Earlier this year, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen wrote the Pentagon placed too much emphasis on the strategic in “strategic communication.” The modern environment of New Media and strategic corporals (or captains if you prefer) blur the distinctions (and stovepipes) of tactical, operational, and strategic communication and perception management.
Then came the permission to ditch the Strategic Communication Integration Group, or SCIG, early last month. So, when the SCIG expired on March 1, 2008, instead of rechartering it for another year, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England let it rest in peace. In its place, CAPT Hal Pittman, USN, will form “a communication integration and planning team” within Public Affairs, a group that believes it can inform without influence.
Now comes word the phrase “strategic communication” itself has fallen out of favor at the Pentagon and those with these words on their business cards have been advised to get new cards.
Is it true we’re saying good-bye to strategic communication’s selective emphasis on controlling the narrative, a public relations approach? Is it being replaced by an another word pair that signifies interactive discourse and perception management to indirectly control or affect behavior in the psychological struggle we face today and into the future? What is the new title? And, is “strategic effects” also out of favor?
Information is Influence!
SC is not going away, just being subsumed by PA, per usual.How is it that one can manage perception? Seems rather unlikely to me.
Wow, for a second I thought you meant STRATCOM and I was panicking that I had failed to notice something. On StratComm, I think this is a failure. DOD has decided that it’s too hard to do strategic communications, and so it’s much easier to do information operations and use the PA to push pieces out. This is backsliding.
Wow, for a second I thought you meant STRATCOM and I was panicking that I had failed to notice something. On StratComm, I think this is a failure. DOD has decided that it’s too hard to do strategic communications, and so it’s much easier to do information operations and use the PA to push pieces out. This is backsliding.
The internal struggle over how to reach the domestic target audience has been resolved in favor of Public Affairs, which is essentially Stockholm-syndromed by the MSM. The Psychological Operations of countering enemy propaganda, defeating enemy Morale Operations, and mitigating threats to national will have proven too hard, too unpopular (with the MSM and the “Loyal Opposition”), too controversial, too easily lawfared.