Author: Matt Armstrong

Prince Llewelyn and his dog Gelert

~ Matt Armstrong

No time to even ponder a meaty post for your Monday morning reading, I’ll offer the story below and let you consider if I’m suggesting anything by it or not.

Before the story, I recommend you get on the CivMil conference webcast. I’ll watching when I can with a few questions ready for the panel. And now for something different

In the short time I lived in Wales two years ago, I read about the famous legend of Prince Llewelyn and his dog Gelert which stayed with me.

Llewelyn was very fond of hunting and in the summer he lived in a hunting lodge at the foot of Snowdon. Although he had many dogs, his favourite was Gelert, not only because he was fearless in the hunt but he was also a loyal friend and companion at home.

One day Llewelyn and his wife went hunting and left their baby son with a nurse and a servant to look after him. The nurse and the servant go for a walk in the mountains leaving the baby alone and unprotected.

Llewelyn is absorbed in his hunting, but after a while he notices that Gelert isn’t with the pack. The Prince knows something is wrong as Gelert is always at the front of the pack. He reasons that the only place Gelert would go is back to the lodge, so he calls off the hunt and heads back home.

As the party is dismounting, Gelert comes running out of the lodge towards his master, covered in blood and wagging his tail. The Princess, calling her child’s name, faints. Llewelyn rushes into the baby’s room to find the cradle overturned, the bloodstained bedclothes thrown all over the floor – and no sign of his son.

Filled with anger and grief he draws his sword and runs Gelert through. As the dog dies, he whimpers and his cries are answered by the sound of a baby crying from behind the overturned cradle. When Llewelyn pulls aside the cradle he finds his son unharmed and the bloody body of a huge wolf next to him. Gelert had in fact killed the wolf as it tried to attack Llewelyn’s son.

Filled with remorse, Llewelyn buries Gelert in a meadow nearby and marks his grave with a cairn of stones. The village of Beddgelert ("Gelert’s grave") owes its name to the dog.

America Should Hire al-Qaeda’s PR Agent

~ Matt Armstrong ~ 1 Comment

While we can easily retake the high ground and can easily own the media through active engagement and managed discourse, we don’t. GOOD Magazine published a short article of mine comparing the public diplomacy of Al Qaeda to that of the U.S. State Department.

Iraq has become a stage on which terrorists, insurgents, and Coalition forces compete for a global audience. YouTube, blogs, and all other forms of citizen media ensure that every GI Joe and Jihadi has at least a bit part in the theater of public opinion. The result is a new public diplomacy that insurgents understand, and the U.S. State Department doesn’t.

…As the enemy shapes itself into a more and more fearsome force, America’s failure to understand or to participate in the war over public perception is not a noble act, but one of implicit suicide. Insurgents can now measure their success in terms of money, supplies, safe houses, and recruits—all of which come at the expense of trust in the United States and its influence on the people. The Administration must stop thinking of foreign audiences as sympathetic and become smarter about how to wage information campaigns. That means realizing that military action is diplomacy, and that embassies are advertisements.

Read the whole thing at GOOD.

Two images that didn’t make the cut are below. The one on the left is insurgent propaganda available easily available on YouTube. It was almost hard to pick the best picture, and painful to go through the footage. It was an exercise in why we must do better in this conflict. The picture on the right is a recent AP photo of the embassy compound. "It’s like Fort Apache in the middle of Indian country, except this time the Indians have mortars."

video still- IED in Iraq us_embassy_baghdad_460- AP Photo

Also see

Congress Votes, Turkey Listens

~ Matt Armstrong

Guest poster (and blogless friend of MountainRunner) LeftEnd comments on HFAC’s recent decision.

Yesterday’s move by the House Foreign Affairs Committee to recognize the Armenian Genocide is chock full of consequences. Today, Turkey recalled its ambassador for consultations back in Ankara. The Turks are careful to point out that this is not a permanent recall of any kind, but instead is par for the course after a “development” such as this one.

Regardless, this could pose a huge problem for U.S. foreign policy. Turkey – perhaps more than any other country in the region – has the ability to soft balance against the United States. Because of the unpopularity of the planned invasion of Iraq, they – along with the Saudis – refused the U.S. request to use their territory for American ground troops. As Robert Pape describes, while it didn’t affect the outcome of the invasion, it did force the Pentagon to alter strategy.

Now the United States needs another favor from the Turks, and yesterday’s vote ain’t gonna help.

