The Propaganda War
The Pentagon's brand-new plan for winning the battle of ideas against terrorists
Rumsfeld had made finding that formula a priority for senior Pentagon officials. "He understands that communicating is an important component of leadership," says the defense secretary's longtime aide, Larry DiRita, who was deeply involved in the writing of the new strategic road map. "That culture has to become more or less second nature to this department," DiRita says, adding that his boss has probably held more press conferences and given more news media interviews than any cabinet officer in U.S. history.
Rear Adm. Frank Thorp, now deputy assistant secretary of defense for joint communications, dates the current effort to the summer of 2004, when the secretary and other top Pentagon officials convened in the secure "tank" of the Joint Staff offices at the Pentagon. "We have got to get better at this," Thorp recalls Rumsfeld saying. A longtime public-affairs official, Thorp admits that "public affairs hasn't done a whole lot of improvement for the joint war fight," while he credits the psychological operations forces with leaping ahead in both knowledge of foreign cultures and the technical means to quickly produce quality print and broadcast products.
Flexibility. But there have been chronic tensions between the public-affairs and psychological operations communities, centered on confusion over the proper domain for psychological operations. These tensions broke into the open when the Los Angeles Times revealed that a U.S. consulting firm hired by the U.S. military was paying Iraqi news media to run stories written by military officials without properly identifying them as such. Defense officials spent several months trying to determine whether U.S. policy permitted these paid, unattributed stories. According to DiRita, the inquiry found that there is "no specific prohibition" against the practice in Pentagon rules and regulations.
That doesn't mean that the matter is settled, however. DiRita says the issue will be examined as part of the doctrine-writing that is now underway. "That's one of the things we want to look at. ... If in certain environments that kind of flexibility is important to a commander, we want to know, is it effective? We have not drawn a conclusion on that."
Some of the uniformed officials interviewed said they believe that all information put out by the military should be identified as such. Current policy already requires that the military issue truthful information except in the narrow case of military deception operations, which aim to affect the military decisions of enemy forces. For instance, tapes of tank noises were broadcast in the Iraq war to simulate a massive invasion. And D-Day deception meant that Hitler sent troops to Calais instead of Normandy where GIs were storming the beaches.
Such neat lines are often hard to draw, however. In the case of media stories in Iraq, there are many who see the practice of paying journalists to run unattributed stories as undermining the effort to nurture a free press and civil society. There is also concern over "backwash," or American consumption of messages not targeted at them. U.S. law prohibits the government from propagandizing Americans. Finally, if the efforts' authors become known, their effect may be nil or even counterproductive. Those in favor of the practice say that it is necessary to get information out that would not otherwise be published and to communicate to anti-American Iraqis who would refuse to read anything overtly coming from U.S. military sources. They argue that psychological operations can achieve military objectives and save lives.
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