Losing the PSYOP war

[marct]

Hi Tom,

Looked at from the strategic and operational level, we tend toward schizophrenia when it comes to IO in general and PSYOP in particular. The "split" in our IO and PSYOP efforts comes in our audience selection (or confusion).

Much of what we do is greatly influenced because it is targeted toward the greater "us" and not the greater "them."....

But when it comes to the strategic and the operational, our two personalities show up very quickly. Consider the issues of rendition and strike operations; do the risks outweigh the gains? In considering such operations which IO/PSYOP audience are we really playing to?

I think that is a really good point. One of the assumptions behind a working democracy is the idea of an "informed citizenry". Increasingly, this has come to mean a citizenry that is told what to think, rather than giving citizens the tools required to think. This is one of the arguments that the extreme globalist movement is making that has enough truth to it so that some of their other arguments appear, on the surface, as plausible. Unfortunately, it is also a tactic used by too many politicians .

I have felt for quite some time now that the IO/PSYOPs being conducted on our own citizens needs to be modified from a rhetoric of "rights" to a rhetoric of "rights and responsibilities".

Too often I believe we are playing to the greater "us" in that we have an audience we need to satisfy that we are indeed doing something; we internally derive a short term positive boost. It serves the greater "us" well in the short to mid-term. Does it serve the "greater them" or better put does it serve portraying and promotong our interests to the "greater them"?

Overall I would say we have not accepted we are fighting a global insurgency centered on ideology as its most obvious feature. It is not per se a "relgious war" as some would portray it; it is a cultural war. Our political culture (if there is an "our") has too many components for religion to serve as a primary motivation.

Honestly, I would have to say that there has been too much of a disconnect - the rhetoric used internally is inconsistent with the rhetoric used externally. I think that this disconnect has been used by a lot of people all over the world as a way of discrediting the entire global counter-insurgency. It is, for example, too easy for someone making minimum wage working at McDonalds to see the Iraq war as a war for the VPs buddies in the oil industry to gain control over Iraqi oil (BTW, that was one scenario floated by the anti-glabalization movement).

As to it being a cultural war and not a religious war, I agree totally - at least as far as the total global war is concerned.

As for our enemies--by that I mean the central core of AQ salafists and wahabists--their very focus on that extreme form of Islam makes them aliens in their own lands.

The cultures and sub-cultures we are dealing with are no more amenable to salafist thought than they are to democracy as we practice it. They are our "targets" or objective. Understanding that and using it should be in our IO and PSYOP tool kit.

How we "target: that objective is critical. And our approach to it has to be strategic and long term. Here our internal IO and PSYOP campaign on ourselves gets in the way. We talk long war but we often seek immediate gratification.

Again, I agree with you on that. If you look at the philosophical underpinnings of the Anglo culture complex, Burke, Hume, Locke, et al., they are also opposed by groups in the West. Think back to the early Federalists at the start of the US. Where I see us as having a great difficulty is in preaching individual freedom / responsibility and then, if the results don't match a preconceived template, refusing to accept those results.

Marc