The U.S. Department of Defense has influence tasks, capabilities, and missions but lacks a formal means for considering the ethics of influence operations aside from legal review. Using the principles of necessity, effectiveness, and proportionality, the authors develop a framework for evaluating influence efforts in three phases: an initial screening, a full ethical risk assessment, and a justification statement.

Planning Ethical Influence Operations

A Framework for Defense Information Professionals

Christopher Paul, William Marcellino, Michael Skerker, Jeremy Davis, Bradley J. Strawser

ResearchPublished Aug 11, 2023

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.

Key Takeaways

  • Influence operations should be necessary, effective, and proportional.
  • Military influence efforts should (1) seek legitimate military outcomes, (2) be necessary to attain those outcomes, (3) employ means that are not harmful (or harm only those liable to harm), (4) have a high likelihood of success, and (5) should not generate second-order effects beyond what is intended. Efforts that do not wholly satisfy all criteria might still be justified, but only if the expected benefit substantially outweighs the likely harm.
  • The framework structuring the application of these principles should unfold in three phases: an initial screening, followed by a full ethical risk assessment (if necessary) and the preparation of a justification statement.

Recommendations

  • Joint and service doctrine that are relevant to influence operations should include the consideration of ethical concerns.
  • Planners and practitioners should adhere to ethical principles and should follow a logical process to make ethical determinations, either using the process detailed in this report or another that bears similar results.
  • An ethical review process like the one described in this report should be formally added to the review and approval process for influence operations to provide greater clarity to planners and reviewers and increase process discipline.

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Paul, Christopher, William Marcellino, Michael Skerker, Jeremy Davis, and Bradley J. Strawser, Planning Ethical Influence Operations: A Framework for Defense Information Professionals. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2023. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA1969-1.html.
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The research described in this report was prepared for the Office of the Secretary of Defense and conducted by the International Security and Defense Policy Program within the RAND National Security Research Division.

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