Brigadier General Vincent K. Brooks

President George W. Bush has defined the global war on terror as an effort to transform the political culture of the Middle East. Just as the counterinsurgencies in Afghanistan and particularly in Iraq have forced the military to change battlefield tactics in this war, the modern media, especially the Internet, also present new challenges for the military. Today's battles play out not only on the streets of Fallujah and Samarra but on websites and news outlets with global reach. In opening a December 8 conference on information warfare, AEI's Thomas Donnelly suggested that perhaps the most important job for the United States today is to make its purposes in the Middle East clear, rather than concentrating on making them popular.

Brigadier General Vincent K. Brooks, former chief operations spokesman at U.S. Central Command during Operation Iraqi Freedom and currently deputy chief of Army public affairs at the Department of Defense, considered how the military should manage the new information battleground. He contended that, despite having already largely established dominance in air, land, sea, and space, U.S. armed forces struggle to win the fight against enemy propaganda because the Internet is open to everyone, including adversaries, and the information being spread is no longer subject to the same verification standards set by older forms of the media.

The enemy can use the Internet to spread deliberate disinformation or multiply the psychological effects of violence, for example by showing the beheading of hostages. Every "hit" to watch such horrors extends the effect of the terror further beyond the victim.
 
General Brooks reasoned that, while the U.S. military cannot control the enemy's Internet tactics, it must consider more carefully how it presents information. When confronting an adversary who regularly and deliberately disseminates false information, the military must not only be truthful but labor to establish a degree of confidence with the public--and not just the American public.

Robert D. Kaplan of The Atlantic Monthly considered media influence and the changing nature of relations between the media and the military. He termed the media "a gray-area threat" because of its ability to reach and influence global opinion. The modern American media is more of a "global cosmopolitan media," in that its practitioners often feel a greater bond with international reporters than with fellow-American soldiers. Given journalism's influence, Kaplan recommended that the military develop a doctrine for dealing with the media, just as the military has done in every other type of battleground.

Kaplan illustrated the power of media coverage in Iraq and in the Philippines. During the fighting for Fallujah in the spring of 2004, the Marines boxed in the insurgents but were forced to pull back in part because of pressure on the Iraqi interim government largely stemming from negative media coverage. The coverage concentrated on civilian casualties, despite their limited number, and repeatedly showed pictures of damaged mosques, thereby implying indiscriminate shooting by coalition forces. Later, during the second assault on Fallujah, these mosques were found to contain stockpiles of weapons used by insurgents against coalition troops. Conversely, in the Philippines, after local media were embedded with Army Special Forces as they set up clinics, trained Filipino commandos, and ejected terrorist guerrillas from Basilan Island, positive stories came out about the U.S. military for the first time in a decade.

Kaplan concluded that in an unconventional war, the side that presents the most compelling narrative will be viewed as the winner of the conflict. Kaplan and General Brooks agreed that the proliferation of soldiers' writing their own experiences in e-mail and weblogs will be an important part of information warfare, as the soldiers present an unvarnished, personal view of what is really happening on the ground.