Inspector General’s report on Information Operations Contracts

August 17, 2009 ~ Matt Armstrong ~ 1 Comment

Last month the Defense Department’s Inspector General issued the first of three reports, D-2009-091: Information Operations in Iraq (2.2mb PDF), on a series of contracts issued to support information activities in Iraq last year. Congress requested these reports after Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus wrote about the awarding of up to $300 million in information operations contracts over three years to four private firms last year in "U.S. to Fund Pro-American Publicity in Iraqi Media".

Arguably the goal of the contracts to "engage and inspire" Iraqis to support the US and the Iraqi Government should have been led by the State Department’s public diplomacy, a practice which used to include such goals as "bolstering moral and extending hope". But for a variety of reasons – ranging from incompatibilities with modern requirements and current sense of mission, leadership, and capabilities – the void left by inaction and the dismantling of America’s arsenal of persuasion in terms of theory and practice, has been filled by the Defense Department. The DOD, who until recently rejected the term "public diplomacy" as something only the State Department did, developed the yet-to-be-well-defined rubric of strategic communication which reflects a subtle but significant difference between the State Department and the Defense Department.

Continue reading “Inspector General’s report on Information Operations Contracts
“ →

Elevating public diplomacy and strategic communication as national security priorities

July 16, 2009 ~ Matt Armstrong ~ 1 Comment

Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michèle Flournoy’s plans to create a team to improve coordination and collaboration within the Defense Department and across Government were announced. The team, led by Rosa Brooks, will also, according to Defense News, “will be tasked with reaching out to key members of Congress on specific issues.”

Flournoy is "establishing a small team with responsibility for global strategic engagement issues," said Army Lt. Col. Jonathan Withington, a Pentagon spokesman. "This team will assist policy offices and senior leaders with the development of outreach and engagement plans, and will help coordinate DoD-wide engagement efforts."

Withington said the team will be composed of about five existing policy shop employees, and will be headed by Rosa Brooks, a principal adviser to Flournoy and a former Los Angeles Times columnist.

The goal is to "improve overall coordination of DoD public diplomacy and strategic communication efforts," the spokesman said.

Continue reading “Elevating public diplomacy and strategic communication as national security priorities
“ →

Obsolete arguments to keep an obsolete law

July 8, 2009 ~ Matt Armstrong ~ 3 Comments

By all means, let’s keep a law designed for another era on the books because, well, it’s there. That’s the argument many have offered in defense of the restrictive provisions added to the Smith-Mundt Act in 1972 and 1985. My friend Kim Andrew Elliot makes this argument while reviewing the Defense Department paper on strategic communication I posted this week.

"Understand the difference between public diplomacy and strategic communication. For the former, the audience is outside the geographic territory of the United States. For the latter, the audience is global. Science and Technology solutions do not generally discriminate based on geographic location, nor should they. The domains of strategic communication can not be limited to those with public affairs authority – everyone should be viewed as a strategic communicator."
Brilliant. This report has found a way to work around the Smith-Mundt clause prohibiting the domestic dissemination of public diplomacy. Just call it "strategic communication."

Kim’s statement is based on the belief that American public diplomacy is unfit for American audiences because it is a) deceitful, b) illegal influence, or c) damaging to the domestic news market. None of these are valid reasons today.

Continue reading “Obsolete arguments to keep an obsolete law
“ →

Summer 2009 Issue of PD Magazine is available

July 8, 2009 ~ Matt Armstrong

The Summer 2009 issue of PD Magazine, a publication of the Association of Public Diplomacy Scholars at USC, is out. Titled “Middle Power. Who They Are. What They Want” it is filled with many articles worth your time.

Continue reading “Summer 2009 Issue of PD Magazine is available
“ →

Defense Department Plan on Strategic Communication and Science and Technology

July 6, 2009February 1, 2019 ~ Matt Armstrong ~ 3 Comments

A newly released report from the Department of Defense may be the first to specifically consider the role of science and technology (S&T) efforts supporting the broad range of Strategic Communication (SC) activities across the whole of government. The Strategic Communication Science and Technology Plan, April 2009, (PDF) produced by the Rapid Reaction Technology Office (RRTO) within the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s Director, Defense Research Engineering (DDRE), responds to direction in the Fiscal Year 2009 National Defense Authorization Act, which calls for the Department to leverage these efforts to designate an “S&T thrust area for strategic communication and focus on critical S&T opportunities.” Congress and RRTO authorized publication of this report on MountainRunner.us.

