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BACK TO : STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS c. 2006 onwards
The Pentagon's brand-new plan for winning the battle of ideas by L Robinson 
The Propaganda War The Pentagon's brand-new plan for winning the battle of ideas against terrorists By Linda Robinson Posted 5/21/06 Pentagon officials have just finished writing a document that they hope will help officials steer a path through contentious debates over how the military should handle communications, seen as central to the war on terrorism and, more generally, to the promotion of U.S. interests. The terrorists' increasingly savvy use of videos and the Internet to recruit followers and shape world opinion has given added urgency to the project. The document, called the "strategic communications roadmap," a copy of which was obtained by U.S. News, has been through 10 drafts by senior officials; final approval is expected in the next few weeks. While U.S. counterterrorism and security strategies call for more robust engagement in the "battle of ideas," the Pentagon has been plagued by internecine skirmishing among various military disciplines, each of which has traditionally had a claim on different types of communications. Strategic communications is the military's umbrella term for a variety of disciplines having to do with information: public affairs, military support to public diplomacy, psychological operations, and battlefield uses of information, such as military deception. According to Lt. Gen. Gene Renuart, the Joint Staff's director of plans and policy and one of the senior officials involved in the new information strategy, "the desire was to look at our doctrine, our training, our integration, how we work in the interagency [environment], and then ultimately create a culture that understood strategic communication is not just public affairs, information operations or psychological operations, legislative affairs or public diplomacy, but it is the totality of that that you have to work to be effective." The goal, Renuart explained, "is to lay out a process for the Defense Department that can position us for the next 15 years." The new Pentagon road map calls for a series of steps, some of which have already been taken. A new Strategic Communications secretariat has been formed with 16 staff members who will research important or contentious issues, such as the recent Dubai ports debate or ballistic missile defense. A Strategic Communications Integration Group of four senior Pentagon officials (the director of the Joint Staff, under secretary for policy, assistant secretary for public affairs, and the Joint Staff's strategic communications director) will decide how to handle those issues, adjudicate policy disputes, and ensure that no government agencies are blindsided by others' activities. Recognizing that far more defense dollars are spent on weapons than on wordsmithing, the document's drafters also plan to seek more funds to expand and professionalize the education given to information warriors. Doing better. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has been agitating for some time for a much more proactive effort to get America's message out and to counter the terrorists' highly effective use of communications media. During a visit to the Army War College in March, Rumsfeld said, "If I were grading, I would say we probably deserve a D or D plus as a country as to how well we're doing in the battle of ideas that's taking place in the world today. ... We have not found the formula as a country." Rumsfeld had made finding that formula a priority for senior Pentagon officials. "He understands that communicating is an important component of leadership," says the defense secretary's longtime aide, Larry DiRita, who was deeply involved in the writing of the new strategic road map. "That culture has to become more or less second nature to this department," DiRita says, adding that his boss has probably held more press conferences and given more news media interviews than any cabinet officer in U.S. history. Rear Adm. Frank Thorp, now deputy assistant secretary of defense for joint communications, dates the current effort to the summer of 2004, when the secretary and other top Pentagon officials convened in the secure "tank" of the Joint Staff offices at the Pentagon. "We have got to get better at this," Thorp recalls Rumsfeld saying. A longtime public-affairs official, Thorp admits that "public affairs hasn't done a whole lot of improvement for the joint war fight," while he credits the psychological operations forces with leaping ahead in both knowledge of foreign cultures and the technical means to quickly produce quality print and broadcast products. Flexibility. But there have been chronic tensions between the public-affairs and psychological operations communities, centered on confusion over the proper domain for psychological operations. These tensions broke into the open when the Los Angeles Times revealed that a U.S. consulting firm hired by the U.S. military was paying Iraqi news media to run stories written by military officials without properly identifying them as such. Defense officials spent several months trying to determine whether U.S. policy permitted these paid, unattributed stories. According to DiRita, the inquiry found that there is "no specific prohibition" against the practice in Pentagon rules and regulations. That doesn't mean that the matter is settled, however. DiRita says the issue will be examined as part of the doctrine-writing that is now underway. "That's one of the things we want to look at. ... If in certain environments that kind of flexibility is important to a commander, we want to know, is it effective? We have not drawn a conclusion on that." Some of the uniformed officials interviewed said they believe that all information put out by the military should be identified as such. Current