Our "Strategic" Communications Policy: Watch What I Say, Not What I Do

Walter Pincus writes in today's Washington Post about Congressional criticism of the Pentagon's "strategic" communications plans that are intended to assist our nation's military in winning over civilians while eroding support for adversaries in countries around the world.

The programs have grown too fast and are spread through the Defense Department budget in a way that hampers oversight, complain the House and Senate Armed Services committees and the House Appropriations Committee. They also suggest that the military is producing propaganda and other materials that mask U.S. government sponsorship and focus "far beyond a traditional military information operations."

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The Pentagon spends nearly $1 billion a year on its strategic communications, its contribution to the "war of ideas" that until recent years had been the sole province of the State Department's public diplomacy effort. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have resulted in the military getting money more easily than the diplomatic corps, and the dominance of military personnel in those countries has led to an increasing military role in information operations.

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Last week, the House Appropriations Committee, in approving the fiscal 2010 defense funding bill, said that it had identified 10 strategic communications programs that had grown from $9 million in fiscal 2005 to a "staggering $988 million request for fiscal 2010." The committee said many of the costlier programs appear as "alarmingly non-military propaganda, public relations, and behavioral modification messaging."

Several of the 10 classified programs "should be terminated immediately," said the panel, and it threatened to withhold funding for all 10 for next year until Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates reports to the committee about their "target audiences, goals, and measures of effectiveness." It also cut $500 million from the Pentagon's overall total for strategic communications.

The Senate Armed Services Committee, meanwhile, directed the Pentagon last week to come up with separate budget materials for fiscal 2011 "that clearly articulate and document Defense Department objectives and funding levels for strategic communications and public diplomacy." Without such documentation, the Senate panel said, it could not "oversee adequately the funding for the multitude of programs."

When I served in the Pentagon as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Security and Information Operations, such programs were included in my portfolio. Back then, we advanced a concept known as "shaping the information environment." Upon reflection, to think that as a nation we could "shape the information environment" as opposed to being shaped by that environment ourselves was both arrogant and foolhardy. It's as if we believed we could repeal the law of gravity.

Unfortunately, based upon results on the ground today in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, "strategic communications" continues to be primarily viewed by our government through the prism of "spinning" the news in order to show U.S. goals and objectives in a favorable light and those of our adversaries in a negative manner. However, much to my frustration, both then and now, such a "strategy" fails to recognize that the best strategic communication plan is often the simplest, i.e. "watch what we do, not what we (or the adversary) say."

Rather than continuing the condescending and irresponsible belief that we can spin the truth and with it the rest of the world, we should instead recognize how our actions play out in the "information environment" and conduct ourselves accordingly. Be it employment of our military, intelligence, diplomatic, economic, cultural, criminal justice, humanitarian or other national capabilities, we should first understand how their employment in specific situations will resound in the strategic information environment and, if they do not advance our overall national goals and objectives, then we should change our conduct rather than attempt to change how the world perceives our conduct. We have direct control over the former, almost none over the latter. It shouldn't cost us billions of wasted tax dollars as well as incalculable cost to our credibility and integrity as a nation to realize that.