Combat Credibility in the Information Age: Why America Must Learn to Win in TikTok Time

In an era where information moves faster than missiles, the United States military is losing ground, not on the battlefield, but online. While America maintains unmatched kinetic power, its ability to tell its own story has fallen behind. Our adversaries understand that shaping perception is a form of power. China and Russia are executing sophisticated, real-time information operations while the U.S. still relies on press releases and photo ops. We are prepared for twenty-first-century warfare, but still communicating like it's the Cold War.

Take TikTok, for example. Chinese state-affiliated accounts use it to showcase military exercises that look like high-end movie trailers, according to intelligence reports revealing how the Chinese Communist Party views TikTok as a strategic tool for military influence operations. They are slick, stylized, and emotionally charged. Russian information warfare teams flood Telegram with pre-packaged narratives, often tailored to local audiences and laced with plausible lies, as documented in recent Atlantic Council research on thousands of fake accounts targeting occupied Ukrainian territories. These platforms reward immediacy, visual impact, and repetition. America's official communication, by contrast, often feels slow, sterile, and reactive.

This is not just a public relations problem. It is a strategic vulnerability. When the world watches a conflict unfold, the first narrative to take hold often becomes the lasting one. In contested environments, perception is often the deciding factor in shaping alliances, morale, and legitimacy. Our adversaries understand that if they can dominate the narrative space, they can shape how force is interpreted before it is even used. China's latest efforts represent what experts call "cognitive warfare" — a coordinated campaign using social media to target adversaries and influence public opinion.

Too often, U.S. strategic communications are treated as an afterthought, delegated to junior officers or wrapped in bureaucratic layers of review. The result is a communications posture that is cautious when it should be bold, sanitized when it should be clear, and reactive when it must be proactive. Silence or delay can be just as damaging as misinformation. In an attention economy, absence speaks volumes.

We have seen the cost of this gap. In the early days of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Moscow launched a barrage of disinformation to justify its actions. Russian channels like "The War on Fakes" spread disinformation and propaganda to hundreds of thousands of followers, as TIME documented in their analysis of Telegram's role as a digital battlefield. It was only thanks to an unusually agile and coordinated response by Ukrainian officials, aided by open-source intelligence and social media-savvy citizens, that the narrative battle did not go entirely Russia's way. The U.S. supported that effort, but often from the sidelines.

The Department of Defense must treat the information domain with the same seriousness it gives to cyber, space, or logistics. This means standing up a joint narrative command cell empowered to operate at speed. It means making digital fluency a requirement across the force, not just for public affairs officers. It means embracing new tools, partnering with content creators, and rethinking clearance procedures that slow down communication in the name of control.

Public trust is part of national defense. So is global credibility. We cannot deter if we cannot explain. We cannot reassure allies if we cannot be heard. And we cannot lead if our adversaries control the narrative.

The U.S. military does not need to out-meme its rivals. But it does need to understand that in the information age, credibility is measured in frames per second. Increasingly, TikTok is not a toy, it is a battlespace. We must learn to fight like it.