The Army Capstone Concept: the Army wants your comments

[zenpundit]

First, I will strongly second Ken's recommendation to add "Disrupt" (see his file, upthread).

Secondly, I will heartily commend the theme of "Complexity and Uncertainty" and the emphasis upon adaptive thinking.

Thirdly, my rec:

Re: IO, PSYOPS, PD, etc. in light of "uncertainty" and "complexity"

Adaptive response to uncertainty and changing conditions require that commanders have flexibility and autonomy. Generally, the amount of flexibility/autonomy they have is inverse to the amount of media attention their operations generate because media attention is a valuable currency that attracts political actors ( domestic and foreign, state and non-state).

The military has attempted to "manage" the media with limited success. The infosphere is now global, networked and viral and many major players (BBC, al Jazeera etc.) begin from a stance of critical hostility toward USG foreign policy/military objectives. The greater the degree that a US operation is the subject of media attention, the worse our strategic starting point is in terms of information. Under such conditions, trying to "spin" or court media influencers is like the Dutch boy putting fingers in the leaking dike.

The media in its varied forms but particularly major TV and print media have very finite resources. They can as a system, give one global crisis tight scrutiny but when the number of newsworthy events coincide, they quickly demonstrate the effects of exceeding "cognitive load". The volume of information cannot be effectively juggled or processed either by the media filters ( reporters, editors) or the audience. This has immediate policy implications.

Even in the simple media era of the early Cold War, simultaneous crisises degraded the ability of superpowers to respond effectively to either. Case in point, the Suez Crisis intersecting with the Soviet invasion of Hungary resulted in Dulles and Eisenhower waffling on Hungary and delivering a sharp elbow to France and Britain. Khrushchev, by contrast, had no realistic possibility of aiding Nasser had Ike sided with the British, Israelis and French. The number of officials in any great power who make key decisions on the use of force are too few to manage multiple intersecting calamities. If the amount of "noise" in the system is increased, their job becomes more difficult.

U.S. war planners need to conceive of campaigns in terms of a global "attention economy". The greater the number of competing stories that exist to suck up media attention during military operations, the wider the latitude that U.S. ground commanders will have to "adapt" to circumstances. The competing stories do not have to be another geopolitical crisis either - a sex scandal or death of a celebrity figure like Princess Diana or Michael Jackson serves just as well. The crux is that the story needs to be attractive to key media decision makers from a business standpoint.