The National War College, one of five colleges at the National Defense University, located at Ft. McNair, Washington, DC, is looking for a professor (assistant, associate, or full) of National Security Strategy, specifically public diplomacy. From the USAJobs announcement:
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Al Kamen informed the public there is a new Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs: Doug Wilson. Confirmed last week, he’ll be on the job at the Pentagon by the time most of you read this, 17 February 2010. It’s been a while since there was an ASD(PA). This means there were will be two public diplomats at DoD’s public affairs shop: Doug and Price Floyd, who will report to Doug. This is good.
Spencer adds his nickel.
Strategic review time.
Here is the Defense Department’s website for its Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), a “legislatively-mandated review of Department of Defense strategy and priorities.” On February 3, DOD hosted a blogger roundtable discussion on the QDR with Assistant Secretary of Defense for Global Strategic Affairs Michael Nacht and Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Strategy, Plans, and Forces Kathleen Hicks.
Here is the Department of Homeland Security’s website for its Quadrennial Homeland Security Review (QHSR), a document that “offers a vision for a secure homeland, specifies key mission priorities, outlines goals for each of those mission areas, and lays the necessary groundwork for the subsequent steps.” DHS is hosting a teleconference roundtable (this blogger was invited but cannot attend) February 5 with DHS Assistant Secretary for Policy David Heyman to discuss the QHSR. (Good outreach.)
Here is the Department of State’s website for its Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR)… wait. Never mind. There’s nothing substantial at State’s website except the July 10, 2009, press release and a related blog post at DipNote four days later. It is due this month, possibly within days, a State Department spokesman told Federal News Radio. No word if State will host a discussion like DOD or DHS to reach out beyond the ‘traditional’ media in the press room.
Stay tuned…
From the first recorded use of mercenaries four thousand years ago, through the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, and until the nineteenth century, mercenaries were regular features of war. It was not Westphalia that disarmed mercenaries, but a confluence of nationalism, technology, and increasing interstate trade that marginalized them. It would be another two hundred years after the birth of the modern state before states would effectively hold each other accountable for the actions of their citizens, started linking the projection of force to a specific geographic territory, and consolidated the decision to personally volunteer and fight in wars away from the people and into the hands of the governments of states that private militaries were “de-legitimized, de-democratized, and territorialized”. The same consolidation seen in privateers was also evident in commercial enterprises as activities from the territory of state was viewed as sanctioned by that government.
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The Defense Department’s Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Public Affairs) has a new deputy: Sumit Agarwal. Agarwal was previously at Google, previously head of Google’s North American mobile products and before that image products. Agarwal’s demonstration of Google’s mobile technology to Robert Scoble from September 2008 is below.
See my policy memo entitled “The State of State: A Proposal for Reorganization at Foggy Bottom” published by PPI. (PDF here, 910kb)
“The past decade has seen the U.S. government expand its activities around the globe in response to complex and stateless threats. In the face of these challenges, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen, and members of Congress have all called for increasing the resources and capabilities of the State Department to roll back what Gates has termed the “creeping militarization” of foreign policy. But efforts at reform are hindered by an institutional structure rooted in a 19th-century view of the world.
The days of traditional diplomacy conducted behind closed doors are over. The democratization of information and means of destruction makes a kid with a keyboard is potentially more dangerous than an F-22. Addressing poverty, pandemics, resource security, and terrorism requires multilateral and dynamic partnerships with governments and publics. But the State Department has yet to adapt to the new context of global engagement. The diverse threats that confront the U.S. and our allies cannot be managed through a country-centric approach. For State to be effective and relevant, it needs to evolve and become both a Department of State and Non-State.”
Download the full memo here. Comment here at MountainRunner or there.
According to the Voice of America, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates endorses the recent report – Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan – authored by Major General Michael Flynn, Captain Matt Pottinger, and Paul D. Batchelor. However, according to VOA, the SecDef took issue with the report being published by CNAS.
Read my guest post over at the Stimson Center’s Budget Insight blog titled Hybrid Government:
Nine years ago we went to war with the enemy we had, not the enemy we wanted. For several years after 9/11 we struggled to comprehend how military superiority failed to translate into strategic victory. We created labels like “irregular” and “hybrid” to describe adversaries that did not conform to our structured view of international affairs shaped by the second half of the Cold War. Today, conflict is democratized, not in the sense of bicameral legislatures but strategic influence in the hands of non-state actors empowered by falling barriers to information acquisition, packaging and dissemination as well as easy access to the means of destruction and disruption, physical and virtual.
