or constitute DoD endorsement.}