If “ya’ll” remember the HEE HAW song, “Gloom, despair, and agony on me,” then you will also remember that the second verse of the chorus refers to “bad luck.”  Well, I must admit I had a stroke of bad luck in the past, because I was wrongfully influenced by the powers above who didn’t “know the truth, or couldn’t handle the truth!” Yes, that must be it; what other reason would make the entire U.S. Army Combat Camera (COMCAM) population (including myself) believe they have no role in supporting Public Affairs (PA) operations in combat and garrison environments?  Were we brainwashed, or simply uneducated?  Well, after nearly a year at the U.S. Army War College, I now “see the light,” and it is time to make amends, correct mistakes, and set things straight.

I commanded the 114^th Signal Battalion from 2008 to 2010, which involved supervising the only active duty COMCAM unit in the United States Army, the 55^th COMCAM Signal Company.  This COMCAM unit and others like it in the Air Force, Navy, and Marines are charged with providing still and video imagery of wartime operations, worldwide crises, contingencies, and joint exercises to leaders ranging from SECDEF down to tactical commanders.  Each unit is required to follow the rules outlined by the Defense Media Activity (DMA) in  DoD Instruction 5040.02, Visual Information (VI).

However, somehow the Army interpreted the guidance differently when it came time to providing photographs and video documentation support for public affairs missions.  Senior leaders instilled in the Army COMCAM community the notion that we were NOT allowed to support these missions, since public affairs units have or should have their own assigned documentation assets to complete the tasks.  Therefore, our efforts went towards supporting Information Operations (IO) and Military Information Support Operations (MISO). 

As one can imagine, the Department of the Army CIO/G6 and public affairs offices are separate organizations within the Army structure, and they have separate funding streams.  As time passed, and missions increased as budgets decreased, friction between both organizations over limited resources became apparent.  This constrained relationship filtered down to the 55^th COMCAM, where it has lingered for over a decade.  However, within our sister services, public affairs and COMCAM assets are closely nested together by a centralized manager.  This enables better relationships, trust, and cooperation between the two activities. 

Now that strategic communication (SC) has entered the military community as a process that enables achievement of national security objectives, the need to rebuild Army PA and COMCAM relationships has become mission essential.  Strategic communication is a commander-driven process that orchestrates programs, plans, themes, messages, policies, words, images, and actions in ways that achieve desired cognitive and behavioral effects among a variety of key audiences.

These effects, or communication outcomes, in turn, support the achievement of overarching goals, objectives, and policies.  Strategic communication managers coordinate and synchronize efforts between the IO, VI, PA, MISO, and public diplomacy (PD) communities.  If COMCAM is responsible for capturing imagery to support and meet the commander’s SC priorities and objectives, then COMCAM must begin a new chapter by providing documentation support to all SC enablers, which includes documenting public affairs missions.

Is there a way ahead, or are we stuck in another hee haw moment of gloom and bad luck?  The answer is, “There is light at the end of the tunnel!”  Since COMCAM products bring immeasurable value to decision makers in OSD, Joint Staff, military departments, and combatant commands, these leaders need to erase the relationship barriers through education and enforcement of published DoD instructions, directives, and policies.   

President Obama has issued clear guidance about the management of strategic communication in his  2012 update to Congress on the National Framework for Strategic Communication. The Assistant Secretary of Defense (Public Affairs) and Under Secretary of Defense (Policy) have been assigned joint responsibility for strategic communication within the Department of Defense (see  U.S. Army War College Information Operations Primer). The Defense Media Activity should now follow their lead in this effort; and the 55^th COMCAM must begin building relationships with the public affairs community. 

Now that I know the truth, I feel compelled to pass the message along. 

While many private sector and government practitioners have been working diligently to define and apply strategic communication as a “best practice” (e.g., see National Summit on Strategic Communication and Update to Congress on National Framework for Strategic Communication), it seems that NATO’s ISAF strategic communication program in Afghanistan, under the leadership of U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Greg Smith and Rear Admiral Hal Pittman, has achieved a level of sophistication not yet seen in private or public sectors. This leadership continues under U.S. Army Brigadier General Lew Boone.

Rear Admiral Pittman recently visited our strategic communication course in the Center for Strategic Leadership at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pa. He recently returned from Afghanistan, after turning over his ISAF duties as Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications to Brigadier General Boone.