Calls for “smart power” and a “whole of government” approach has resulted in countless articles, memos, and reports on updating the State Department, the Defense Department, and other agencies to confront the challenges of today and tomorrow. The focus on improving the operational elements of national power, while necessary, ignores a critical national security actor that has received little to no attention or pressure to adapt to the new and emerging requirements: Congress.
Read the whole thing here. Comment there or below.
What is “strategic communication”? To many, it is synonymous with public diplomacy, but are they? Is it that strategic communication is simply engagement by the Defense Department and public diplomacy is engagement by the State Department?
To many in the Defense community, strategic communication encompasses public affairs. This is reflected in the comment by a senior Defense official who noted beliefs that strategic communication is “public affairs on steroids.” Personally, I have never heard public diplomacy similarly described.
I’m interested in thoughts on the difference between strategic communication (SC) and public diplomacy (PD).
I’ll fire off the first observation on the differences for your comment:
The difference is not merely semantic but based in differences in techniques, tactics, procedures, time horizons, and audiences. On the last point, audiences, strategic communication is global as it does include public affairs, the US public and US media. From the comments from the Secretary of Defense to the “orchestra chart“, the struggle to communicate is not restricted to audiences beyond our borders. In stark contrast, public diplomacy is exclusively aimed at audiences residing out the geographic borders of the United States at the moment of contact.
Back to you. What are your thoughts on strategic communication and public diplomacy, including or ignoring my above statement.
See also:
Below is the report on the Smith-Mundt Symposium of January 13, 2009. Subtitled “A Discourse to Shape America’s Discourse”, it was a frank and open discussion across a diverse group of stakeholders, practitioners, and observers from Congress, the Departments of State, Defense, and Homeland Security, and outside of government, many of whom never had a reason to be in the same room with one another before. Ostensibly on the law that authorized what we now call public diplomacy, it was really a way to foster an interagency, public‐private, and inter‐tribal discussion was on the purpose, structure, and direction of America’s global engagement. The report has been online since April. It is republished at Scribd for greater attention and comment. Please contribute your comments below.
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The U.S. Army War College (USAWC) seeks a Visiting Professor of Strategic Communication for the academic year 2010-2011.
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The following was delivered at “New Approaches to U.S. Global Outreach” hosted by The Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication at George Washington University on October 5, 2009. It is available here by permission of Bruce.
Due to travel, there will be no posting until 4 October. If you haven’t already, check out the posts below (additional comments in italics) as well as explore other previous posts through the Archives or through the categories in the bottom left of the page.
By Tony Corn over at Small Wars Journal: The Art of Declaring Victory and Going Home, Strategic Communication and the Management of Expectations (PDF, 140kb)
Contrary to a naïve belief, actions rarely speak for themselves. The choice of a communication strategy determines whether a military build-up is perceived as a temporary “surge,” or an open-ended “escalation,” and this initial perception, in turn, determines whether a future withdrawal will be perceived as “mission accomplished,” or “lack of resolve.” …
If good deeds spoke for themselves, we could send the Peace Corps and disband the Marine Corps. Good deeds so rarely speak for themselves that even NGOs devote up to one-fourth of their budget to self-promotion, and that the greatest weakness of U.S. AID for years (compared to its EU counterpart) has been found to be its failure to advertise its own activities. …
The idea that strategic communication is at best a supporting activity constitutes a formidable intellectual regression. If the West all loses so many “media engagements,” it is precisely because – as Kilcullen pointed out – al-Qaeda plans its media operations first and gives a supporting role to military operations, while the West too often continues to plan military operations first, and give information operations a supporting role.
Read the whole thing here.
NPR’s Jackie Northam reported on development and governance skillsets in high demand and short supply in Afghanistan.
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My article “Hitting Bottom at Foggy Bottom” is online at ForeignPolicy.com:
Discussion over the fate of Foggy Bottom usually focuses on the tenure of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the troubles of public diplomacy, and the rise of special envoys on everything from European pipelines to Afghanistan and Pakistan. But Americans would benefit more from a reassessment of the core functionality of the U.S. State Department.
Years of neglect and marginalization, as well as a dearth of long-term vision and strategic planning, have left the 19th-century institution hamstrung with fiefdoms and bureaucratic bottlenecks. The Pentagon now funds and controls a wide range of foreign-policy and diplomatic priorities — from development to public diplomacy and beyond. The world has changed, with everyone from politicians to talking heads to terrorists directly influencing global audiences. The most pressing issues are stateless: pandemics, recession, terrorism, poverty, proliferation, and conflict. But as report after report, investigation after investigation, has highlighted, the State Department is broken and paralyzed, unable to respond to the new 21st-century paradigm. …
Read the rest at ForeignPolicy.com. Originally titled “Fixing State” (my title was too staid and the “State of State” was taken), it highlights forgotten or ignored structural and capacity issues at State that contributed to Defense leadership in foreign policy and public diplomacy.