Continue reading “Defense Department Plan on Strategic Communication and Science and Technology
“ →

Guest Post: How to win the GWOT – or whatever it’s called today

April 22, 2009 ~ Matt Armstrong ~ 2 Comments

By Mark Pfeifle, Jonathan Thompson

America has the finest military and diplomatic leaders in the world. They know how to win on the battlefield and at the negotiating table. Yet, despite those winning ways, there are times when they become victims of circumstances rather than drivers of events. At such times, some may falter with the media and public, and when that happens, they too often lay blame the results on bad press coverage.

Continue reading “Guest Post: How to win the GWOT – or whatever it’s called today
“ →

The Future of Public Diplomacy

March 24, 2009 ~ Matt Armstrong ~ 4 Comments

The world increasingly operates on perceptions created by the “Now Media” environment. Governments must fully take into account these perceptions in the forming and conducting of foreign policy. From the perspective of the United States, the simple and essential fact is that everything we say and do both at home and abroad, as well as everything we fail to say and do, has an impact in other lands. This isn’t a new idea but an observation originally made by a certain general running for president in 1952.

Continue reading “The Future of Public Diplomacy
“ →

Leadership Changes at the Combatant Commands and more thoughts on Realigning the State Department

March 23, 2009 ~ Matt Armstrong ~ 1 Comment

Jason Sigger has the new roster of the Defense Department’s Combatant Commanders.

CENTCOM – Army General David Petraeus

PACOM – Admiral Robert Willard

EUCOM – Admiral James Stavridis

NORTHCOM – Air Force General Victor Renuart

SOUTHCOM – Air Force Lt Gen Douglas Fraser

AFRICOM – Army General William Ward

JFCOM – Marine General James Mattis

STRATCOM – Air Force General Kevin Chilton

SOCOM – Admiral Eric Olsen

TRANSCOM – Air Force General Duncan McNabb

Jason also notes that President Obama intends to keep the Chairman and Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Would it be great if we had the same visibility into the leadership State Department regional bureaus? More importantly, would it be great if the regional bureaus were not headed by assistant secretaries but by Under Secretaries, a rank equivalent to a Combatant Commanders? Is a regional perspective for the State Department so much less important than the Defense Department?

A suggestion: abolish the Under Secretary for Political Affairs and elevate the regional bureau heads to Under Secretary and give each new Under Secretary the same letter acknowledging their direct connection to the President that Ambassadors receive today. At the same time, align the regional bureaus to match the geographic assignments as the Combatant Commands. The Defense Department needs a partner to balance it and the State Department must be that partner. Empowering the State Department in this way, along with enhancing the Department by making it the Department of State and Non-State, will be a huge step toward truly whole of government approaches to dealing with national security issues that encompass more than terrorism and insurgency.

See also:

Kristin Lord on DOD’s $300m “Public Diplomacy” push

October 28, 2008 ~ Matt Armstrong ~ 2 Comments

The Brookings’ Kristin Lord asks why the DOD is getting resources for public diplomacy in the Christian Science Monitor:

Today’s public diplomats wear boots, not wingtips. Increasingly, the Defense Department is at the forefront of US efforts to engage public opinion overseas. While the State Department formally leads the effort, the Pentagon has more money and personnel to carry out the public diplomacy mission.

This trend is risky. The message foreign publics receive – not the message the US sends – changes when the Pentagon is the messenger. Putting our military, not civilians, at the forefront of US global communications undercuts the likelihood of success, distorts priorities, and undermines the effectiveness of US civilian agencies.

…

The Pentagon should play an important role in public diplomacy, but as a partner – not the principal. For its part, the Congress should give public diplomats the tools they need to do their jobs, and then hold them accountable.

Read the whole article here. The first line should sound familiar…

Arming for the Second War of Ideas: the Department of Global Affairs

October 17, 2008 ~ Matt Armstrong ~ 1 Comment

Some suggest the War of Ideas is simply between us and “violent extremists”, “Islamists”, or some other derivative label for Al-Qaeda, Taliban, and associated movements from the Middle East to South Asia and eastward. There is even proposed legislation that places boundaries on who the adversaries are. However, while some of our policy makers continue to ignore or even reject the importance of information and persuasion in international relations from economics to war, our major competitors do not.

