MountainRunner friend Craig Hayden has a post about State’s DipNote blog that’s worth your time.

MountainRunner friend Steve Corman over at the Consortium for Strategic Communication (CSC) posted a deep analysis of DipNote that’s worth reading.

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

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?

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.

Continue reading “Noting DipNote’s Noteworthiness (Updated)
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Very quickly, from the Associated Press:

The normally hushed corridors of diplomacy are about to get a jolt.

The State Department’s first-ever blog was to go live on the Internet late Tuesday in a launch timed to coincide with the buzz surrounding the U.N. General Assembly. It upgrades U.S. foreign policy to Web 2.0 interactivity for the new electronic information age.

"Dipnote" aims to give Net surfers an insider’s view of diplomacy and diplomats with informal, chatty posts from key senior players in Washington and abroad as well as a younger generation weaned on e-mail for whom traditional cable traffic communication is foreign

A swell outreach. I wonder how much discussion they had on imaginary Smith-Mundt prohibitions against the blog and how many rules are in place to bifurcate overseas and domestic content.

It is interesting that Sean McCormack, who works for Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Karen Hughes is the face of this. Has the view of Smith-Mundt become so intrusive as to create the internal impression that Karen Hughes should remain focused externally? Can anybody shed light on the internal politics going on here?

Dipnote is the latest in a series of innovations blessed by Rice and set in motion by McCormack’s office to bring the State Department into the mainstream of 21st century information technology.

The department has already vastly expanded its Web presence and multimedia coordinator Heath Kern has set up a State Department YouTube channel, where special briefings and interviews with officials on key issues of the day are posted.

I’m curious that if State has adopted Smith-Mundt wholeheartedly as they apparently have, have they fully ignored the news service aspect of Smith-Mundt? How is the blog not more like a news service than including images on a powerpoint shown to a US audience that were included in overseas literature?

More lipstick from State…

State’s Dipnote can be found here. As of this writing, DipNote is down so I haven’t seen it….

Is “virtually impotent” really the best description of a person who inspires many, many people on the Web? NSA Frances Townsend gets the propaganda element of Osama bin Laden’s message, but she doesn’t get that OBL out-maneuvers the US, home of Silicon Valley and Madison Avenue, on the web (directly and indirectly) and in the war of perceptions.

Thomas Friedman’s op-ed this past weekend is spot on with many a post here at MountainRunner, especially my comment last week about replacing Karen Hughes with Karl Rove. If Rove approached international public opinion, especially public opinion in contested physical and mental states (i.e. Middle East and disenfranchised Muslims in the EU), Osama, Sadr, and all the others would be either running scared or panhandling.

Today, the direct impact of bullets and bombs is often much less than the propaganda opportunities and perceptions they create. A famous dead Prussian once said war is a continuation of politics, but the reality today is that war is politics and nearly every act is an attempt to gain strategic influence over friends, foes, and neutrals. YouTube, blogs, and all forms of other media and connectivity everywhere means every GI Joe and Jihadi gets at least a bit part in the theater of information, for better or worse.

Now imagine Karl Rove takes this to heart and instead of the US telling foreign audiences what we want our own people to hear, we tell them the truth about their false idols?

Continue reading “Keep Rove off welfare, give him Hughes’ job
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Austin Bay posted a list of “measurements of effectiveness” he thinks Petraeus will consider in the too-highly hyped September progress report. Even though Austin acknowledges the importance of perception, he focuses his list on Industrial Age (no, not “3GW”) qualifiers that are essentially the same that led to the “surprise” collapse of the Soviet Union.

Here’s Austin’s nod to perception management:

Recognize this problem: if you tell the enemy what you are measuring and it become very easy for him to frustrate it — at least frustrate it perceptually. The best example (or perhaps “worst example” is more appropriate) is the conclusion that Babil is secure. The leader of an Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia cadre sees that conclusion in a newspaper headline so he sends several suicide bombers to Babil. One gets through and kills twenty Iraqis. What’s the media tout? Petraeus was wrong?

Yes, the enemy sees an opportunity. He’s smart, even when he’s sitting in a cave he’s more adept at us at manipulating public opinion. And what do we do? Nothing. We create his opportunities, do nothing to defend proactively or retroactively. It isn’t a big challenge to be a propaganda officer for an insurgent group, but it should be.

