Ryan McBeth spent 20 years in the Army before becoming an intelligence analyst and software engineer. Now, he is using his expertise to create YouTube videos debunking misinformation being spread, especially as political and military tensions increase globally.
Host Ryan Robertson spoke with McBeth to discuss real and hypothetical events, and to discover why the former infantryman got into the truth-telling business to begin with.
The following interview excerpt has been edited for length and clarity. Watch the full interview in the video above!
Ryan Robertson: When we’re talking about the war in Ukraine — and that’s kind of major — your social media following balloons. What’s gotten you to the point now? Was it the Nazis in Ukraine disinformation video? Was that the first one that kind of blew up for you? Or what was the first one [that made you think] ‘I got something here?’
Ryan McBeth: So the first video that really blew up for me was a video that I did about why tank turrets pop off of their holes. I actually don’t know which was the first disinformation video. And I didn’t set out to become a disinformation expert, but I think that since I knew so much about the military and anti-tank warfare, I just kind of became an expert at going like, ‘No, you’re wrong, and here’s why you’re wrong. It’s because tanks actually do this, or reactive armor actually works like this.’
And what I kind of noticed was that there was just so much disinformation out there about how the military works that by me kind of peeling back some of this stuff, I found more and more stuff. And I guess over two years … I became really good at finding disinformation agents because they were just freaking everywhere on the subject of Ukraine.
Ryan Robertson: Obviously the the videos are doing well for you. So as a content creator, you see that, and you want to give the audience what they want, right? But the the audience flocks to that because there’s a desire for that, right? How important in your mind is the disinformation, misinformation take down for you?
Ryan McBeth: It’s more important now than I think it was at the start of the conflict in Ukraine, mainly because one of the things that I realized doing my work is that information war is a weapon. And one of the things I’ve done over the past year is I have traveled around giving speeches about how information war is a domain of warfare. In fact, I think I’m going to be in Ohio with the Ohio National Guard and all other judge advocate generals in the Ohio National Guard. They’re going to this one meeting, and I’m going to give a presentation where I’m going to try to convince them that we need to come up with a plan for treating information warfare practitioners as combatants.
Think about it like this. When you buy a drill, do you buy a drill because you want a drill, or do you buy a drill because you want a hole? [You buy it] because you want a hole, right? Nobody collects drills, right? You buy a drill because you need a hole. So when you buy a weapon, you don’t really buy a weapon. You buy a weapon because you’re going to need the effects of that weapon. And the effects of that weapon might be to destroy a bridge, right? So a weapon is really an effector.
So let’s say you want to prevent your adversary from crossing a bridge. You could use a weapon like a bomb or a cruise missile. Maybe you could use a cyber attack right, set a cyber attack and disable the electronic controls on the bridge so the toll gates won’t open or whatever. Or you could use information warfare to tell a bunch of weak-minded college students to go shut down the bridge because of colonialist, imperialist, whatever. We’ve already seen that when a bunch of students shut down a bridge, shut down the Golden Gate Bridge in California, that was a weapon. TikTok is a weapon.
These students are motivated by TikTok to shut down a bridge. And if the adversary can do that to a bridge, they can also say — if deterrence fails and China invades Taiwan — ‘China had Taiwan has always been Chinese. This is colonialist, imperialist. The U.S. is trying to take Taiwan for its own. You need to go to a naval base and glue yourself to a ship.’ And now you have an information warfare program working as a weapon system that is disabling a ship no different than a bomb can.
Usually I am very blunt when I’ve talked about how we need to kill these people, and when we start putting Hellfire missiles through people’s windows, or we start putting TLAMs into a into an office building that’s being used as an information warfare center, they’ll probably get the message. Usually, when people interview me about this and I tell them that, and I’m very blunt, we need to kill these people, usually they go, “Oh my goodness,” like clutching their pearls, “You’re gonna put a TLAM through someone’s window?”
There are other effects that you might be able to use. You might be able to use a cyber attack. There might be groundwork that you can do to take out critical parts of this operation. But we need to start considering is information were to be a domain of war land. The land domain has been a domain of war ever since someone picked up a spear and said, “I don’t like the way [that person] is always in charge.” And sea warfare has been a domain of war since the Peloponnesian War, where they were fighting on ships. And air has been a domain of war since we’ve had fighter planes, you know, World War I planes shooting at each other and well, now we have information war.
Russia can’t defeat Ukraine by force of arms. They can’t — they would have done it already. So how do you defeat Ukraine? Well, you can cut off their supply of arms. How does Russia do that? Well, they could use a weapon. They could bomb some of the factories in Germany and maybe use missiles on factories in the U.S. Well, that’ll cause a war.
But if [Russia] uses information war to convince people that Ukraine is corrupt, your money is getting thrown away. Vladimir Zelenskyy, his wife, just bought a new Bugatti with your tax dollars, well, then we get people to call their congressman and say, “I don’t want us sending money to Ukraine.” And that stops the munitions just as easily as a bomb. We are at war right now, and these people who are using information warfare to affect as an effector, they need to be targeted.
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