Strategic Communications

1. Strategic Communications TSDM Web-enabled Course Dr. Coty Keller

2. Agenda • Concept has high priority • Why its Important to you as staff officer • Insights • Stigler • Murphy • Shirky • COCOM role NWC/TSDM Dr. Coty Keller

3. Priority of Strategic Communications “Communicating strategically during a war on global terrorism should be an urgent part of the mission of every arm of the U.S. Government. Explaining our government’s actions and policies to the peoples of the world must be a top priority.” —U.S. Department of State • Subject of broad importance for War College students. • Gen. Richard Meyers listed Countering Ideological Support For Terrorism (CIST) as a war college educational priority some years ago • TSDM is the only class in the intermediate NWC course that deals with the topic. NWC/TSDM Dr. Coty Keller

4. How YOU (Staff Officer) may become involved • Efforts to communicate America’s values, policies, and intentions. • Conducting military operations and especially reconstruction efforts. • Conducting military to military contacts with states around the globe. • Developing doctrines and tactics that seek to minimize impact of military operations on civilian populations. • Developing a COCOM’s Theater Security Cooperation Plans. NWC/TSDM Dr. Coty Keller

5. Stigler* Insights • Ideology, or what one desires to counter with strategic communication, can be considered “an image of society and a political program.” • There is a difference between considered and intuitive support for terrorism. • Considered: weighing the group’s motives and ideology • Intuitive: automatically supporting the group’s actions or attacks on the group’s targets. • Studies of terrorist psychology have generated few useful observations. • However, explorations of political psychology suggest serious challenges to changing individuals’ perspectives of the US. • The international media is an important filter of US efforts at public diplomacy. • While the extent to which international public opinion plays a role in generating terrorists can be overstated, the broadly held negative opinion of the US does not aid efforts directed toward CIST. • The United States has an array of tools at its disposal. Public Diplomacy programs such as Alhurra TV are a means of disseminating the U.S. message to a large target audience; however, measuring the success of these efforts poses serious methodological challenges. Keller Observation: Lots of JMP Framework Element s here (i.e. Ideology, Media, Public Opinion) *Andrew Stigler, “The Challenge of Strategic Communication” as reviewed by Professor Bob Carney NWC/TSDM Dr. Coty Keller

6. JMP Framework NWC/TSDM Dr. Coty Keller

7. Murphy’s Insights* • There is a critical difference between strategic communications and information operations. They have different targets, effects, and primary capabilities. . • Integrating strategic communications involves: 1) Defining the environment, and 2) Defining the desired effect. • “Messages are certainly sent by verbal and visual communications means, but they are also sent by actions……Strategic Communications are 80% action and 20% Words.” * Murphy, Dennis, “The Trouble with Strategic Communications as reviewed by Professor Bob Carney NWC NWC/TSDM Dr. Coty Keller

8. Shirky, the Political Power of Social Media* • Networked population has risen to the low billions. • Powerful Example: a million-person protest organized in the Philippines largely via text message, which caused the country’s legislature to reverse course on an impeachment trial. • Some similar protests fail, however, as in Belarus in 2006, and Iran 2009. • Communicative freedom is good for political freedom. •  ”Conservative Dilemma”: cracking down on communications can radicalize otherwise pro-regime citizens. •  “Slacktivism”: efforts to achieve social change through low-cost and ineffective means. •  US should support anti-censorship efforts and free speech. *Shirky Clay, The Political Power of Social Media: Technology, the Public Sphere and Political Change, as reviewed by Professor Bob Carney at the NWC NWC/TSDM Dr. Coty Keller

9. Impact in Theater The combatant commander leads the largest single group of America's strategic communicators in almost any area of the world-the uniformed men and women of the Armed Forces and a growing number of civilians under his command. To be effective, he must have an effective SC architecture that consists of qualified people, analysis, technology, systems, procedures, advocates, education, linguistic and lexicon knowledge, innovation, fusion, coordination, cooperation, and effective linkages among strategic, operational, and tactical levels of engagement, as well as among joint, combined, and interagency players and planners. JFQ, 4th Qtr 2009 NWC/TSDM Dr. Coty Keller