policy already requires that the military issue truthful information except in the narrow case of military deception operations, which aim to affect the military decisions of enemy forces. For instance, tapes of tank noises were broadcast in the Iraq war to simulate a massive invasion. And D-Day deception meant that Hitler sent troops to Calais instead of Normandy where GIs were storming the beaches. Such neat lines are often hard to draw, however. In the case of media stories in Iraq, there are many who see the practice of paying journalists to run unattributed stories as undermining the effort to nurture a free press and civil society. There is also concern over "backwash," or American consumption of messages not targeted at them. U.S. law prohibits the government from propagandizing Americans. Finally, if the efforts' authors become known, their effect may be nil or even counterproductive. Those in favor of the practice say that it is necessary to get information out that would not otherwise be published and to communicate to anti-American Iraqis who would refuse to read anything overtly coming from U.S. military sources. They argue that psychological operations can achieve military objectives and save lives. The official inquiry into the practices of the consulting firm, the Lincoln Group, has not been made public. The House Armed Services Committee has requested a list of all media contracts in Iraq, but the Pentagon has so far failed to provide one. "As far as the committee is concerned," says staff member Loren Dealy, "we're still waiting to hear back." The United States engaged in similar practices during the Cold War when Communist parties made inroads in western Europe. A former Pentagon official who has worked in this area says that on rare occasions, planting news stories secretly can be effective. But "if you do find it necessary, for goodness' sake, do it on a classified basis by professionals--going to the folks up the river," he says, referring to the Central Intelligence Agency, which has the mandate for covert political action. A previous effort to resolve these disputes came to naught. A Pentagon "Information Operations Roadmap" was written in 2003 and declassified this January in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. It attempted to lay out guidelines for psychological operations and limit their use to "semipermissive" and "nonpermissive" environments. But even though "it was signed by the secretary as definitive guidance," Chris Lamb, the former defense official who wrote it, said "it was never enforced." He adds, "The problems result from the unwillingness of the psyop community to abide by the lanes in the road that were made explicit in the [2003] road map." There are those in uniform who are so wary of having their credibility compromised in any way that they are instinctively opposed to psychological operations. "In my personal view," one official says, "we ought to make the term go away. It carries so much baggage." Others see this as a misunderstanding of psychological operations, which they insist are based on credible, truthful information but aim to influence rather than just deliver information. One former official scoffs at public-affairs officers who don't think media "spin" is part of their job. "They are not journalists," he says. "Their job is to defend American policy. Guys in uniform express the views of the military!" All this fighting, he concludes, reveals that persuasive communications is a difficult art form replete with nuance. After the September 2004 meeting in the "tank," the psychological operations community stepped out smartly. The "information operations" mission was assigned to the Strategic Command led by a four-star general. STRATCOM in turn set up a Joint Information Operations Center at Lackland Air Base in San Antonio. Now led by a reserve colonel who is a television broadcaster in private life, the JIOC has been staffed with temporary personnel but will soon get 10 billets or permanent staff positions. The JIOC sends Information Operations Support Teams to the various regional combatant commands in the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and Latin America. The Special Operations Command in Tampa also has a Joint Psyop Support Element that fields teams around the world. "Strange critters." A senior official emphasizes that information operations--including psychological operations--are "conducted predominantly during a military operation and generally focused on an opposing force or the strategic elements of an opposing force." But that elastic definition currently includes Iraqi civilians. Another conflict arises in the effort to integrate or coordinate all the information activities under strategic communications directors in the field. This makes public-affairs officials uneasy. Their preferred solution is to do all the integrating at senior levels in the Pentagon, where tricky policy decisions can be made. One of the officials working on the new doctrine, which will define who calls the shots and what are acceptable practices, explains why it will take several more months to finish that key part of the project. "Every time you lift a rock," this official says, "there is another strange critter under there." All the jockeying and headache is worth it, DiRita concludes, because integrating communications is key to an effective military. "The old-fashioned idea that you develop the policy and then pitch it over the transom to the communicator is over. You're continually thinking about communications through the course of the policy development process," all the way down to the battlefield. And, he says, "The policy gets better when it's subjected to the rigors of knowing how you're going to communicate that policy." Translation: Refusing to clear up the confusion is just not an option. This story appears in the May 29, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report. |