Hi Rob,
That's the question, isn't it? Okay, let's take a swipe at it. First of all, let's split up the term "narrative" since it covers too much ground to be immediately useful.
Grand Narrative: a grand narrative (GN) is a general symbol system that defines and outlines basic components of life and has come to have the power to interpret all aspects of life for a group. Think religion, philosophy, scientific theories / paradigms, etc. In general you can effectively ignore grand narratives if your opponents use the same ones with the exception of providing alternate interpretations from the GN.
Core Narratives: generally applicable only to a culture or a society, these tend to be historical stories that answer the question "how did we get here?". The FM 3-24 example of the Boston Tea Party is an example of a part of a core narrative. In a few cases, e.g. civil wars inside a monocultural state (e.g. the US, England, etc.) or wars in a culture area (e.g. China), the core narratives will be the same or similar - again it's a case of providing interpretation rather than a new narrative.
Cultural Narratives: aka Folklore, Atrocity Tales, Wonder Tales, myths, etc. often deal with day to day ways of living in "reality", and this is where you have the hardest time in communicating different ones since the lived environment is radically different.
Okay, let's get back to your question. So, my first question is what is the mission? That decides, in part, what narratives you are trying to communicate. The "We are here to make you free" rapidly becomes "We are here to conquer you" when the lived reality of the situation is indistinguishable from cultural narratives of conquest. Let's take the "cordon and search" example from Iraq. You can keep your narrative going IFF you can keep your actions in line with expectations. So you can point out that in order to be "free" you have to isolate and destroy certain elements that are attempting to "enslave" the populace. This "pointing out" has to be done publicly and, also, has to be set up so that members of the local population can adjust it. The original form of C&S acted just like the SWOT teams shown on TV (at least in some areas); the latter form respected the sensibilities of the locals to some degree and got more buy in and better results.
If your message is "We are here to set you free", what does "free" mean in the local culture? It is quite different from "we are here to help you rebuild your country and make it stable".
Basically, at least at the tactical level, you have to know exactly what the mission is, know roughly how that is understood by the local populace, and then select actions that condition expectations.
Sorry to be so vague, but without a specific scenario, it is hard to be specific .
Marc
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