During his briefing and discussion with students, Rear Admiral Pittman outlined the ISAF strategic communication program through slides and examples fresh from the Afghanistan theater of operations. Our class discussion was conducted under “not-for-attribution” guidelines, but Admiral Pittman authorized us to share his slides and some general information about the ISAF strategic communication program. 

I was particularly impressed by the following features of the ISAF strategic communication program, which represent successful application of the U.S. Department of Defense Principles of Strategic Communication.

Leadership Driven. Admiral Pittman made it clear that the success of the ISAF strategic communication program is directly related to the personal commitment and support of senior NATO leadership in Afghanistan like U.S. Army General David Patraeus through the current ISAF Commander U.S. Marine Corps General John Allen.

Based on Dialogue and Understanding. The ISAF strategic communication program is dedicated to understanding and engaging audiences through dialogue, from meetings between senior leaders to attending shuras (or consultations) with local village leaders. In turn, the deep understanding of attitudes, cultures, history, etc. that derives from this dialogue helps produce more effective communication. However, Rear Admiral Pittman acknowledged several communication challenges to sustaining this dialogue:

1)  Frequent rotation of individuals and entire units, which disrupts relationships.

2)  Aligning reality and perceptions across a broad theater and spectrum of audiences.

3)  Trying to be “first with the truth” in an environment filled with insurgent propaganda.

Unified and Pervasive. The ISAF program has achieved a high level of integration in communication. The activities of the ISAF commander, messages released by public affairs offices, efforts by military information support to operations (formerly known as psychological operations), and the actions of individual soldiers throughout the Afghan theater all convey meaning. To the extent possible, each of these activities is carefully coordinated and vetted to achieve a consistency in communication that results in accuracy and credibility. Enlarge the following image to view a depiction of how ISAF communications were integrated with other key entities during a three-month period in 2011.

Credible. By establishing sound policy and using effective communication (e.g., the proper alignment of actions, images, and words) to explain that policy, ISAF is able to establish the credibility of their operations through accurate, truthful, and respectful communication. However, when gaps open between what ISAF says it will do (e.g., promote a safe, secure environment built on respect) and what ISAF actually does (e.g., burn the Qur’an, kill innocent civilians), credibility is damaged. This “say-do” gap can often undermine months of success and even compromise an entire mission.

Responsive. The ISAF team has truly taken “effects-based” communication to a new level. The ISAF strategic communication program focuses on achieving short-term and long-term communication end states that support overarching coalition, national, and military strategies and policies. ISAF even uses a “media engagement team” to monitor and counter insurgent propaganda that appears in these channels news and social media channels. For instance, enlarge the following image to view ISAF’s Communication Action Plan for the Bonn Conference in 2011.

Results-Based and Continuous. Finally, ISAF employs a group of operational analysis and research experts that use advanced metrics to evaluate results of communication efforts. Data from this evaluation is used to continually refine communication efforts and achieve desired results. The following image depicts nine assessment points in the ISAF communication strategy.

According to Admiral Pittman, the way ahead for strategic communication in Afghanistan includes a sharper focus on proactive planning, civil-military coordination (including NGOs), and rapid execution (including social media). Over time, as the milestones of the military mission are accomplished, ISAF will also need to “de-militarize” the narrative and shift responsibility for strategic communication to civilian authorities and the Afghan government.

My brief time with Rear Admiral Pittman convinced me that his message about ISAF strategic communication activities needs wider circulation. The remarkable advances in strategic communication achieved by ISAF deserve further discussion and study, so that the lessons learned from the ISAF model may be added to our body of knowledge and applied as best practices in the communication field.

Click here for Rear Admiral Pittman’s unclassified slide deck about ISAF strategic communication. Contact me us you have any questions or comments that you would like to convey to Rear Admiral Pittman about his work on strategic communication, or visit him on Facebook.

President Obama and Defense Secretary Panetta recently announced a new direction for the Defense Department. Along with significant cuts in funding, manpower and weapon systems programs, the President reemphasized our status as “a Pacific nation.” He repeated this refrain during his State of the Union address on January 24, 2012.

The implications of this policy shift are far-ranging. But it appears fairly certain that we will not be placing any large land forces into the Middle East anytime soon, as former Secretary Bill Gates cautioned against before leaving office. Militarily, our Pacific focus will certainly rely heavily on naval and air forces to maintain stability and deter aggression. But effective strategy relies on the integrated application of all the elements of national power, generally recognized as diplomacy, information, military and economic (DIME). In the case of a Pacific looking strategy the preeminent element employed should be information.