The dean of international relations at the Russian foreign ministry’s Diplomatic Academy said

The Russian government must prepare to fight information wars which are becoming an ever more important part of geopolitical life, restoring parts of the Soviet-era system and going beyond that as well…

The Chinese meanwhile are spending time exploring informatized warfare, “attitude warfare”, “perception warfare”. All of which are fundamentally based on Sun Tzu’s dictum of defeating an enemy without fighting. Unrestricted Warfare will attack the enemy’s strategy and diplomacy, contend for “hearts, minds and morale”, and focus on enemy’s decision-making skills and personal traits.

Interfering with the OODA loop is not new to us, even Hans Morgenthau described the importance of morale and the quality of diplomacy (as did George Kennan in his intentions on containment).

The U.S. is still not armed for the Second War of Ideas, a war we’re already 7-10 years into. To be effective, we need a Department of Non-State, functionally if not bureaucratically, armed with the appropriate tools and comprehensive collaboration across agencies and countries and organizations. But we also need a Department of State as traditional diplomacy is not obsolete. The War Department changed to the Defense Department at the end of World War II and the beginning of the First War of Ideas, maybe it’s time to change the Department of State to the Department of Global Affairs.

Ideas are not confined by geo-political borders, including our own. Myopic and temporally challenged visions of who the enemy is and will be and where and how the struggle takes place must be challenged.

See also:

Realizing the value of Foreign Aid

October 10, 2008 ~ Matt Armstrong ~ 3 Comments

The importance of foreign aid programs in building capacity, empowering foreign populations, and denying physical and ideological sanctuary to our adversaries is finally coming to the forefront. The militarization of America’s foreign policy is more than Defense leadership in informational engagement and propagating a comprehensive approach to stability operations, but in the management of foreign aid for development. As was noted in a conference call with LTG Caldwell this week, the percentage of the foreign aid budget the Defense Department manages has skyrocketed.

Continue reading “Realizing the value of Foreign Aid
“ →

FCC to Probe “Hidden Hand” Analysts

October 8, 2008 ~ Matt Armstrong

The Federal Communications Commission is looking into whether the Pentagon’s program to use and leverage retired officers as “message force multipliers.” David Barstow broke the story in The New York Times earlier this year. Today, writing in the Congressional Quarterly, John M. Donnelly’s reports the FCC launched a probe to “address congressional questions about a Pentagon program viewed by some lawmakers as propaganda.”

The FCC is looking into whether TV networks and certain on-air analysts broke the law by failing to disclose to viewers that the apparently independent analysts were in fact part of a Pentagon-funded information campaign, a spokesman for the commission said.

“What I can confirm is that the enforcement bureau at the FCC is looking into this matter, and I can confirm that they have sent letters in connection with it, seeking information,” the spokesman said late Tuesday, without elaborating on when the inquiry began or who its targets are.

Continue reading “FCC to Probe “Hidden Hand” Analysts
“ →

American Public Diplomacy Wears Combat Boots: the Pentagon’s $300 million to “engage and inspire”

October 4, 2008 ~ Matt Armstrong ~ 4 Comments

American public diplomacy wears combat boots. Not only is the Pentagon in the critical last three feet of engagement virtually and in person with audiences around the globe, especially in contested areas, but it is the Defense Department that is putting up the money to expand public diplomacy. The Pentagon’s 3-year, $300 million contract for private companies to “engage and inspire” Iraqis to support U.S. objectives and the Iraqi government, described by Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus in the Washington Post, is more than an effort five years too late. It is one more shining example of the significant failure of the U.S. Government to come to grips with the present need and commit the resources necessary to engage in the Second Great War of Ideas that began in earnest nearly a decade ago.

Continue reading “American Public Diplomacy Wears Combat Boots: the Pentagon’s $300 million to “engage and inspire”
“ →

Principles of Strategic Communication

September 29, 2008February 1, 2019 ~ Matt Armstrong ~ 8 Comments

This is Part I of two posts on describing “Strategic Communication.” Part II is here.

In the coming months, reports and Congressional legislation will attempt to change how the United States communicates with the world. Called “public diplomacy” or “Strategic Communication,” the importance of this type engagement has finally come to the forefront of our national security debate, at least for those taking a serious look at the present and future. Irregular conflict, the present and future reality of war, is based not on our ability to “kill our way to victory” but to operate in a local and global information environment.

