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THREAT ASSESSMENT

The Propaganda Advantage: Why the Terrorists Still Have It

Terrorism is primarily psychological warfare carried out by “propaganda by deed.” It’s a mind war that can grind down the public’s will to continue the fight.

Weighted down by the old big-war concept of superior firepower, the Pentagon and the national security community at large have ceded the propaganda advantage to the terrorists and insurgents, who cannot hope to defeat us militarily. Despite impressive coalition gains around the world, and especially in Iraq, the United States lacks an effective counterpropaganda strategy to deprive the enemy of its ability to inspire recruits, intimidate the majority, and grind down America’s will to fight.

Key Problem Areas

The main areas of difficulty in combating extremist ideology and propaganda include the following:

• Versatile and creative adversary. Terrorists are nimble propagandists who seek always to be on the offensive. Their messages are quickly crafted, well coordinated, easily adjustable, and enjoy grassroots dissemination channels. The U.S. operates slowly in comparison.
• No national leadership. No single official in the U.S. government has the placement or stature to coordinate an interagency information strategy.
• Excessive emphasis on centralized message control. The bureaucratic vetting process slows and waters down messages to the point that they can be near useless or counterproductive when finally issued.
• Domestic propagandists trump warfighters. Public affairs officers, the domestic propagandists responsible for message-making at home, tend to be the greatest obstacles to the warfighters who need quick and lethal counterpropaganda capabilities.
• Timidity about ideological warfare. The United States confronted Marxism-Leninism head-on during the Cold War, but shows a marked timidity about tackling Islamist extremism—the political ideology of extreme interpretations of Islam—for fear of offending Muslims or violating the so-called constitutional separation of church and state.
• Discouragement of risk-taking. The bureaucracy still discourages risk-taking, even in wartime.

The threat is not so much enemy capabilities as it is the U.S. inability and unwillingness to confront its own self-inflicted handicaps.

U.S. Information Assets

It is not as if the United States is doing nothing. The Pentagon is grappling with the concept of “strategic communication,” the gamut of public diplomacy, public affairs, public relations, international broadcasting, information operations, and psychological operations, but to date has been unable to devise an overarching information strategy. Neither has the State Department, which is the lead government agency responsible for waging the war of ideas.

Within the armed forces, the information operations (IO) component is morphing mercurially, divided generally between those who view IO as mainly cyberwarfare against or through networked communications systems and those who seek to use information to manage perceptions and exert influence. The military’s established but small psychological operations (PSYOP) capabilities, with decades of experience behind them and countless unheralded successes, risk falling between the cracks as the strategic communication concept fleshes itself out.

Stacked against IO and PSYOP is the military’s aggressive and dominant public affairs (PA) component. PA is devoted mainly to relations with the domestic media, the international media, and the American public. Special operations officers in the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) have complained often that public affairs officers, or PAOs, have the power to veto IO and PSYOP in the field, often to the detriment of the fighting forces who need them.

Lack of Warrior Mentality

“The U.S. military has a lot of good PAOs, but few have a warrior mentality,” a veteran practitioner associated with the Special Operations Command tells Serviam. “They have a cover-your-ass mentality, a bureaucrat mentality, an exaggerated sense of caution that makes them more concerned with making things look good to the public back home than with finding creative ways of taking down the enemy through psychology and persuasion.”

Andrew Garfield, a former senior adviser to the British Ministry of Defence, agrees, and adds that many are poorly purposed. “While psychological operations officers tend to be well trained, many information operations and public affairs officers are seconded from other branches of service and have not received much if anything beyond the military’s basic introductory course,” he says. “Shortfalls of qualified personnel are compounded by the constant rotation of key personnel, and often replacing those experienced through ‘on the job’ training with a new group of officers forced to reinvent the wheel.”

Many PAOs have taken the law to absurd lengths, invoking an early Cold War-era law that does not even apply to the military as an excuse to forbid a modest IO effort against a top Iraqi extremist leader.

Serviam has obtained copies of e-mails between a U.S. Air Force PAO colonel and a civilian contractor working in Baghdad in support of the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) in 2006 and early 2007. In the correspondence, the PAO rejects a plan to discredit Shi’ite extremist leader Moqtada al Sadr through a cell phone-based instant messaging campaign, a medium popular with Iraqis. The reason, according to the colonel, was that Arabic-speaking American contractors in Baghdad might be exposed to the message, which would be a violation of the Smith-Mundt act of 1948 that is said to prohibit “propagandizing the American people.”

The colonel is wrong. A reading of the Smith-Mundt act shows that Congress intended that it apply narrowly to the State Department and entities directly related to it, such as the late U.S. Information Agency. The law has nothing to do with the Department of Defense. Interviews with career public diplomacy officers at the State Department show that even they do not interpret Smith-Mundt as strictly as the wayward colonel.

Problems with Contractors—and Opportunities

Faced with filling a critical need for running cross-cultural IO, the military has relied heavily on civilian contractors to find linguistic and cultural expertise, polling and focus group services, technical production, and strategic guidance. Those contracts, administered mainly through USSOCOM, have gone to the Rendon Group and the Lincoln Group of the Washington, D.C., area, and to the Bell Pottinger advertising agency of London. Much of the work is done necessarily by trial and error. Most is highly visible, including television advertisements and billboards to discredit insurgents. Some is quiet—at least until leaked by disgruntled employees or turf-conscious PAOs, such as the Los Angeles Times revelation in December 2005 that the Lincoln Group was working with Iraqi reporters and editors to plant favorable—and true—stories about American troops in the Iraqi press.

That revelation touched off a round of hysteria in the American media about the military’s alleged subversion of Iraq’s new free press, and finger-pointing in the Pentagon, with PAOs not living up to their job of adequately explaining approved programs once exposed. Instead, the operation became somewhat of a scandal, putting IO on retreat in the midst of unrelenting terrorist propaganda.

Garfield, formerly with Lincoln Group and now vice president of Glevum Associates, a strategic communications company that specializes in IO, says that contracting out IO has great promise despite many shortcomings. He urges the military and civilian agencies to permit greater creativity and relinquish the urge to overcentralize influence campaigns. Important military-authored requests for proposals for contracts, he notes, have been poorly worded, appearing to reflect a misunderstanding of the mission or the capabilities needed. Some of the decisionmaking has been geared to signing up the cheapest proposal, resulting in lower-grade, less experienced personnel being deployed as part of the deal.

With political leaders of both parties in Washington increasingly demanding more effective hearts-and-minds strategy and capabilities in the war, IO, PSYOP, and the strategic communication field overall will be demanding more input and expertise from the private sector. In recent months the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Special Operations Command, the Central Command, the Strategic Command, the Army War College, and the intelligence community have been more proactive in tapping ideas and challenges from the private sector.

The new military emphasis on human terrain analysis is also likely to spawn increased reliance on the psychological and informational aspects of conflict and conflict resolution.

The State Department’s new requirement that private diplomatic security contractors take cultural training programs to avoid offending locals in Iraq and Afghanistan will increase demand for private providers of communication skills.

But little will matter without a national strategy on the information and influence fronts. The White House National Security Council is flailing for a solution. At the civilian level, most political leaders up to the president placed their eggs in the basket of Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Karen Hughes. Hughes announced her retirement in late October, so it’s back to square one.

The strategy is unlikely to develop without a real national debate on the role of information, psychology, and persuasion as weapons of warfare. Until it does, the terrorists, insurgents, and their state sponsors will continue to have the upper hand.

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From the November/December 2007 issue of Serviam.