Getting serious about strategic influence: How to move beyond the State Department’s legacy of failure

And because it didn’t, others stepped in. Across the Potomac, civilian and uniformed personnel alike—with groundbreaking efforts by the bipartisan Defense Science Board under the leadership of William Schneider—worked out a new strategic communications vision and strategy. Whether or not one agrees that this is the military’s proper role is immaterial for the moment; the point is that, when all others failed, the military filled the void. With the civilian Defense Science Board leading the way, the Pentagon moved quickly to pitch in where the State Department was failing. It set up an assistant secretary position for “public diplomacy support” (deliberately placing itself in an auxiliary role to State); pushed the envelope with the expansion of information operations from narrow cyber-warfare to “hearts and minds” work that would eclipse traditional psychological operations (PSYOP) and tread where the public diplomats dared not go; and integrated the informational aspect of warfare into a new, broadly acclaimed, and—for the moment—successful counterinsurgency doctrine and field manual that propelled Gen. David Petraeus to near-superstar status. At the higher education level, the military colleges encouraged mid-level officers to think about strategic influence to win wars more humanely and less expensively, and even to prevent them from breaking out in the first place.² Defense Secretary Robert Gates has reached down into the mid-level officer corps—the warfighters themselves—for new ideas that he has been implementing from the top, and a lot of those ideas have to do with communicating strategically in defense of national interests.

But much more remains to be done. Not everyone is comfortable with the military expanding its role into these areas, and this unease is held widely within the armed forces themselves. Yet nobody else has stepped up to the plate. So the military is carrying the load for now, only to catch the opprobrium of Congress. Yet Congress won’t act to force change in the strategic communication field as it did on the military with Goldwater-Nichols, or after 9/11, on the intelligence community with the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act.

A changing of the guard 

What is the point of public diplomacy, anyway? To make America look nice around the world? To help other people like us? To do good? What about strategic communication? Is it to tell others about our feelings? To convey information so they will arrive at more informed opinions and decisions?

The answer is no to all of the above. Public diplomacy, like public affairs, international broadcasting and information operations, is a mere component of strategic communication—the systematic development and application of information and messages to global and selected audiences outside the United States. The purpose is to shape the opinions and attitudes of foreign publics and decision-makers, with the goal of influencing their policies and actions. The goal of strategic communication, in other words, is strategic influence.

But “strategic influence” is a dirty word in Washington—at least as far as promoting the national interest abroad is concerned. Just look at what happened to a Pentagon office with that name. Immediately after 9/11, a number of top DoD planners realized that the U.S. no longer had the capability to combat the ideological dimension of the war. The CIA had been gutted of its covert assets and had not, at that point, moved far beyond the Cold War in terms of building new agent networks and clandestine political influence capabilities. In late October 2001, the Pentagon’s policy shop cobbled together a group of military officers, civilian careerists and highly capable contractors as an Office of Strategic Influence (OSI). This writer was a volunteer supporter of OSI in a very peripheral way, but still had a good insider view of what transpired. All of OSI’s initiatives received inter-agency approval, including from the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy.  Where it got bogged down was within the Pentagon’s own public affairs office, where the new spokeswoman, Victoria Clarke, expressed disapproval and would not sign off on key initiatives. The apparent reason was because OSI was treading on public affairs turf, and risked creating public relations problems.