Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is thinking about the vital role of public affairs in the War on Terror, and considering that the U.S. may be losing the battle for hearts and minds.
Our enemies have skillfully adapted to fighting wars in today's media age, but for the most part we -- our country -- has not -- whether our government, the media or our society generally....
The standard U.S. government public affairs operation was designed primarily to respond to individual requests for information. It tends to be reactive, rather than proactive -- and it still operates for the most part on an eight hour, five-days-a-week basis, while world events, and our enemies, are operating 24-7, across every time zone. That is an unacceptably dangerous deficiency.
Government is, however, beginning to adapt.
In Iraq, for example, the U.S. military command, working closely with the Iraqi government and the United States Embassy, has sought non-traditional means to provide accurate information to the Iraqi people in the face of the aggressive campaign of disinformation.
Yet this has been portrayed as inappropriate -- for example, the allegations of "buying news" in Iraq. The resulting explosion of critical press stories then causes everything -- all activity, all initiative -- to stop.
Even worse, it leads to a "chilling effect" for those who are asked to serve in the military public affairs field.
The conclusion is drawn that there is no tolerance for innovation, much less any human error that could conceivably be seized upon by a press that seems to demand perfection from the government, but does not apply the same standard to the enemy or even sometimes to themselves.
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The U.S. government will have to develop the institutional capability to anticipate and act within the same news cycle. That will require instituting 24-hour press operation centers, elevating Internet operations and other channels of communications to the equal status of traditional 20th Century press relations. It will result in much less reliance on the traditional print press, just as the publics of the U.S. and the world are relying less on newspapers as their principal source of information.
And it will require attracting more experts in these areas from the private sector to government service.
This also will likely mean embracing new institutions to engage people across the world. During the Cold War, institutions such as the U.S. Information Agency and Radio Free Europe proved to be valuable instruments for the United States of America.
We need to consider the possibility of new organizations and programs that can serve a similarly valuable role in the War on Terror in this new century.
Watch the video.
Posted by Alan at February 17, 2006 05:45 PM