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Kind of a part “theory”, part “futurism” post as my introduction to CTLab readers:

Visualcy and the Human Terrain

As a result of public education, the rise of mass-media and commercial advertising, Western nations and Japan, some earlier but all by mid-20th century, became relatively homogenized in the processing of information as well as having a dominant vital “consensus” on cultural and political values with postwar Japan probably being the most extreme example. The range between elite and mass opinion naturally narrowed as more citizens shared similar outlooks and the same sources of information, as did the avenues for acceptable dissent. A characteristic of modern society examined at length by thinkers as diverse as Ortega y Gasset, Edward Bernays, Marshall McLuhan and Alvin Toffler.

….Interestingly enough, despite complaints by American conservatives regarding the political bias of news outlets like al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya, these organizations are packaging news in the familiar “Pulitzerian frame” in which mass media have been structuring information for over a century. Effectively, habituating their audience to a Western style (if not content) of thinking and information processing, with all of the advantages and shortcomings in terms of speed and superficiality that we associate with television news broadcasting. This phenomena, along with streaming internet video content like Youtube and – very, very, soon, mass-based Web 2.0 video social networks – will overlay the aforementioned complexity in regard to the range of education and literacy.

Read the whole thing here.

Blogfriend Matt Armstrong was recently featured at the USC Center for Public Diplomacy where he had a very thorough and well-considered op-ed on Information Operations and New Media. Pretty much everything Matt had to say were things the USG should be doing in attempting to craft some kind of coherent narrative of it’s national objectives, policies and values:

SYNCHRONIZING INFORMATION: THE IMPORTANCE OF NEW MEDIA IN CONFLICT

Insurgents and terrorists increasingly leverage New Media to shape perceptions around the globe to be attractive to some and intimidating to others. New Media collapses traditional concepts of time and space as information moves around the world in an instant. Unlike traditional media, search engines and the web in general, enable information, factual or not, to be quickly and easily accessed long after it was created.The result is a shift in the purpose of physical engagement to increasingly incorporate the information effect of words and deeds. Thus, the purpose of improvised explosive devices, for example, is not to kill or maim Americans but to replay images of David sticking it to Goliath.

The U.S. military is actively and aggressively revising its role in shaping its own narrative in cyberspace, but this is falling short. While the U.S. is finally coming to grips with the centrality of information and perceptions, it remains confused as to how to use information effectively. American responses seem to stem from the belief that the message and the messenger we are countering are the same without regard for the target audience, intent, or how the message fits into a larger narrative, which perhaps mirrors our own perception of information as propaganda. ….A famous dead Prussian once said that war is a continuation of politics by other means, but the reality today is that war is not part of political intercourse with foes but an orchestrated, if loosely, effort to gain strategic influence over friends, foes, and neutrals. YouTube, blogs, SMS and traditional media, make every GI Joe and Jihadi a communicator, public diplomat, and persuader. Our adversaries understand and exploit this reality. Writing to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in 2005, Ayman al-Zawahiri stated that “we are in a battle, and that more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media [sic].”The U.S. military as reluctant heir to the information throne in an online world has several inherent challenges. First, operating in the environment of New Media requires awareness and agility inconsistent with the current organizational culture of the military. For example, in Iraq the military broke through the bureaucratic red-tape and started posting videos on YouTube. However, this small “victory” was incomplete: the group that uploaded to YouTube was still not permitted to view YouTube. In effect, they were posting information they were not authorized to see.”

Those quotes were snippets. Matt’s post is rich in detail and really requires being read in full.

I have tilted at the IO windmill a few times in the past. It’s a subject that is both easy as wel as difficult to analyze. Easy, because the USG has yet to initiate and/or master the fundamentals of good IO as Matt’s post makes clear ( there are genuine IO experts in the USG, perhaps even a large number of them, but the bureaucracies are not institutionally optimized to conduct IO with consistency or coordination) but difficult because the level of genuine sophistication and effective nuance in strategic communication remains so far off. Even if that level of “play” was achieved by our civil service and soldiers, any  IO campaign could be undone in an instant by some clumsy action or statement from a political appointee or elected official concerned primarily with fellating some domestic special interest group. 

