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In 1990, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and its clandestine propaganda machine, the West became increasingly confident that globalization supported by an information technology network, the Internet, would increase openness, liberalism, and democracy; the core values of the 'free world'. Western leaders knew then, just as they know now, a quarter of a century later that the power of the Internet would grow as the technology that controls its use develops. And developed it has. However, no development is all good and the Internet is no exception. It seems that the technology that has enabled us to create a "global village" where people are able to communicate in a way that is open, free and that bypasses the encumbrances of class and ethnicity has also brought with it a very dark underworld, an uncontrolled rhizome or meshwork, where propaganda, trolling and hate speeches are rife.

How do organizations survive in the face of change? This is a key question for Western military organizations after the Iraq War and its consequences. All human crises are manmade because of we are human beings. The spreading of individual risk also increases systemic risk. The root cause of the problem is what has been termed "rational irrationality" – behavior that, on the individual level, is perfectly reasonable but that, when aggregated in a complex system, produces calamity (Alpaslan & Mitroff, 2010, xvii). From the perspective of organizational adaptation and learning, March (1991) argues that a significant number of competencies needs to be learnt and unlearnt during each and every process of change. According to Birkinshaw and Gibson (2011, 2004), in many sports, ambidexterity is a competitive advantage. Footballers are encouraged to use both left and right foot; left-handed batsmen have a slight advantage against right handed bowlers; the southpaw boxer presents a rarely encountered challenge to a boxer with an orthodox stance; some ambidextrous tennis players even use both hands, separately, to play strokes during a rally. And while some individuals are naturally two-handed or two-footed, many work hard to gain an advantage by practising until they master ambidexterity. The challenge for public security and safety organizations is that with terrorism and changes brought on by cyber-security they are faced with their greatest challenge since the end of World War Two. Not only are the structures and operating procedures undergoing change but also attitudes and values are pressed on by a changing society. Rational black and white thinking no longer functions when immigrants, various ethnic backgrounds, social media and the operating mechanisms and values of market economy force their way into the training grounds of military bases and battlefields. This article examines the usefulness of the concept of ambidexterity as part of the Comprehensive Approach planning and decision-making process adopted by Western military organizations.

The history of combat is primarily the history of radically changing fields of perception. In other words, war consists not so much of scoring territorial, economic or other material victories but of appropriating the immateriality of perceptual field. The function of the eye has become the function of the weapons (Virilio, 1989; 2009). To understand information age warfare we have to understand the concept of representation as a part of our process of violence. The idea of information warfare or an information operation is based on the process where the physical target is no longer destroyed with the kinetic systems, but the process where the non-kinetic systems, like information, scan the symbols-semiotics networks. We like to consume safety different kind of fears. The feeling of the safety fear based on the virtual boundaries, which are set in the movement from "principle" to "practice, in other words in the actualization of the cyber-form. The power of fear is not a form. It is not abstract. It is the movement of form into the content outside of which it is a void of potential function, of the abstract into the particular it cannot be or do without. (see Massumi 1993, 20-21) Today, particularly the advanced mobile technology, the Internet and the entertainment industry immensely exploit the experiences from different wars and conflicts for example as ideas of computer games. In return the military industrial complex represents its own language for example in the concept of information operations with the help of applications particularly rising from the entertainment industry. The roles of Hector and Achilles, the teachings of Jomini and Clausewitz have an effect in the background of games and gaming. Opposite to Clauseiwitz's thinking, Jomini took the view that the amount of force deployed should be kept to the minimum in order to lower casualties and that war was a science, not an art. The most central genres in gaming are "strategy", "adventure", "shooter", "sports", "simulation", "music", "role playing" and "puzzle". All of these are related to warfare one way or another. Another interesting fact is that in the 1950's the first computer games were mathematic strategy based games that that had been developed in universities (Czosseck, 2009; Peltoniemi, 2009).

AbstractIn this reflective paper, we study the tension between leadership and institutional control in contemporary Western military organizations. More precisely, we focus on two (out of five) NATO measures of merit, namely the Measure of Performance (MOP) and the Measure of Effectiveness (MOE), and how they manifest this tension at the operational level. We suggest that fixed leadership roles are not enough - what is required instead is an adaptive, pragmatic and even rebellious attitude towards the military bureaucracy in the contemporary, ever-changing conflict landscape.

How to steer military actions that are concurrent both in the real world and in virtual networks? After the great wars of the 20th century and the Cold War with the threat of nuclear warfare, the information revolution, as well as the emergence of new wars and global threats, has led to an increasingly complex security space of the 21st century. A corner of this space is occupied by private military and security contractors that have been introduced to the wide public as previously undetected actors operating in conflict zones. These developments have required the re-thinking of military organisation, planning and conduct. This article scrutinises the basic principle and key concepts of a new western politico-strategic level military planning model called the Comprehensive Approach. It is a Wikileaks type of open door policy: everyone operating in the same real space can participate in the shared virtual planning space. The model's usability in the new military atmosphere is under theoretical scrutiny. Challenges that the open planning creates to the military organisation are highlighted.

Abstract
Strategic communication has replaced information warfare. As Art of War has been replaced by science, the representations of war and the role of the military have changed. Both war and military forces are now associated with binary roles: destruction vs. humanity, killing vs. liberating. The logic behind 'bombing for peace' is encoded in the Grand Military Narrative. This narrative is hidden in American (and NATO) strategies such as Effects Based Operations, which rely heavily on technology. As people aim to rationalize the world with technology, they fail to take into account the uncertainty it brings. In warfare, that uncertainty is verbalized as "friendly fire", "collateral damage" or simply as "accident". Success and failure are up to technology. Technology is no longer a tool, but an ideology and an actor that not only 'enables' the military to take action, but legitimizes it.
This article aims to contribute to military studies by analyzing, in the spirit of critical discourse analysis, American 'Grand Military Narrative' and he standard and trends of rhetoric it creates. The article focuses on pinpointing some of the linguistic choices and discourses that define the so-called 'techno-speak', the product of modern techno-ideology. These discourses result in representations of techno-centered binary values, which steer military strategy and foreign policy.