Related Posts:
USAID challenges reflect greater problems at the State Department looks at the importance of development. (See also The Intended ‘Psychological By-Products’ of Development on the psychological effects of the Marshall Plan; and from last year, USAID and Public Diplomacy.)
House Appropriations Concerned Pentagon’s Role in Strategic Communication and Public Diplomacy examines the theory of House Appropriations and Walter Pincus that “State should be doing this”.
Defense Department Plan on Strategic Communication and Science and Technology is a report that noted a need for leadership and coordination in strategic communication programs earlier this year.
American public diplomacy wears combat boots from May 2008 highlighted the leadership in basic engagement the Defense Department was exercising in the absence of an effective alternative.
Developing a National Strategic Communication and Public Diplomacy Strategic also from May 2008 highlights Congressman Adam Smith’s (D-Wash) effort to get the country’s efforts in global engagement on track.
The Cost of Keeping the Principal off the X from October 2007 is particularly relevant post on State’s view of the world. This issue resurfaced with the recent “outing” of the behavior of both the contracted Kabul security and the lack of action by the Department. See also an event I put on October 2006 titled American Mercenaries of Public Diplomacy.
Much has been made of made of Congressional concerns over the Defense Department’s role in strategic communication and as the de facto leading public diplomat in policy, engagement, and personnel. At first the lack of informed media coverage – and shallow or error-filled when it exists – is ironic considering the subject, but there it is part of a trend when considering that in general public diplomacy and the laws governing it are also subject to misinformation and misinterpretation (PDF, 140kb).
When The Washington Post reported on July 28 on the House Appropriations decision to slash $500 million from the estimated Defense budget request for strategic communication programs – for 10 (ten) programs which should have been “IO” (information operations) programs, a minor difference – Walter Pincus mentioned requests from the House and Senate Armed Services Committees (HASC and SASC, respectively) that preceded the House Appropriations – Defense Subcommittee (HACD) action. For your reference, the actionable items for the Defense Department in the area of strategic communication from the reports of the HASC, SASC, and HACD are below.
It has now been eight years since 9/11 and we finally seem to understand that in the modern struggles against terrorism, insurgency, and instability, the tools of public diplomacy are invaluable and essential. We live in a world where an individual with a camera phone can wield more influence than an F-22 stealth fighter jet. The capability of engaging public audiences has long been thought of as the domain of civilians. But for the past eight years, the functions, authorities, and funding for engaging global audiences, from anti-AIDS literature to soccer balls to development projects, has migrated from the State Department to the Defense Department. It seems whole forests have fallen over the same period on the need to enhance civilian agencies – be it the State Department or a new USIA-like entity – to provide a valid alternative to the Defense Department who most, even the detractors, agree was filling a void left by civilians who abrogated their responsibility for one reason or another.
This summer may be a turning point. Some in Congress have unilaterally decided that 2010 is the year America’s public diplomacy will stop wearing combat boots. Sounds good, right? This is the future most, including analysts and the military, have wished for. The military has been the unwilling (if passionate once engaged) and often clumsy surrogate and partner for the State Department in representing the US and its interests in Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere around the world through what the House Armed Services Committee now calls “military public diplomacy.” In some regions, State is almost wholly dependent on Defense money and resources to accomplish its mandate.
Whither Strategic Communication? A Survey of Current Proposals and Recommendations by Christopher Paul, 2009, at RAND Corporation
Countless studies, articles, and opinion pieces have announced that U.S. strategic communication and public diplomacy are in crisis and are inadequate to meet current demand. This paper reviews contemporary thinking regarding the advancement of U.S. strategic communication, cataloging recent recommendations and identifying common themes and the frequency with which they are endorsed. …findings indicate that four core themes capture consensus recommendations: a call for “leadership,” demand for increased resources for strategic communication and public diplomacy, a call for a clear definition of an overall strategy, and the need for better coordination and organizational changes or additions. This paper also discusses specific recommendations for strategy elements or resource targets that made frequent appearances in the literature and during interviews.
From the acknowledgments:
I owe my friend and colleague Matt Armstrong a considerable debt of gratitude for his support of this effort. Matt helped arrange and conduct many of the interviews used in this research.
For your reference, the below citations are from reports of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees from before the summer recess in support of Defense information activities commonly referred to as strategic communication. As far as the House Appropriations Committee, Defense Subcommittee, there is nothing in support of DOD information activities, as you may already know. The numbers in parentheses at the end of each citation is the page number of the report.
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