Hi Bill,

Quote Originally Posted by Bill Moore View Post
The biggest challenge in the IO war though is convincing the home audience that the sacrifice is worth it. With relatively very little effort we can put the bad guys on the defensive on the moral front (will we do it? I don't know), but equally important is showing we have a "viable" plan and we're making progress. If we can't show that, then it is unrealistic to expect support for continued operations, because you're then asking the American people to invest their blood and dollars into hope, not a plan.
Honestly, I have to disagree with you on this. Yes, the "home audience" is a critical target for the reason you state, but it isn't the biggest IO challenge.

First off, this is a multi-party IO war (I prefer the term "symbolic war" - more on that in a couple of months when I get the time to write it up). And, as with the fight in Iraq, the "sides" are amorphous:
  1. A broadly centrist / left of centre political ideology that operates strongly in Europe and, to a lessor degree, in North America.
  2. A broadly individualist political ideology that operates moderately strongly in North America, Britain, Oz, India, etc.
  3. A highly reactionary revitalization movement within Islam, broadly descended from the Muslim Brotherhood.
  4. A moderate (for Islam) secularizing / reformation movement within Islam.
  5. A sometime capricious, highly self-centered and self-referential, loosely "political" but, actually economic, ideology that infuses many corporate organizations.
Second, the IO war is not taking place in a geographically limited space but, thanks to inexpensive global communications technologies, is taking place world wide in "information space". It is a perfect example of what Barry Wellman calls "glocalization" - "Think Globally, Act Locally" and its corollary, "The Local is the Global".

Third, the US can not win the GWOT without large amounts of support from other nations, especially in the form of economic "support" (loosely construed). Without that support, the US could find itself stuck in a situation of an economic warm war with both China and the EU that would, basically, cause a massive recession in the US economy (look at the trade and production figures for China, the US and the EU as well as foreign cash reserve figures).

What all of this admittedly somewhat round about argument means is that the actual IO war that counts is one that attempts to construct an alliance between actors 1, 2 and 4 that moderates the glocal perceptions of actor 5 against actor 3. The area of operations must be glocal (global and local), not geographically based.

Marc