Joseph Nye, former Defense Department official and Harvard dean defines power as the ability to influence. He further argues that influence can be wielded through hard or soft power, where hard power coerces and soft power co-opts. The current status of the Pacific region combined with an era of economic austerity that drives our future military and diplomatic structure seems to point to a soft power approach in the years to come.

Interestingly, using information as power to influence fits nicely into both the geo-strategic constraints and opportunities of the Pacific region. First, employing the information element of power is relatively cheap. Kristen Lord points out that the State Department’s use of public diplomacy to wield information as power is but a minute fraction of the budget of the Defense Department. And while it may seem counterintuitive to the uninformed to consider the U.S. military as a source of information as power, in fact their influence by co-opting can be significant. Each combatant commander develops a long-term strategy and campaign plan (with its imbedded theater security cooperation plan) for that very purpose. These strategies spawn military-to-military relationships and military-sponsored activities that send significant and loud messages to the populations of the region.

The primary influence processes of information operations (IO) and strategic communication (SC) arguably work best in an environment where the U.S. hopes to shape the environment to support their interests while deterring aggression by potential adversaries (known as phase 0 and phase 1 operations in military terms). This best describes the current Pacific environment. Again, these are relatively cheap ways to influence compared to the enormous economic costs of hard power reflected by traditional military hardware and force structure.

Certainly there are real and present threats to U.S. interests in the Pacific region. China’s long-term intentions are unknown, but their policies toward Taiwan, economic expansion in Africa and posturing in the Spratly Islands reflect an expanding regional hegemony. An uncertain future of North Korea remains a significant concern, especially with a new leader, massive army, nuclear threat and economic disarray. These two examples alone call for a strong hard power presence in the Pacific. But at this point in America’s history for the reasons described above, the prudent approach harkens back to Teddy Roosevelt’s advice to “speak softly and carry a big stick.”

You can be certain that the force managers in the Pentagon and throughout the executive branch are busy looking for “low hanging fruit” to cut from the budget. These cuts will be necessarily painful. Using our dwindling resources to enhance information as the preeminent element of power in a Pacific-focused national strategy in this period of austerity seems to make sense. But early signs show just the opposite. Congress recently eliminated the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. Information operations and strategic communication expertise is being eliminated in some military professional education institutions. The Army is the only military service that qualifies officers for a career of service in information operations. The other services see it as an additional duty or tour specific function that a generalist can do.

This forebodes a cautionary note: Beware the bean-counters. If we really want to succeed in the Pacific while doing more with less, the information element of power will be a key enabler of success. In an era of shrinking budgets this is where you’ll get the most bang for your buck. 

Center for Strategic Leadership Professor Dennis Murphy (Information Operations and Information in Warfare) conducted a live interview with Federal News Radio (1500 AM, FederalNewsRadio.com) on Thursday, 8 Dec. The interview focused on the U.S. Army War College’s 2011 (AY12) update to the Information Operations Primer, with special emphasis on new approaches to cyberspace.

During the interview, Prof. Murphy provided information (paraphrased below) on the following topics. Click here to listen to the complete interview with Prof. Murphy. 

Challenges of cyberspace to the mission of the U.S. Army War College:

Emerging concepts (like cybersecurity, information operations and strategic communication) are evolving rapidly in the information age.

We have responsibility to educate the next generation of strategic leaders, teaching them how to better make strategic decisions or advise leaders who make those decisions.

We must stay current in terms of issues and policies related to cybersecurity, information operations, and strategic communication.

The level of preparation in cybersecurity among students as they arrive at USAWC:

As students come to the USAWC from our theaters of war, they recognize the importance, speed, cheap cost of entry into cyberspace, and value of information.

They also know how our enemies may use cyber activities against us as an asymmetric weapon of choice.

Today’s students are better attuned than predecessors to the security requirements and the value of information in current and future environments.

The nature of dialog coming from Pentagon about U.S. cyber operations:

The government is considering use of cyberspace as a domain, but we don’t want to tip our hand to an adversary about our specific capabilities.

We must consider cybersecurity when releasing public information about our capabilities.

From the perspective of national strategy, deterrence is important.

The difficulty from an educational perspective of framing enemy information capabilities:

There are many open sources of information that show what our enemies can do.

