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[infowar.de] The Pentagon's brand-new plan for winning the battle of ideas against terrorists
Zwei interessante Aspekte aus dem gut recherchierten Artikel:
1. 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.
2. 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."
Die "Information Operations Roadmap" von 2003 gibt es hier:
<http://www.iwar.org.uk/iwar/resources/io/io-roadmap.pdf>
RB
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/060529/29propaganda.htm
US News & World Report
The Propaganda War
The Pentagon's brand-new plan for winning the battle of ideas against
terrorists
By Linda Robinson
5/29/06
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.
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