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Mind the Gap: Post-Iraq Civil-Military Relations in America

~ Matt Armstrong

Too many people I speak with, from academics to laypeople and in between, do not understand American civil-military relations and their role U.S. foreign policy. Next week, the Foreign Policy Research Institute will webcast a conference on Post-Iraq Civil-Military Relations in America, cosponsored by the Reserve Officers Association. It’s free and open to the public and apparently online audience members will be able to pose questions electronically.

Personally I won’t be able to see all of it due to standing Monday afternoon commitments, but Panels 1-3 are the lead issues for me right now (not to dismiss 4), so maybe I’ll catch most of it. I suggest you watch as well.

To register, click here.

The agenda for the webcast is below.

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Congress continues to screw up its priorities and we still don’t get privatization issue

~ Matt Armstrong

It’s no wonder that Congress asked such lame questions of Blackwater’s Erik Prince and think that tweaking MEJA will solve the problems. While there’s a war raging and we continue to lose credibility, Congress, namely the Foreign Affairs Committee, fiddles.

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Revising History

~ Matt Armstrong

I envy Ambassador L. Paul Bremer and his ability to revise history. It’s fantastic to read Ambassador L. Paul Bremer revising history again (the first time was in his memoir). When talking about CPA Order 17, he said “The immunity is not absolute. The order requires contractors to respect all Iraqi laws, so it’s not a blanket immunity.” Seriously?

I envy even more the reporters who wrote the New York Times article that I copied the quote above. They are so innocent in their article so as to be irresponsible. 

If a private in the United States military fires on civilians, a clear body of law and a set of procedures exist for the military to use in investigating each incident and deciding if the evidence is sufficient to bring charges.

But when private security contractors do the same, it is exceedingly unlikely that they will be called to account. A patchwork of laws that are largely untested, and practical obstacles to building cases in war zones, have all but insulated contractors from accountability.

No where in the article do the authors ask why in 2007 are they asking this question? No where do they bring up how contractors have the ability to directly and immediately influence U.S. foreign policy, national security, and public diplomacy. Think Fallujah and the decision to "teach them a lesson" for dragging and stringing up contractors, against the recommendations of the commanders on the ground. War today isn’t about personal enmity, which is what came into play in the aftermath of Fallujah as a result of a company going cheap and going stupid in trying to escort kitchen goods. The end result? We lost prestige, high-ground, trust, and possibly the war. Not because the contractors were there, but because we allowed them to remain outside of our mission and we maintained separate civil and military operations.

I didn’t notice any questioning of why or to what effect in the New York Times article, but plenty of opportunity to revise history and ignore the real issues and attack the pinata of the day.  I don’t mean to pick on the NYT article, but too much of what’s being written today doesn’t really scratch the surface of the real problem and is simply noise, mastabatory writing if you will. They want to see their own words, that are really the same words somebody else has used, with rare exception, but in a different order.

See also

A role model for DipNote?

~ Matt Armstrong ~ 2 Comments

Joshua Keating at Foreign Policy’s Passport suggested a role model for State’s DipNote:

AfghanUKamb As Blake noted yesterday, the U.S. State Department’s disappointing new blog Dipnote does not mean that the new genre of diplomatic blogging has no potential. To see how it’s done right, check out the site of Sherard Cowper-Coles, the UK’s ambassador to Afghanistan.

Cowper-Coles has been blogging regularly from Kabul since Sept. 26, including four self-made YouTube videos. He has conducted interviews with a British military commander and the staff of an Afghan TV station, and shared some of his observations on Afghanistan’s culture and current events. Cowper-Coles is an engaging writer and comes off as genuinely excited by the potential of the medium.

Is it just PR? Of course. But Cowper-Coles proves that public diplomacy doesn’t have to be limited to boring photo-ops and go-nowhere initiatives. The UK Foreign Office currently has six officials blogging, including Foreign Minister David Miliband, though none of the others seems to update as regularly. One hopes they’ll take a page out of Cowper-Coles’s book.

Interesting. Then again, the UK is a place where it’s common form to use your own voice and minimize agentry of spokespersons. For example, do you know who the UK Prime Minister’s spokesperson is, alternatively known as PMS or PMOS? Is this person a man or woman? There’s an ownership of words that the UK accepts that we do not (ever watch the PMQ?). It would be great to see the FCO model here, but there’s a cultural divide, and fear of mistake, at work here.

I haven’t put much thought into how that might be addressed or bridged. Have you?

