Newsweek has a must-read story on something we’ve hammered on again and again here at Defense Tech HQ: the American military’s inability to get its message out in any sort of sensible way. Especially through new media.
While the Pentagon clamps down on milbloggers and squeezes embedded reporters, the insurgents are, as Ms. Jardin noted the other day, starting TV stations, training over the Web, and selling t-shirts online. Here’s the latest example of the media-savvy inequality:
A draft report recently produced by the Baghdad embassy’s director of strategic communications Ginger Cruz… makes the stakes clear: “Without popular support from US population, there is the risk that troops will be pulled back … ” Under the heading DOMESTIC MESSAGES, Cruz goes on to recommend 16 themes to reinforce with the American public, several of which Bush is likely to hit: “vitally important we succeed”; “actively working on new approaches”; “there are no quick or easy answers.“
What’s even more telling is that the IRAQI MESSAGESthe very next sectionare still “TBD,” to be determined. Indeed, the document so much as admits that despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars, the United States has lost the battle for Iraqi public opinion: “Insurgents, sectarian elements, and others are taking control of the message at the public level.” Videos of U.S. soldiers being shot and blown up, and of the bloody work of sectarian death squads, are now pervasive. The images inspire new recruits and intimidate those who might stand against them. “Inadequate message control in Iraq,” the draft warns, “is feeding the escalating cycle of violence…“
Sunni insurgents in particular have become expert at using technology to underscoresome would say exaggeratetheir effectiveness. “The sophistication of the way the enemy is using the news media is huge,” Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, told NEWSWEEK just before he returned to the United States. Most large-scale attacks on U.S. forces are now filmed, often from multiple camera angles, and with high-resolution cameras… In some cases, U.S. officials believe, insurgents attack American forces primarily to generate fresh footage…
What the insurgents understand better than the Americans is how Iraqis consume information. Tapes of beheadings are stored on cell phones along with baby pictures and wedding videos. Popular Arab satellite channels like Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya air far more graphic images than are typically seen on U.S. TVleaving the impression, say U.S. military officials, that America is on the run…
The U.S. military’s response, on the other hand, usually sticks to traditional channels like press releases. These can take hours to prepare and are often outdated by the time they’re issued. Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, director of the military’s press operations in Baghdad until this past September, complains that all military-related information has to be processed upward through a laborious and bureaucratic chain of command. “The military wants to control the environment around it, but as we try to [do so], it only slows us down further,” he says. “All too often, the easiest decision we made was just not to talk about [the story] at all, and then you absolutely lose your ability to frame what’s going on.”
Exactly.
Apparently by accident, I got a Pentagon message about the war in Iraq, complete with images, and published them over the weekend. The firestorm of controversy was much larger than I expected.
The other problem: the pentagon has a hard hard story to sell, especially in Iraq…
An insurgent’s footage of blowing up a HMMWV is one of liberation. To the local audience, it plays like a woodcut of Washington crossing the Delaware.
Footage of the US’s response, or one of the cliche “bomb-cam” views, plays like watching a teenager beat up a 4-year old kid on “America’s Most One Sided Fights Caught on Tape”, a huge problem.
Worse, footage which shows portions of the insurgency in a bad light (EG, the carnage from the secarian bombings) is liable to up the heat in the civil war, and doesn’t necessarily help the US anyway (for I think the following: “I’ll still shoot the enemy of my enemy in the back” largely holds)
I think Nicholas makes a good point. Anyone who’s been reading this site regularly probably agrees about the problems we’ve been having with getting our message across to the Iraqi people — with the “how” of the hearts-and-minds campaign — but I’d like to know whether the military has a much better idea of what the content of the message should be — the “what” of hearts-and-minds.
As Nicholas says, the content question is easy for the bad guys (it always is): their two messages are 1) “the Americans and the [insert rival Iraqi group here] evil” and 2) “we are righteosuly slaughering them.“
For the good guys, the job is harder. Clearly, you want to get across the message that what we’re doing is good and what the other guys are doing is bad, but the obvious ways of doing that, like discussing reconstruction, don’t seem to be going very far. We can’t push the message that the bad guys are evil by showing the bad stuff they do, as Nicholas points out, because that will just inflame one side and do the other side’s propaganda work for it.
More generally: we all know what propaganda is shockingly effective at getting people angry and violent, but what type of propaganda gets them calm and willing to sit down and talk? Do we even know the answer to that in theory?
I’m really curious to hear what people think about this. I hope this doesn’t turn into another DefTech flame-war.
As an U.S. Army employee and blogger, I think our PAOs would probably do a better of job of getting the ‘message’ out under three conditions:
1) If they didn’t have to scrutinize every word of information slated for public release.
2) If they didn’t clamp down on milbloggers, regardless of their feelings about the mission in Iraq.
3) If they had a more compelling message other than ‘U.S. forces, democracy, Iraqi government = good. Terrorists, insurgents, militias = bad.‘
Americans will trust a more transparent Army, even if doesn’t always have something positive to say. Iraqis will listen to the U.S. government if it speaks to their day-to-day needs and actually helps the Iraqi government deliver.
I will get off my soapbox now.
Good Morning Folks,
I agree with the appearent agreement here that the Newsweek article is on the money. The big question is how did this happen?
The U.S. has invested $billions in the area of cybercentric warfare, it was the cause de. celeb of the 80’s and 90’s how did we let the Terrorist trump us?
Maybe it the fact that we are a Demotratic Society and have a revolution to “propganda”, was it not a year ago that someone uncovered that the DoD was paying to plant articles favorable to the U.S. in Iraq in Iraqi newspapers and of course the sh** hit the fan.
If we are going to compete in this are we have to go back to the lessons that Joseph Goebbels taught the world in the 1930’s and make your case early, often and loud.
Until the U.S. learns that it’s the message and the technology we will be on the losing side in this game.
ALLONS,
Byron Skinner