Not only do we need to move away from numbers of officers and soldiers in defining success and toward more qualitative measurements, but we need to have active countermeasures that anticipate and respond to enemy IO.

There’s too much complaining that the media jumps on the bandwagon after a terrorist strike. Who else will they hear? There ain’t nobody else talking to counter the IED or suicide bomber pinpricks. Not only can we not counter enemy IO, we can’t anticipate it, and this inability to manage perceptions continually strikes at our credibility, legitimacy, and lowers confidence. (How’s the urban tourniquet going for those inside the walls? Last I heard, not so great. No mini-PRT to make the walled communities something to be demanded.)

Too many fret about the media jumping the bandwagon driven by insurgents and terrorists, but with such a passive and suicidal stance on IO must include getting the truth out and exposing the lies, deceptions, perversions, and self-serving criminal behavior in the name of Islam or tribe, it’s not surprising. You can go ahead and be upset when the media questions Petraeus, but what else are they supposed to think? What other news do they have to cover? How else are they to frame the messages?

Targeting the morale of the civilian population is not new and certainly not something absent from 20th Century warfare as many would have you believe. What is new, is the rise of the non-state actors, but attacking the will to fit. The United States hired privateers to attack the will of the British to support the war against us in the 19th Century at the dawn of the nation-state. While the nation-state brought with it problems of governance because the governing lost at least some autonomy over the governed (in the worst cases they had to at least work harder to oppress their people than before). Long before the nation-state, consider Vlad the Impaler’s PSYOP to dissuade trespassing.

In the 20th Century when supposedly warfare was only industrial and between states to the exclusion of the people, German bombing in World War I caused such panic in London that one observer, Giulio Douhet, the influential Italian air warfare theorist, developed a thesis that can best be described as terrorism from the air for maximum psychological affect on the enemy:

At this point I want to stress one aspect of the problem – namely, that the effect of such aerial offensives upon morale may well have more influence upon the conduct of the war than their material effects. For example, take the center of a large city and imagine what would happen among the civilian population during a single attack by a single bombing unit [dropping 20 tons of high-explosive, incendiary and gas bombs.]… First would come explosions, then fires, then deadly gases…By the following day the life of the city would be suspended…

What could happen to a single city in a single day could also happen to ten, twenty, fifty cities. And, since news travels fast, even without telegraph, telephone, or radio, what, I ask you, would be the effect upon civilians of other cities, not yet stricken but equally subject to bombing attacks? What civil or military authority could keep order, public services functioning, and production going under such a threat?…

A complete breakdown of the social structure cannot but take place in a country subjected to this kind of merciless pounding from the air. The time would soon come when, to put an end to the horror and suffering, the people themselves, driven by the instinct of self-preservation, would rise up and demand an end to the war…

In 1939, E. H. Carr also noted the rising “power over opinion” as contemporary war nullified “the distinction between combatant and civilian; and the morale of the civilian population became for the first time a military objective.”

And even the realpolitik author decades later, Hans Morganthau, in his nine elements of national power, included two as unstable: national morale and the quality of diplomacy. Both were subject to domestic and foreign strategic influence campaigns.

Attempting to influence the psychology of populations comes in many forms. If the last resort of kings was war, the first resort was intelligence and linkages from cultural diplomacy. We have clearly forgotten how to participate in the struggle over minds and wills. We used to know. From radio broadcasts to inform and mobilize people over there to influencing the framing of US domestic news of events over there, we fully engaged the public, both ours and theirs.

George Kennan understood the importance of information, public opinion, and morale. As Nicholas Thomson wrote six days after I posted the ending of Kennan’s Long Telegram,

…in a letter to Lippmann that Kennan never mailed (most likely because his boss, Secretary of State George Marshall, had chastened him for causing a ruckus), Kennan explained that he didn’t mean containment with guns. He didn’t want American armed forces to intervene in countries where the Soviets were mucking around but hadn’t gained control, like Greece, Iran and Turkey.

The Soviets are making “first and foremost a political attack,” Kennan wrote. “Their spearheads are the local communists. And the counter-weapon that can beat them is the vigor and soundness of political life in the victim countries.”

Something to think about.