Noting DipNote’s Noteworthiness (Updated)

~ Matt Armstrong

The Department of State’s DipNote, a function of the Public Affairs section of Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Karen Hughes, isn’t half bad and has quickly found a rhythm. However, and this really isn’t a knock on the blog, it isn’t more than half good either. This limit is a function of the beast. Over a coffee earlier this year, a blog master of one of the many blog projects of a certain K Street think tank noted the bureaucracy lurking behind each post that would probably resonate with DipNote’s blog master. So, in truth, I’m actually impressed with what DipNote is putting out. To be sure, Foreign Policy’s Passport Blog found the DipNote bureaucracy to be agile enough.

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America Should Hire al-Qaeda’s PR Agent

~ Matt Armstrong

America Should Hire al-Qaeda’s PR Agent by Matt Armstrong, 3 October 2007, at GOOD Magazine.

Posted on MountainRunner here: America Should Hire al-Qaeda’s PR Agent.

Iraq has become a stage on which terrorists, insurgents, and Coalition forces compete for a global audience. YouTube, blogs, and all other forms of citizen media ensure that every GI Joe and Jihadi has at least a bit part in the theater of public opinion. The result is a new public diplomacy that insurgents understand, and the U.S. State Department doesn’t.

Today, bullets and bombs often have a much smaller impact than the propaganda opportunities they create–opportunities to influence public opinion and build public support.

The Cost of Keeping the Principal off the X

~ Matt Armstrong ~ 1 Comment

Does anybody else found it disturbing that the Department that contains the US Public Diplomacy apparatus, is ostensibly in charge of “winning hearts and minds” (used here because they use this phrase), and works with foreign media could be so blind as to ignore the impact of their travel? While they were too busy looking after the forest, they didn’t realize they were poisoning the land on which the trees grow.

Their aggressive posture, fueled in part by IEDs, was more than condoned but encouraged. Blackwater did their job: they kept their principals of the X and nobody they were charged with protecting died.

A few brief comments:

  • In a Los Angeles Times editorial, Max Boot hypes the utility of contractors while ignoring the political and economic trade-offs as he notes more warfighters are freed to do other things. There is a decision that must be made here: upsize the force or spend more money on “short-term” solutions that are used for the long-haul? There are political costs to using contractors that include public diplomacy, changing foreign policy options, and distance from the citizenry from conflict, all of which must be factored in. Economic costs are similar.
  • Malcolm Nance’s suggestion of a Force Protection Command is useful and one of the best analyses of the subject I’ve seen.
  • However, as P.W. Singer notes in his comment to Nance’s post at SWJ, Nance’s recommendations also skipped over the foundational reasons contractors are engaged.
  • Ralph Peters plays the same emotional card that contractors are independent cowboys while feebly addressing the core issues.
  • Tom Barnett, commenting on Ralph Peters’ emotional and fact-challenged diatribe, unfortunately, drinks the Peters Punch and Jeremy Scahill’s Kool-Aid that outsourcing itself is wrong and that the principal’s agents are uncontrollable. The world Peters describes is not accurate at heart but has become functionally accurate the more we learn about how State, not DOD, has used and supported contractors. The existence of contractors isn’t the issue, nor is their use by a democracy novel, but novel is the absence of employing the real mechanisms to hold them accountable, we need to implement and internalize these processes, understanding the core reasons why it’s necessary to do so.

It is this failure to understand the resource being engaged, and the necessary control, that makes the Machiavellian warning more accurate after years of use. It is State that, ironically, demonstrated it could not, for a change not for bureaucratic reasons, understand the need for appropriate RUF and ROE out of a lack of vision, awareness, and fortitude.

Both the conduct and rules of war has changed, and the range of services that private military companies provide and what the US requires of them is significant, prompting the Dean of the Army War College to say, “The US cannot go to war without contractors.” Unlike technology stewardship issues that prevent aircraft carriers from putting to sea without civilians (for the last four decades), security contractors are on the front lines, directly and independently engaging foreign publics. These “guns with legs” are point persons in American foreign policy and public diplomacy and are perceived as representatives of the United States. Their role isn’t a given nor is it required, but we seem to have accepted it. We cannot afford to make these assumptions.

Globalization comes to Afghanistan

~ Matt Armstrong ~ 1 Comment

Coming Anarchy notes that connecting Afghanistan to the global marketplace means they get to see lots of things, including what’s under those burqas. In the spirit of Swedish Meatballs, this article (which is not Coming Anarchy’s post) has an artistic photo that isn’t work safe (for those who went to Swedish Meatballs from work without prior knowledge, I forgot to warn M1 of SM about the article…):

From entering puberty to old age, almost all women still wear burqas, which cover them from head to toe. Most men have never seen a naked woman outside the circle of their families.

