Losing the PSYOP war

[Tom Odom]

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." Consider the debate over kinetic versus non-kinetic. Tactically we seem to get the message that we cannot "kill" an insurgency in OIF or OIF. And because that is a contained environment, we can tailor our ROE and our operations to sustain such an approach.

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?

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.

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.

Dr. Joe Nye writes on "soft power" and its role in foreign policy. I agree with much of what he has to say; you have brought up some of it on this thread in speaking of television. Music is another example; we can make jokes about Bono of U2 but he has served our greater interests well because rightly or wrongly he is seen globally as a symbol of Western conscience.

Now I sense that I am rambling...

More later
Tom

[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

[Bill Moore]

In another thread about gangs in the military we were exchanging links to “information” as we frequently do in the SWJ Council. One of the links was to a paranoid blog that predicted the coming culture war, thus everyone needed to prepare for war, etc. We all know the type, build a bomb shelter, get your guns boys, them other folks is coming… The site, like so many others, points to a relatively new phenomenon, which is internet facilitated networks of like minded people. Communities are no longer refined to geographical areas, and on line communities in some cases may be stronger than communities defined by geography. This really came to the forefront for me during my son’s high school graduation last year, and the people sitting to the left and right of us (prior to the ceremony starting) were on their cell phones in rather intense conversations. My wife and I obviously didn’t exist in their world, we never had a chance to say hello. We were in their physical space, but not their community. Then it hit me that all this information technology has disconnected us at the local level, and instead allowed us to plug in to the global community where we see fit. To top it off the principle’s opening remarks for the graduation quoted Thomas Friedman’s book “The World is Flat”.

What does have to do with psychological operations? In general people with strong points of view do not pursue dissenting points of view on the internet or on the numerous cable news stations they can “choose” from. They simply search for information that supports their point of view. Hey this guy thinks the way I do, he sure is smart, and all the links on his site link to other smart folks like me. Doesn’t matter if you’re on the far left or far right or a religious zealot or animal rights activist, you’ll find your community on the internet. It is niche marketing, but with an ugly twist, because these blogs for bias and unbalanced, the option to select the information you want and the angle you want that information presented in (the spin) is in effect dumbing down society, and I believe further fragmenting it.

This phenomenon is being used unintentionally and intentionally to prepare the battlefield by shaping perceptions of the populace by various groups (almost all, if not all are non State actors). These websites, blogs, niche news stations, talk radio, etc. shape perceptions of select audiences (many in the audience simply opt in, you don't even have to reach out to them, and you put links on your site that link to like minded sites to further pull the audience into your collective group think not unlike a cult). What is interesting is that this is a distributed community, so no telling what group your neighbor is in. Idiots no longer have to put white sheets on and go out and burn crosses, they can do it on line.

This PSYOP of effect of training people to perceive the world in a certain way is “strategic” and critical for undermining governments or other groups. Once the audience has been trained, when a certain event happens it can be turned into a catalyst for action. One example is the FBI raid on WACO, which led Tim McVeigh's attack on Federal Building (a lone wolf or small pack of wolves). Another example, painting a perception of globalism as threat to numerous interests, then using the World Trade Talks as a catalyst to rally mass action in Seattle. Another example, use the photos from Abu Ghrab on numerous media outlets and websites to build up a base of hate against the U.S., that may have led to numerous actions. The attack on the Madrid Subway was largely spurned by the internet. The list goes on and on. This is where we’re losing the PSYOP war. We’re still focused on dropping leaflets and making local broadcasts (which still have a function), but we’re not going to shape the numerous niche markets out globally unless we inject our messages in the right mediums.

[marct]

Hi Bill,

In a word - "Yup". I've been researching this phenomenon since 1986, and there is a lot of material on it - Castells' The Rise of Network Society comes to mind (if you can overlook his rather simplistic Structural Marxist theoretical base). I wrote a book chapter on this in The Handbook of Organizational Culture and Climate back in 2000 arguing that the "search for meaning" is now operating in a Hunter-Gatherer mode with the rise of communities of interest, communities of practice and contingent communities, and an article using some of the same ideas in the practice of establishing strategic alliances in business (warning, that one's really theoretical).

I think there were some really good posts in the Tactical Blogging thread that Rob started a while back that were trying to grapple with the issue of broadcast IO/PSYOPs vs ground level / interactive IO/PSYOPs.

Marc