“To capture the enemy's entire army is better than to destroy it; to take intact a regiment, a company, or a squad is better than to destroy them. For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the supreme excellence. Thus, what is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy's strategy. Next best is to disrupt his alliances by diplomacy. The next best is to attack his army. And the worst policy is to attack cities”--- Sun Tzu

 Many years ago Sun Tzu has quoted, “To have hundred victories in hundred battles is not the acme of skill; but subduing the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill”. This eternal truth is never realised as much as that of today. When the conflicts between nations are becoming increasingly asymmetric and the synergised wherein there is far greater convergence of the conventional defence forces as well as the technocrats and diplomats, and peace time manoeuvres are more emphasised than the direct face-to-face conflicts; the wars are fought at an entirely different plane. From the dusty battle grounds, the war has finally moved into the minds and the technologies. Basically the wars of today are going to be cyber wars which can be otherwise called as information warfare.  The cyber warfare variously known as information warfare, psychological warfare (Psyops) is not a new maxim; it is as old as Hitler’s era when he said “…the infantry in trench warfare will in future be taken by revolutionary propaganda, to break down the enemy psychologically before the armies begin to function at all.” Here the word used by him propaganda signifies the new term information warfare.But what a party will do with the information? It matters how a party utilises the information to understand the enemy and how to attack, as said by Sun Tzu” the psychology of the adversaries”. This building up on the available information so as to create psychological dip in the adversaries is what can be easily, called managing the perception about the status of the war, about one’s own self and thereby influencing the decision making process of the target. This perception management is going to be a critical affair today when the warfare has been becoming more and more sophisticated, as the level of information gathered and disseminated are increasingly getting higher.

What is perception management:-

Now when we embark upon the discussion on the use of perception management and its utility in the post modernist information warfare, it is pertinent to understand the concept of perception management. The US Department of Defence defines it as

“Actions to convey and/or deny selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning as well as to intelligence systems and leaders at all levels to influence official estimates, ultimately resulting in foreign behaviours and official actions favourable to the originator's objectives. In various ways, perception management combines truth projection, operations security, cover and deception, and psychological operations”.

In more practical ways the perception management in a nutshell can be defined by the DIME principle. The following figure provides the pictorial view of DIME principle.

In simpler terms, when two actors are involved in a mutually inclusive phenomenon, be it a war or any other interactive endeavour, each builds a certain perception about the other. If one actor is able to interfere with the perception held by the other (towards it), modifies it to his own advantage, then he gets a head start in the interactive process as he gains psychological advantage over the other. This interference with the perception of others and thereby suitably modifying it to one’s own advantage is called perception management in layman’s terminologies.

Now let’s try to understand the dynamics of perception management as an interactive phenomenon. Perception management is not limited to warfare only. But for the purview of the topic, we can consider the warlike situation as the ideal platform to analyse the dynamics of perception management. War is basically a two dimensional interactive phenomena where in two actors take part. The phenomena is taken to be two dimensional for simplicity sake, under the assumption that the action of one actor is guides and guided by the action of the other. Hence there is free flow of information amongst the various sub actors under one actor and restricted information flow between the two actors. So in an ideal state if the system is considered to be a closed one, the entropy is controlled. It is an established fact that in an information flow some amount of noise is inevitable. If by any means, the noise is so much increased that the situation becomes chaotic due to distortion of information, then the entropy would be increased in a chaotic manner. Earlier the natural entropy of the system was in check because in a non exclusive interactive system, certain level information sharing was mutual with least distortion. Now one actor knowingly increases the noise means, he knowingly distorts the information flow so that the entropy which was in check would be released to make situation chaotic. Hence the natural entropy of the system comes to the hands of one player and that is a great advantage to the tune of winning the battle. In the above depiction how we fit in the idea of perception management. In the above analysis, the flow of information is the media of building perception about one another. When there is total transparency in perception about each other, each one knows what the other is capable of and what he is supposed to do in case of an assault. So there is sort of dynamic equilibrium, which in the above paragraph is mentioned as the stabilised entropy. Now the management of perception is the simile for the deliberate distortion of the information, so that there is mismatch about the knowledge of each other’s capabilities. The more efficiently one manages the information to one’s favour, the sooner he gets the ability to control the natural entropy; to say in simple words, gains more ground.

This very phenomenon can be better understood through the principle of Kopp’s hyper-game theory. The following diagram shows the Kopp’s hyper-game models in two cases.

The first situation is the ideal dynamic model where the actions of player A are well perceived by Player B and vice versa and this helps in building a decision (outcome model) for the respective players. However in the second situation each player has two locus of decision making for its actions: a> the outcome model of each player himself b>the perceived model, one player has about the other’s decision modules, named as outcome model. Now suppose Player A creates the image of very powerful entity in the minds of the Player B. This means Player A has created a different perception about itself in the minds of player B. This only happens with the proper management of information flow. In such a situation the decision making of B is indirectly being influenced by A to the latter’s advantage. In a real life situation this advantage may mean deterring a war or building reputation worldwide to gain psychological victories.

Perception management: a corporate phenomenon

 Perception management is not something of an innovation for war. It is one of the many boons of the corporate sector, especially the advertisement sector. As described earlier many times, in any two dimensional transaction perception is the medium that prepares the base for the contract. For example, in business it is the perception the stake holders might have with a certain product or a certain service provider. If an organization suppose, SAIL has implemented SAP for its inventory management then it is because it perceives SAP is a superior package compared to other similar ERP packages available in the market. And what is the role of SAP Ag. (the company which provides the SAP package ) ? It markets its product in such a way that every potential buyer, which we might refer as stake holder, tend to perceive it as a superior package. This phase is called building perception. What is perception management in corporate sector then? Sometimes there exists a  Perception management is not something of an innovation for war. It is one of the many boons of the corporate sector, especially the advertisement sector. As described earlier many times, in any two dimensional transaction perception is the medium that prepares the base for the contract. For example, in business it is the perception the stake holders might have with a certain product or a certain service provider. If an organization suppose, SAIL has implemented SAP for its inventory management then it is because it perceives SAP is a superior package compared to other similar ERP packages available in the market. And what is the role of SAP Ag. (the company which provides the SAP package ) ? It markets its product in such a way that every potential buyer, which we might refer as stake holder, tend to perceive it as a superior package. This phase is called building perception. What is perception management in corporate sector then? Sometimes there exists a gap between the perception of the organization (service or goods provider) and the stakeholders. Then it is the duty of the organization to fill the gaps of the perception so that the organization and stake holder come in synergy. So basically by perception management enterprise builds reputational value among its stake holder by playing through their psychology. Though it has been a corporate innovation, this strategy is well taken by the US army in a well organized manner, though it has been used since long by armies of different countries since the days of Hydapes war to World War 2.

The concluding part will be published soon........