Matt’s focus on “synchronicity” is apt. It will be a herculean task needing laser beam focus to get all of the USG players on the same message most of the time; even then some dissension and debate being showcased is itself a vital advertisement of the attractive nature of a liberal, open society and a sharp contrast with the dismally intolerant and brutally ignorant alternative our Islamist enemies have to offer. In pursuing that, I’d like to offer a few suggestions:

Credibility is the COIN of the Realm:

Matt touched on this but I want to give this principle added weight. For all our official, overt, communication by any spokesman representing the United States, the best long term strategy is a reputation of credibility. It may hurt to concede errors or enemy successes in the short run but having the global audience grdugingly concede that “the Americans speak the truth” adds momentum of every word, every idea and every action we undertake. It will not bring us love because oftentimes, our pursuing national interests will come at the expense of others but truth-telling will yield something more valuable, respect. No one cares to be treated as if they were a fool and most of the transparently self-serving gibberish official spokesmen offer up pays dividends only in contempt being added to the anger foreigners already feel at some of our policies.  Credibility is to the war of ideas what COIN is to guerilla warfare and it is a valuable and exceedingly rare quality because once your credibility is lost, it is lost.

Without Attention Being Paid All Our efforts Are Useless:

Credibility is not enough. Key messages or memes also have to be interesting. If people are not psychologically engaged in the presentation then they are not hearing it, much less reaching the points of comprehension, sympathy or agreement. American popular culture and commercial advertising is nothing short of an unrelenting global juggernaut that is eroding traditional mores of every society with which it comes into contact, yet our official proclamations remain starkly uninteresting even to most Americans so why should a Yemeni teen-ager or Afghan farmer tune in to what we are selling ? As long as our attempts at capturing attention remain at the level of dull mediocrity we can expect to fail.

Influence is a Long Term Investment:

The 1980’s saw a march toward capitalism and democracy in part because we were reaping the harvest of decades of student visas, cultural and scientific exchanges and consistent public diplomacy outreach. From Mongolia to Czechoslovakia Chile there were reformers taking power who were ” Chicago Boys” who had imbibed free markets at the feet of Nobel laureates. The National Endowment for Democracy, the USIA, VOA, Radio Free Europe and NGO’s like the AFL-CIO whose efforts and programs abroad were robust and self-confident. American society was permitted by the USG to sell itself. These things cost pennies on the dollar compared to having to  use hard power options and they lower our transaction costs when sanctions or military intervention is the order of the day.

Deception is Best Left to the Clandestine Operators :

HUMINT based strategic influence efforts, black propaganda and disinformation and various arts of deception will be better left to covert programs, plausibly deniable third parties and used sparingly and with subtlety. The increasingly “radically transparent” world ensures that too many sophisticated eyes with all sorts of agendas will be analyzing our official spokesmen 24/7. The best will can hope to accomplish is effectively framing our public message to be truthful and compelling. Any meme that is verifiably false, if we believe we must put it out into the global media environment, cannot have a return address.

IO is a secondary area of operations for the United States.  Good IO programs cannot remediate incompetent statecraft or poor military leadership or put a “happy face” on obvious disasters but poor or absent IO capabilities can fritter away the capital that successful diplomacy or military action can accrue when our enemies accusations go unanswered. 

Crossposted at Chicago Boyz

Usually, when I link to Democracy Project it is to highlight some important problem that my friend Bruce Kesler attacking head on. Today, Bruce has invited another friend, Matt Armstrong of MountainRunner, to share the spotlight in a special guest post in an area of expertise – the crisis of American public diplomacy:

U.S. Tongue-Ties Self In Talking To World

To begin with, we must accept that the romantic days of the United States Information Agency are gone. So many confuse the USIA and the other information services, such as Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, of recent decades with the USIA that was engaged in the active psychological struggle that largely ended with détente and the finalizing of the European partition.

Unlike half a century ago, the U.S. military has a clear voice and is arguably our dominant public diplomat. Therefore, simply resurrecting “USIA” without reorganizing our national information capabilities across civilian and military lines would turn it into just another voice struggling to be heard over America’s military commanders, spokespersons, and warfighters.

The candidates must look deeper than re-creating an agency and or re-establishing old outreach programs. They must show strong leadership and have a bold vision to rally the government and country to adapt to a world that requires understanding the information effect of action, agile response capabilities, and above all, credibility and trust.

Read the rest here.

The implementation of COIN in Iraq has garnered success even as American public diplomacy and IO efforts are justifiably trashed by…well…everyone, really. Why is that?

Perhaps the reason has to do with the credibility of the actors operating on different levels of conflict. Unit commanders in Iraq, if they are engaged with locals and dependably follow through on their commitments and threats, they gain a degree of authenticity with their audience, friend and foe alike. More or less this is happening at the tactical level.

Our national leaders, broadly speaking, carry no such weight on the strategic level, neither at home nor abroad. Regardless of their position on the war, most politicians appear to be disconnected economically and socially from the lives of ordinary Americans, much less foreign audiences – unless they are foreign elites who were educated in American Ivy League schools. “Spin” has become so habitual and baldfaced lying, denial of reality and lawyerly semantics so commonplace a tactic in American politics, that our words no longer carry any credibility, just our actions. When our actions then contradict our values as well, the game is over.

