Discourse on America's Discourse, published by Matt Armstrong

Unrestricted Warfare Symposium 2008: Proceedings are available online

By Matt Armstrong on April 27, 2008 9:32 PM 2 Vote 0 Votes

Categories:

Whether you did or did not attend this year's URW Symposium at Johns Hopkins University (10-11 March 2008), the proceedings are available online (hard copy typically arrives much later, but I didn't couldn't make it this year, so I won't be getting a book). A few presentations stand out, even if 80% of the content was surely in the accompanying narrative.

The first is COL Karen Lloyd's Experiences from the Field: Using Information Operations to Defeat AQAM (al-Qaeda and Associated Movements). COL Lloyd is from J3, Joint IO Warfare Center. The slides don't give away anything new, except for one not about AQAM:

Effects-Based Public Affairs. More on this later.

See also Mark Stout's (Institute for Defense Analysis) Listening to the Adversary About the "War of Ideas" as well as the rest here.

2 Comments

| Leave a comment

Adrian Martin | April 27, 2008 10:28 PM | Reply

AQAM? Sounds like a Batman sound-effect. I think the major impediment to our strategic communications effort is our reliance on acronyms...

ErsatzG7 | May 1, 2008 7:15 AM | Reply

I disagree with COL Lloyd and so does joint and Army doctrine. This 'hard' line between IO and PA is the same old thinking that continues to hold back both as effective instruments. Her own service has, for better or worse, strengthened the bond between IO and PA by making the tactical IO officer explicitly responsible for coordination PSYOP and PA activities to ensure there's no fratricide and that they don't become entangled in conflicting messages.

This thinking also represents a lack of knowledge of the Information Environment as described in joint doctrine. As long as we describe these two (and other) functions as driving along separate lanes then we'll continue to constrain the effectiveness of both.