Yesterday, 6 December 2012, USA’s
website (but not today’s printed edition) touted an
article: “Special Operations Command leads propaganda fight” (see: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2012/12/06/socom-leads-propaganda-fight/1746013/)
in which they have apparently woken up to the fact that MISO personnel (on the
active side only of course) are part of SOCOM and that these professionals are
deployed around the world supporting US government missions.
The article
points out that the SOCOM efforts include the virtual world and that some of
the supported media do not carry US DOD attribution. The article is based on a
September 2012 report by the Stimson Center and can be found at: http://www.stimson.org/books-reports/the-pentagon-as-pitchman-perception-and-reality-of-public-diplomacy/
which is also the photo source of the report’s cover.
One of the
report’s conclusions was:
“Most of the defense activities often implicated in public
diplomacy should not be.
These include most of the activities the Defense Department
defines as information operations, public affairs, building partnership
capacity, and even most tactical military information support operations.”
If you have the time, you can read the entire report (which I
haven’t done this morning because I have two planes to catch) or can read this
quote from page 17:
“No MISO
can be categorically called tactical since all influence operations can have
strategic effects, but most MISO is closer to the tactical end of the spectrum
than the strategic. These activities are not like public diplomacy.”
From a
Regimental Perspective – this article, like the one I profiled last time evokes
negative images. In many ways it reeks of some poor journalistic techniques by
selling newspapers through headline innuendo.
Our
Constitution goes a long way to making sure that the press can do all of this,
but we, as professionals, have an equal or perhaps greater duty of setting the
record straight.
The
challenge remains: how does the Regiment counteract this type of article? My
best guess is that the soon to be announced Regimental Association needs to
have a Public Affairs Committee and authorized spokes persons who can talk on
behalf of the Association and by implication the Regiment. We also need to
think about a systematic information stream to Congress so that the staffers
who may not be familiar with defense issues can turn to an articulate and
authoritative source.
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