Defining things through binary opposition - male/female, familiar/foreign, life/death - forms the base of human thinking. Adding moral assessment to logic, we often represent binaries even as divisions into good and evil. Exclusions based on the division of Us vs. Them make their presence felt during any conflict, and become crucial in times of war. However, binary thinking is inherent also in peaceful, everyday conversation, when politics, social issues, ethnicities and religious identities

Disinformation and misinformation about COVID-19 have proliferated, particularly on social media. The purpose of this paper is to show the rhizomic nature of COVID-19-related dis- and misinformation having aspect of conspiracy theories, which are used on social media platforms to counter the official narratives about the origins of the virus. Consisting of 40 news-style articles, the data was used to find out how a conspiracy theory about the virus being a possible man-made bioweapon was presented to the audience. The results indicate that the rhizomatic structure of COVID-19 conspiracy theories makes it possible to vary the narratives based on the platform where it is published and the target audience. Information spreads in unexpected ways, and it is difficult to control or predict the spread of extremist content. This makes it possible for different actors, governments, and organizations to use information for their own purposes as a weapon of information warfare.

This study sets out to explore embodied aspects of military routines. It conceptualises the body as a waking-sleeping being and analyses routines from the perspective of sleep. In doing so, it challenges the privileged position wakefulness has had in earlier explorations of military routines. We have conducted a multi-year ethnographic study at a military training camp in Finland and analysed how cadets enact routines during their training. The analysis demonstrates how their bodies balance between sleeping and waking and remain active while asleep. We thus offer a rich micro-level understanding of the dynamic aspects of the sleeping-waking body's enactment of routines. Our study has implications for the studies of military bodies and military routines.

Securing the society is a central task of the state. In the present day, as well as in the future, knowledge and information are evermore closely tied to electronic data transfer. Finland's newly published Cyber Security Strategy depicts how the government safeguards electronic data transfer, that is, information security against different threat and risk scenarios. Cyberspace has a human element and a technological element. It is a way to influence and affect society. It may be used to influence minds or to attack the physical world, for example by disrupting traffic control. But cyberspace cannot exist without people. The cyberspace offers the platform so called strategic communication. Strategic communication is a concept that unites the efforts of governmental organisations to influence people in support of national interests. Formal organisations and institutions are often seen as being opposed or resistant to change. Social Media and the cyber domain can offer many opportunities but also unknown threats and risks. In this paper we argue that securing an organisation is a living and continuously changing process. Deleuze and Guattari (1983) present the concept of a rhizome, meaning a dynamic weed formation which, opposed to the arboreal and hierarchical structure of the tree, involves spontaneous, unpredictable and distant connections between heterogeneous elements (Linstead & Thanem 2007, 1484) Strategic Communication is the focus of a heated discussion in the military field: How can militaries be credible and uphold the high standards of democracy within the asymmetric and complex battlefield? To be credible one must act according to what is said. The challenge is that the scene is global in the information age. The act, the actor, the scene, the purpose – all are exposed to a global audience through cyberspace on a very short notice. The most effective way of showing the scene and actors is an audiovisual product. Examples of this come from all conflict zones. Militaries are establishing Youtube channels and supplying material from intense fighting and frontline action. The solution for supporting the organisation's own arguments has been the Combat Camera capability, in other words media-trained soldiers who are where the main effort is happening. Within the spirit of strategic communication, the cyber strategy itself is one way to operationalise cyber security by announcing measures to be taken against cyber attacks. In this article the authors reflect on the Finnish Cyber Strategy and Strategic Communications from a phenomenological perspective.

Security strategy work requires a definition for 'cyberspace'. This article discusses national definitions and analyses their contents. Defining what cyberspace is equals the exercise of political power. Therefore, it is important to discuss what the definitions mean in practice - whether cyberspace is seen as a restricted mathematical-technological domain or a social construction. Government publications highlight the technological aspect of cyberspace, whereas threats stem from human behaviour. For some, cyberspace is a primary operational environment for national security that must be protected with defensive and offensive military means. For others, cyberspace is primarily a digital civil society in which the free flow and usability of information and the identity and anonymity of citizens must be secured. Cyberspace can also be seen as a place for business, where material and immaterial products and services can be offered. The authors argue for the broad definition of cyberspace, incorporating both technological and social concepts. But cyberspace may never be comprehensively defined. If only a strictly technology-oriented approach is used to define cyberspace, many of its risks and problems cannot be addressed. Cyberspace allows the exercise of power; therefore, its definition should not be reduced to pure technology.

This article describes how Public Safety Organisations (PSO) come up against hybrid, demanding operations like terrorist attack or school shootings more frequently. Obtaining a realistic situation picture is crucial in organising the rescue operation and in minimising further violence. The role of PSOs' 24/7 situation centres becomes vital. In this paper, the authors explore how PSOs can ensure an information flow and a situation picture in hybrid environments. The empirical data were official reports and the data collected through interviews with staff at different PSOs. It was analysed using qualitative content analysis. Achieving a common operational picture involves taking account of each authority's needs and constraints, thereby enabling the exchange of relevant information between key authorities on-scene and off-scene. In addition, human factors play an important role in complex, multi-authority missions. Furthermore, the increasing role of citizens and social media in producing valuable information should not be overlooked.