Our elite cannot wage 4GW or strategic IO until they first become connected enough to reality to systematically execute actions that build legitimacy in the eyes of a multiplicity of audiences. Our checking account is overdrawn and we need to start making deposits. This isn’t a call to appease anyone but to earn the respect of even our enemies by making the certitude of what America is fighting for a given.

After that, the rest is simply a discussion of means.

The release of the conclusions in the recent NIE  (PDF) on Iran’s nuclear program has provoked widespread commentary in the blogosphere. The pure politics of the release is best dealt with elsewhere but here are a few words from some folks with more than nimble typing fingers to back up their analysis:

Haft of the Spear:

“The declassified key judgments of the latest NIE on Iran are yet another opportunity to get a glimpse of the inner-workings of the highest levels of the intelligence community. The picture isn’t pretty. The key judgments are notable for many reasons, not the least of which is how they contrast with the last NIE on this same topic. In 2005, with access to an Iranian source’s laptop, the community was confident that Iran was determined to build a nuclear weapon “despite its international obligations and international pressure.” Today it is equally confident that Iran halted its weapons program in 2003 and that it remained suspended for several years”

Whirledview:

“I will note that the supposedly secret uranium enrichment program that the administration accused North Korea of, and broke up the Agreed Framework for, was disavowed by the intelligence community earlier this year in much the same way that this NIE disavows the 2005 NIE on Iran. I’ll also note that proving a negative is difficult, and one of the favorite tactics of the right: we say that you’ve got a secret program. Prove to us you don’t.”

ArmsControlWonk:

“ Dafna Linzer reports in the Washington Post that a crucial bit of information was an intercepted communication by a senior Iranian military official “complaining that the nuclear program had been shuttered.”The intercept – which Linzer notes was one of 1,000 footnotes in a 150 page document – was the final piece in the puzzle, and Linzer reports that the intercepts were briefed to the Bush Administration “beginning in July.”So, that timing would be consistent with Mike McConnell’s reference to “new information collected in late spring that caused a reconsideration of some elements of the assessment.”

Swedish Meatballs Confidential:

“The ‘new’ NIE on Iran’s nuclear weapons program [9-page pdf] — which has been [minor tweaks aside] in the can for nearly a year now — was released this afternoon. It is clear why the Cheney Cabal didn’t want this estimate to see the light of day.”

Counterterrorism Blog:

“ While the NIE clearly shifts the assessment of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, it acknowledges the regime continues to engage in dangerous behavior and comes down firmly on the side of political and economic pressure as an effective means of changing Iranian behavior. According to the NIE, Iran’s decision to halt its nuclear weapons program on the fall of 2003 was “in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure resulting from exposure of Iran’s previously undeclared nuclear work.” (It was around this time that the U.S. and other governments exposed the A.Q. Kahn network and its international nuclear weapons material black market). The key judgments conclude that “our assessment that the [nuclear weapons] program probably was halted primarily in response to international pressure suggests Iran may be more vulnerable to influence on the issue that we judged previously.”

Sic Semper Tyrannis:

” The chimera of Iran as deadly menace is a product of Israeli paranoia and debilitating fear of the “other.”  This fear saturates Israeli strategic thinking making impossible for them a rational contemplation of the odds against Iranian suicide attacks against Israel.  Israel rejects the concept of deterrence of nuclear attack through creation of MAD (mutual assured destruction).  I have described their reasoning elsewhere in these pages. Given the awful nature of Jewish history, such overwhelming fear of the return of the final “gollum,” or perhaps Azrael himself is comprehensible.”

Thomas P.M. Barnett:

“ Iran’s choice is reasonably smart: talk big like Libya, stop short of weapons like Japan, but signal willingness to aggressively defend like Israel. I told you these guys are not stupid.”

I recall, as a lowly grad student, that many of the documents I would have loved to have had my hands on – NIE’s and PDD/NSDD’s referred to in secondary literature – were locked up tight, despite having been issued sometimes decades earlier. It’s rather surreal, from a historian’s perspective, seeing even partial declassification of a just issued NIE. Until recently at least, the USG had still classified documents going back to 1917 ( most likely covering cryptological sources and methods)!

The devil is in the details, to which we are not privy. Traditionally, the NIC process constructing a NIE would have a NIO as point man and emerge as a consensus, with the CIA  often being the heavyweight in the interagency wrangling. Supposedly, procedures have changed since the pre-Iraq War days to clarify the degree of certainty in an inherently uncertain scenario. Given the general unwillingness of IC bureaucracies to reconsider even information-sharing habits, how robust were the changes in the analytical methodology ?