EVENTS

Date:	Wednesday, December 8, 2004
Time:	12:00 PM -- 1:30 PM
Location:	Wohlstetter Conference Center, Twelfth Floor, AEI 1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036

December 2004

Winning Hearts and Minds: Information Warfare in the Global War on Terror

The counterinsurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq are revolutionizing the way the U.S. military wages information warfare. Public affairs officers are now war fighters by another name, responsible for shaping the battlefield by countering enemy propaganda and anticipating public opinion. But even as the struggle for hearts and minds has become as important as any piece of territory, military operations are themselves increasingly covert, small-scale, and inaccessible to journalists, making it easy for facts or images to be distorted to America's strategic disadvantage. How is the U.S. military waging information-operations campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq? To what extent can and should the U.S. military develop a battlefield doctrine for influencing public opinion? In what ways can the U.S. military work together with war correspondents to ensure more accurate reporting in a counterinsurgency environment? Brigadier General Vincent Brooks and Robert D. Kaplan addressed these issues at a December 8 AEI conference.

Thomas Donnelly
AEI

Carl von Clausewitz defined war as an act of force to compel an enemy to accede to its opponent's will. Thus, the measure of victory in war is always psychological, and the global war on terror is no exception to this dictum. Just like every other war, it is a contest of wills.

President George W. Bush has defined the war on terror in fundamentally ideological terms: an effort to transform the political culture of the greater Middle East. It is a tripartite struggle between the status-quo autocrats who currently dominate the region, the Islamist revolutionaries who seek to overthrow them and establish their own radically theocratic order, and the liberal democratic revolutionaries on whose side the United States has intervened.

Information operations and strategic communications are crucial to winning this effort, although the precise meaning of these terms has proven elusive. Regardless, it is insufficient to frame these efforts as conventional public relations. Indeed, it may be more important that the U.S. purposes in the Middle East are clear than that they are popular.

Brigadier General Vincent Brooks
U.S. Army

The U.S. military has achieved a high degree of effectiveness if not dominance against its adversaries in the traditional battle space of land, air, sea, and space. The information domain is different, however, as it is particularly vulnerable to asymmetrical warfare. Even lesser-developed parts of the world now have Internet and cell phone technology, having bypassed the "wired" age and moved directly to the "wireless" one. Consequently, adversaries can disseminate untruthful information that is operationally oriented against the United States. In fact, deliberate disinformation and psychological operations information are evident on the Internet. One such example are the digital videos of the beheadings in Iraq. Each "hit" multiplies the terror effect beyond the original victim, illustrating the asymmetrical nature of the information domain.

The essential task of military public affairs officers is to tell the truth, because this is indelibly linked to U.S. credibility. The first objective of military public affairs officers is to use information to inform, principally the American public, about what goes on inside the military so that there is clarity of context. It is also vital to communicate the complexity of military operations. For instance, there might be extraordinary violence on one street in Iraq, but calm on the next. Unless the military is able to convey this reality, the public will not know. It is also crucial to articulate the confidence that is reflective of the military's professionalism.

In the case of Fallujah, there was counter-pressure in the information domain by insurgents, with accusations of civilian casualties. The appropriate response by the U.S. military is to introduce further information about what is actually occurring. At the same time, public affairs officers are acutely aware that, when they show successes, there are inevitably accusations of propaganda.

It is also important for U.S. public affairs officers to recognize that the power of the image is considerably greater than the power of the word. America's adversaries are extremely adept in their use--and misuse--of images, and it is vital that the U.S. military compete in this sphere. One of the great benefits of embedding journalists is that it has allowed the U.S. military to show the media directly what, previously, it had only been possible to describe to them.

Robert D. Kaplan
The Atlantic Monthly

A century ago, the naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan noted that the seas were the great commons of warfare, and that he who controls the seas controls the battle space. The information domain is the new commons that the U.S. military must adapt to, mold, and manipulate. This is made more difficult by the fact that, although there is still an American military, there is less and less an American media. Rather, there is a global, cosmopolitan media into which an American contingent is rapidly dissolving. The media must thus be considered a gray-area threat and a terrain of battle, and the U.S. military must develop battlefield doctrine for dealing with it.

In Fallujah during the first week of April, the First Battalion of the Fifth Marines and the Second Battalion of the First Marines were two or three days from taking down the city. Instead, a ceasefire was called, largely because media coverage of the campaign had become so negative that it put pressure on newly emerging Iraqi authorities. While the Marines in Fallujah had mapped out every step of their assault, there appeared to be no commensurate strategy by the Pentagon for information operations. During the invasion of Iraq, Brigadier General Brooks was the voice and face of the campaign, explaining it to the world. But when unconventional fighting began in Iraq, there was no war room, no spokesman, and thus, no means to project a clear and central message.

By contrast, when Army Special Forces invested Basilan Island in the southern Philippines in the summer of 2002, they set up medical and veterinary clinics, trained Filipino commandos, and ejected Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiah guerrillas. Most importantly, they embraced the Filipino media, embedding them with U.S. troops, taking them on tours, so that by the end of the summer, the U.S. military was getting positive press in the Filipino media for the first time since the withdrawal from Clark and Subic Bay in 1992.

In unconventional wars, the victor is whoever presents the most compelling narrative, and this spring and summer, there was no compelling narrative from the Bush administration about Iraq. Although Samarra was a major turning point--the first time Iraqi forces took the lead in taking down a city, with minimal civilian casualties--the perception among many Americans was that the campaign was just another flare-up of violence in Iraq.

American troops increasingly have access to cyberspace, and they are using it to write emails and blogs, frustrated that the media's reporting is so at odds with their own experience. There will be more of this in the future. The latter will not whitewash problems, but they will also reject the cult of victimhood that the global, cosmopolitan media wants to bestow on them.

In an age of emerging democracies, rules of engagement for the military are also likely to become more restrictive because emerging local medias in former dictatorial societies are often unprofessional, aggressive, and receptive to conspiracy theories. This necessitates that the U.S. military return to the original methods of unconventional warfare, training and professionalizing indigenous proxy forces, who in turn will attract less local and global media attention. Indeed, it is a measure of success that recent U.S. military efforts in countries such as Mali, Kenya, Georgia, and the Philippines have tended to stay off the front pages of newspapers. Wherever a herd of journalists materializes, it is often impossible to win the information war.

AEI research associate Vance Serchuk prepared this summary.