The difficulty is attributing activities in cyberspace to specific nations, entities, individuals.

We present students with “wicked” problems in strategic thinking. Students might have to learn how to make “least worst” decisions instead of best decisions in terms of cyber operations.

Students at USAWC often come from a black and white world. Here, they learn how to deal with the grey areas they will face when they transition back to leadership roles.

Challenges to students who must consider known and unknown aspects of cyberspace:

Enemies adapt, just as we do; we cannot become complacent.

We can’t assume that defenses that worked in past will work in future. Enemies will always look for opportunities to get around our defenses.

We must remain attuned and vigilant, ready to adjust our defenses, whether in terms of kinetic operations or operations in cyberspace, where bits and bytes of information are sent around the Internet or World Wide Web.

Significant changes to the Information Operations Primer:

The IO Primer addresses three key areas: information operations, strategic communication, and cyberspace operations. All have evolved very quickly in Information Age: entry into cyberspace is cheap and information is transmitted in real time on the battlefield.

The Primer describes the publication of a new international cyberspace strategy and a DoD strategy for operating in cyberspace.

Washington, DC, provides strategic guidance, which allows us to operationalize concepts related to cyberspace, information operations and strategic communication.

The impact of change on training and professional military education:

Changes do not make it easier to train and educate strategic leaders.

Washington provides broad strategic guidance.

We must then work hard to operationalize strategy so military leaders can employ new capabilities in support of our national strategy and security.

The U.S. Army War College has released its 2011 (Academic Year 2012) edition of the Information Operations Primer. The Primer, now in its eighth edition, contains an unclassified overview with current updates associated with Department of Defense (DoD) doctrine, U.S. Government organizations, and activities regarding Information Operations (IO) and related fields.

This year’s edition includes new sections on U.S., DoD, and Army Cyberspace; Department of State’s Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications; and Department of Defense IO responsibilities. The current edition of the Information Operations Primer is available online along with other information as power resources through the U.S. Army War College Center for Strategic Leadership’s DIME website. Click here for a digital copy of the Primer.

Center for Strategic Leadership Prof. Dennis Murphy, one of the Primer’s contributing authors, described the publicationas a valuable “living” document. “This is not a static world,” Murphy observed. “This year’s Primer, like other editions before it, helps students and other professionals keep up with changes and advancements in Information Operations, Strategic Communication and cyberspace theory.”

Changes reported in the 2011 (AY12) edition are among the most significant in recent years. These include new sections dedicated to U.S. International Strategy for Cyberspace, DoD strategy for Operating in Cyberspace, the U.S. Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, the DoD Chief Information Officer, and the U.S. Army Cyber Command.

Other changes include deletions of information published in previous editions. This year’s Primer replaces an Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks and Information Integration section with the new DoD Chief Information Officer section. References to Information Operations activities formerly related to the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence were moved to a section for the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy.

Finally, the Primer contains several important revisions. A new definition of Information Operations has been added to the Glossary and is addressed in the opening section. Sections dedicated to Information Operations, Strategic Communication, and Cyberspace and Cyberspace Operations have undergone significant updates. Information related to Department of Defense and Department of State agencies has been modified to reflect the most current doctrine, organization, and activities. 

The Information Operations Primer is produced annually by the U.S. Army War College’s Department of Military Strategy, Planning, and Operations and the Center for Strategic Leadership. The Primer, since its inception in 2004, has served as a primary resource about Information Operations for the staff, faculty, and students of the U.S. Army War College.

As awareness of the Primer’s value has grown, its readership has expanded to include other senior service colleges, private colleges and universities, and many government and non-governmental agencies. Hence, the publication has become a unique, single-source platform from which individuals and organizations share information, clarify misunderstandings, and promote cooperation in the field of Information Operations and emergent related topics.

The U.S. Army War College grants permission to U.S. government agencies and organizations to download and reprint this document or portions of it. Furthermore, U.S. government agencies and organizations may post the Primer wholly, or in part, to their official websites. Non-government organizations or individuals may request permission from the U.S. Army War College to reprint or post the Primer. Requests will be managed on a case-by-case basis. Such requests should be referred to:

U.S. Army War College

Department of Military Strategy, Planning, and Operations

Attn: ATWC-ASP

122 Forbes Avenue

Carlisle, PA 17013-5242

E-Mail: Carl_ATWC-asp@conus.army.mil