It is therefore no surprise that the first encounters with satellite channels that offer 100% hardcore porn are the equivalent to the close encounters of the third kind. Men from Kandahar, cut off from the outside world for decades, accustomed to conflicts and uncompromising Taliban laws, have never seen anything like this, even though it is in fact exceptionally soft porn by western standards, usually aired between hotline ads.

A strange discomfort can be felt, but no shortage of curious glances. A group of Taliban wearing overgrown beards are sitting in a bar with their eyes riveted to the screen. A western woman enters the room and one of them frantically changes the channel.

Abdul Wasi, the owner of one of the many new satellite equipment stores, says that business is doing exceptionally well. “I sell digital receivers and satellite dishes for about 350 dollars and I import the equipment from Pakistan. I started the business a month ago and by now I have sold almost four hundred receivers. My store is always crowded, everyone wants to watch satellite television,” says Wasi.

Mercenaries: Useless and Dangerous? It is a matter of choice

~ Matt Armstrong

As much as I hate to hear Machiavelli’s warning against mercenaries regurgitated without so much as a fundamental understanding of the realities of the time and place it was written, recent revelations that the Department of State willingly allowed Blackwater to use aggressive tactics to “keep the Diet Pepsi from spilling” resonates deeply with the real intent of the Secretary. The irony almost drips from the media reporting on State’s culpability in Blackwater’s tactics that virtually incited the Iraqi public against the mission.

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DOD Approved Strategic Communication Plan for Afghanistan

~ Matt Armstrong ~ 3 Comments

dod_afghan_sc_plan_p1 An interesting document made its way to MountainRunner: DOD’s approved Strategic Communication Plan for Afghanistan (which I’ve made searchable) approved by Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England.

In order to augment our ongoing efforts in Afghanistan, the Department of Defense has developed the attached DOD Strategic Communication (SC) Plan for Afghanistan. This SC plan supports and complements NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) operations.

This SC plan directs all DoD organizations to begin execution immediately according to their specified duties and responsibilities. The plan is dynamic, and will continue to be updated and modified as Coalition efforts in Afghanistan evolve. To ensure the successful execution of this plan, DoD leaders are requested to provide the appropriate support to the designated lead organizations. Please review the attached SC plan to identify your responsibilities.

The DoD Strategic Communication Integration Group (SCIG) Secretariat stands ready to work with you and your staff on this important effort.

There’s a lot in this document, including hits and misses. Addressed only to the DOD members of the Strategic Communication Integration Group, and not the Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, it identifies key elements of strategic communications, including those in which DOD is not the lead.

For example, Provincial Reconstruction Teams are listed as "strategic communicators and listeners".

  • Assess benefit and availability of Afghan, U.S., Allied, and coalition PAOs for assignment to PRTs
  • Assess requirements to expand PRT Executive Steering Committee into an effective coordinating body
  • Assess cost and feasibility of incorporating/adjusting PA/SC predeployment training and in-theatre distance learning for basic, tailored public affairs training for U.S. and non-U.S. PRT officers

Other tools and enablers include:

  • Senior Afghan Government, DSG, and NATO officials as strategic
    communicators
  • DoD Regional Centers as strategic communicators
  • NATO Media Operations Center as a strategic enabler

I encourage you to take a look at the plan and comment. As I noted above, there are "misses" in the document, but I’ll hold my comments until later.

IED as a Weapon of Strategic Influence: Creating the Blackwater Nightmare

~ Matt Armstrong

Abu Muqawama has a smart post on IEDs as Weapons of Strategic Influence, something I’ve talked about before. However, what he and others have missed is the role IEDs have had not just on American military force posture — using armored Humvees and MRAPs (scroll down to find reference) — but also of the entire Coalition, including private military contractors, highlighted by recent events that have dramatically altered the narrative and focus of the entire mission in Iraq, as well as the tools used in the execution of that mission.

The Blackwater incident of September 16th is a direct and successful result of the effectiveness of IEDs to influence the posture and response of our security forces, including of our own military, to threats. The effort to “stop the bleeding” back in 2003 took a turn toward our expertise (technology) and while failing to address the root causes and purposes of the attacks in the first place. The result: failure. Now you can subscribe to YouTube channels to watch new IED footage (as MountainRunner has) while more money is spent on jammers and armor. The former causes a technology race toward the bottom with diminishing returns and the latter insulates both physically and morally the Coalition from the population.

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