When there are no capitals to take or “hearts” to be “won,” real security comes through enduring engagement of local and global groups in a modern proxy struggle for minds and wills. Operating “by, with, and through” such groups not only extends our reach, but acts as a force multiplier against adversaries who elicit support in the global information environment for money, recruits, and sympathetic actions. Think Hamburg, Madrid, London, and Glasgow.

Continue reading →

Defense Media Activity: centralizing information practice and understanding

August 26, 2008 ~ Matt Armstrong ~ 1 Comment

From the Defense Media Activity website:

The Department of Defense (DoD) is undertaking an initiative designed to modernize and streamline media operations by consolidating military Service and DoD media components into a single, integrated and transformed organization, the Defense Media Activity (DMA).

It seems the Defense Department is finally realizing that it too needs a central coordinator of information. Very probably the leadership role will be on the order of what State Department’s Under Secretary of Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs is supposed to be in the absence of a United States Information Agency (USIA) or its Director who was to sit at National Security Council meetings and be in the take-offs of policy.

There are too many information assets within the Defense Department, some on the right track, others not, but always fighting some kind of turf war. I won’t get started on the Air Force’s attempt to boot up Cybercommand. It’s one thing to have a hacker and counter-hacker team, but it’s another to claim information transmitted through a certain medium is your domain. Do we have a bureau to address information in newspapers and another for radio broadcasts? No…

Back to the DMA, interestingly it does not have a news feed or other means of staying in touch. Perhaps they’re waiting for the “energetic and imaginative executive” to lead them. See also Walter Pincus in the Washington Post on same.)

Follow up on American Public Diplomacy Wears Combat Boots

August 7, 2008 ~ Matt Armstrong

The struggle today is not a struggle against a tactic, but for the minds and wills of groups and individuals around the world. This is not a “battle” to be won or lost, but a continuing struggle to create resistance against threats to America’s national interests and security.

The importance of communicating in the modern environment is critical. It requires informational activities that disregards often quaint notions of state borders, including our own. We lament the ability of a guy in a cave to out-communicate the United States, but the group that was a virtual unknown in 1998 faced little opposition in the information war. We lost that fight as much, possibly more than, Al-Qaeda won it. We are in an era when the value brute force is severely diminished. Increasingly, the pen, or keyboard and camera-phone, is mightier than the gun.

However, like it or not, American public diplomacy still wears combat boots. The military does not like it and neither does the State Department. The Defense Department should not be, as I wrote yesterday, America’s ambassadors to the world. This is especially ironic considering fewer American’s know someone in uniform.

Yesterday I commented on the reality of America’s international engagement. In doing so, I shifted the blame from the Defense Department to the leadership of the State Department as well as on to the Congress. Only recently has the State Department, for example, begun to push to increase the size of the Foreign Service Officer corps. The most visible pressure, however, continues to come not from the State Department, but from the Defense Department.

It should not be a surprise that over the last seven years, the Secretaries of Defense have seemingly fielded more questions about the resurrection of USIA than the Secretaries of State, or the Under Secretaries for Public Diplomacy for that matter.

While “War of Ideas” is not entirely accurate, it is appropriate considering where we are today. The term will die by January 2009, but by then, forward momentum will have been achieved. Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy Jim Glassman is playing the right game to influence U.S. policy makers. The unfortunate phrase does not further militarize America’s foreign policy, it simply reflects an existing condition.

Below, without additional comment, are some key quotes from last week’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on “Defining the Military’s Role Towards Foreign Policy” that reinforces both points.

Continue reading “Follow up on American Public Diplomacy Wears Combat Boots
“ →

American Public Diplomacy Wears Combat Boots, it’s wrong but it’s true

August 6, 2008August 5, 2020 ~ Matt Armstrong

Last week the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing with the subject Defining the Military’s Role Towards Foreign Policy. The purpose was to explore, in Senator Joseph Biden’s (D-Del) words, “an important trend affecting this country…the expanding role of the military in U.S. foreign policy.” He went to say that “there has been a migration of functions and authorities from U.S. civilian agencies to the Department of Defense.”

Today, American public diplomacy, its international communications with the world, wears combat boots. The Secretaries of Defense have used their podium to communicate not only to the American public but to the world far more effectively than the Secretaries of State since 9/11. At a time when fewer Americans know someone in uniform, it is increasingly the U.S. military that is in the critical “last three feet” of engagement with foreign publics in the most unstable lands. Around the world, images of combat boots and “digicams” (the new “digital camouflage”) lead while cameras don’t seem to find the civilians. Maybe it’s because there are so few there.