Every now and then I come across a forgotten gem that’s worth a second look. A post from August 2006, "Afghan Road Rage": on the frontline of Public Diplomacy, the real PAOs, focuses on a memo written by Command Sergeant Major Daniel Wood about Army personnel standards of conduct in Afghanistan. The importance Wood places on perception of the civilians to be significant and welcoming. Everyone, Wood emphasizes, is a strategic communicator.

We are currently engaged with an enemy that attempts to win battles in the press where the tide of public opinion is the ammunition and make no mistake… this ammunition is effective, especially when it has credibility. The effective engagement of the "middle ground" or the people of the rural communities and villages of this country is where the long war will be won. EVERY TIME you move down a road in this country, you are affecting this middle ground either positively or negatively.

The memo is worth a read. American public diplomacy wore combat boots then and it continues to do so today, although less so than a year ago. Let’s hope the trend back to civilian leadership in shaping perceptions about America continue.

See the complete original post here.

Public diplomacy is a contact sport. Everything we say and everything we do takes place in am arena with virtually no boundaries thanks to the Internet and global transportation. This is a competitive space in which ideas and agendas struggle to shape perceptions for attention and dominance (and sometimes parity) from an increasing number of state and non-state actors. We are, as we have been, in a global struggle for minds affecting the will to act.

America’s attention, the focus of our global engagement, a better and functionally more accurate title than public diplomacy, must expand beyond countering violent extremism, the ball on which so many eyes are glued. Between the Chinese in Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere, the Russians and now the Iranians, we must return to global engagement.

Below are excerpts from Mike Doran’s testimony for the hearing of the House Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities titled “Strategies for Countering Violent Extremist Ideologies” (31k PDF):

Countering extremism is part of a larger enterprise. For the sake of discussion, let’s call it “strategic communication.” This is an imperfect label for what we are talking about, but I do not want to get bogged down in definitional debates. When I say “strategic communication,” I mean the effective coordination of all of the activities of government that are intended to persuade, inform, and influence foreign audiences. …

The Obama administration can dramatically advance the enterprise simply by designating an office as the lead for government-wide strategic communication, vesting that office with the requisite authorities and resources to do its job properly, and holding it accountable for results.

Where should this office reside? One school of thought supports placing it at National Security Council. Appointing one of the president’s advisors to monitor the enterprise is certainly a good idea, but doing so will not entirely solve the leadership problem. Those who argue in favor of the NSC ignore the strong (and healthy) aversion, which exists throughout our system, to an operational White House. …

The key to [Jim Glassman’s, the last person to serve as the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs,]success was that he wholeheartedly embraced the notion that the business of the Under Secretary is national security. By contrast, his predecessors viewed the position as a public relations portfolio. They shied away from associating with the Department of Defense (DoD) and other agencies. …

The answer to this problem, in my view, is to develop thicker connective tissue between the State and DoD, especially in the fields related to strategic communication. Exactly what I mean by “thicker connective tissue” is itself a subject for another discussion – one that would touch on mutual training, compatible planning processes, and institutional reorganizations. We need not go into those details now. My main point today is that closer coordination will not take place until we create a strategic-operational center in the government that can act as an effective proponent for a whole-of-government effort. And with that point, I circle right back to where I began: with all roads leading through the Department of State.

Read the whole testimony here.

Briefly, here are some items that should be on your Friday reading list.

Three Reasons We Can’t Go Slow on a Public Diplomacy Chief by Steve Corman (link)

There is risk in taking too casual a pace and allowing the disruption caused by the election of Obama to fade.  There is a lot of urgent managerial-organizational work to be done, regardless of campaigns that might or might not be launched.   And there are also important internal audiences that have been expecting change.  Not only are they not seeing change, they’re not seeing anything. … [W]e can’t afford to go slow in getting a good Under Secretary in place.  On the contrary, it should be a high priority at this time.

An end to embassies: Diplomats are ill-equipped to deal with 21st-century problems (link)

While a diplomat in the 1990s and early this century, I found the methods of conventional diplomacy seemed almost deliberately constructed to separate the diplomat from reality – and also from the people diplomats claim to represent. By and large, diplomats speak to other diplomats. Thanks to ballooning bureaucracy, e-mail and security constraints, they are increasingly confined to their embassies, dealing with the real world by computer and telephone rather than directly. … So-called (and ill-named) "public diplomacy" has always been the poorer cousin of the self-regarding hard-core "real" diplomats who do the important stuff like negotiate treaties and start wars. For some reason, diplomats and governments have believed that somehow the message about the role of governments can be separated in the public’s mind from what they actually do. … As more and more people live away from the countries of their birth, and more still assume multicultural identities, I find it less and less convincing that national governments, and thus national diplomats, can legitimately claim to speak for and act on behalf of such heterogeneity. … Acceptance [that diplomats are declining in importance] is – paradoxically – the only path to relevance for modern diplomats: to be primary no longer but only one among many is an exciting challenge as much as a burden. Success will go to those who use mass networks effectively, build coalitions of states and concerned nonstate actors like corporations and NGOs and can credibly lead opinion.

Mapping Change in the Iranian Blogosphere By John Kelly and Bruce Etling (link)

A number of recent international anecdotes indicate increased online activism by governments. A perfect example of this ’state-engagement’ in cyberspace is found in Hamid Tehrani’s recent post about the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ plan to recruit 10,000 Basij bloggers. This may help explain some changes we’ve seen in the Iranian blogosphere, and is a good opportunity to share an updated Iranian blogosphere map created by John Kelly at Morningside Analytics, Berkman’s partner on our foreign language blog studies…. Most strikingly however, the ‘twelver’ cluster, which we are tentatively relabeling ‘CyberShia,’ has grown dramatically. It is possible that the organized Basij blog effort may account for some of this change, since these blogs are rooted in that part of the network. But there is another intriguing possible explanation. The expanding CyberShia cluster may also reflect a growing online debate around Islamic law in Iran.

See also:

• Still Wanted (?): An Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy
• Wanted: an Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy
• Layalina’s State Department Classifieds: Next Under Secretary and Pentagon Steps Up Strategic Communication

Also, expand your mind and your library: see Books you must read, check out Ideas as Weapons: Influence and Perception in Modern Warfare (I haven’t read this, but it just arrived and looks really good), and purchase The Just Prince: A Manual of Leadership and get insight into why Machiavellian concepts of power don’t work when dealing with non-Western European allies, adversaries, and “swing voters”.