Communicating With Intent: The Department of Defense and Strategic Communication

Summary

The Department of Defense's (DoD's) development of strategic communication processes, a supporting organizational structure, and an institutional culture change began in earnest in 2006. The broad, operational view of communication presents many opportunities for the DoD; it also presents many areas demanding attention if the department is to realize its aim of positive strategic effects in the information and cognitive domains.

This paper examines the DoD's development of strategic communication, concentrating specifically on the implications, opportunities, and threats associated with the public information environment. The paper does not present a prescription for tactics to win near-term battles, but rather a review of current efforts to build strategic communication capacity and considerations that demand attention to advance this capability for long-term, strategic successes.

Recognition of public communication's importance is evident in the DoD's current efforts to build strategic communication processes. The effort cannot come soon enough. The Defense Science Board's (DSB's) 2004 review of the DoD's strategic communication capability states that public communication is "in crisis." Similarly, the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review cited strategic communication as one of the five key areas that require DoD plans for focused development.

Increasingly, conflict takes place in a population's cognitive space, making sheer military might a lesser priority for victory in the Information Age. Use of the nation's hard power is inadequate as the sole — or even primary — means to address an insurgency. Instead, national decision makers must create a synergistic approach that emphasizes the country's soft power capabilities while drawing on complementary efforts of its hard power if necessary.

The public information environment is a key battleground in the modern information environment. Some military leaders have labeled the current operating conditions as Fourth Generation Warfare — a term that refers to an enemy that operates in a virtual realm and uses mass media cleverly, effectively making the media the terrain.

Personal electronic devices such as cell phones, digital cameras, video recorders, and various kinds of computers have created a new intersection between the individual and the mass media. The public can no longer be viewed as passive information consumers: the public now more than ever actively contributes to the information environment via World Wide Web sites, blogs, and text messaging, to name only a few.

The new technologies also give individuals, groups, and (in some regards) nations enormous capability to organize and influence various audiences. Likewise, the public media, citizens, and international organizations can directly affect the success or failure of military operations through their influential effect on U.S., allied, and adversary public support. Despite their effects on operations, the editorial freedom of these public information elements is protected and guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and therefore protected from U.S. government control.

To bring success in the modern operating environment, policy, diplomatic, and military operations must include consideration of public information and integration of the efforts of the resources that deliver it. As the DSB states in its 2004 report, strategic communication will be less effective if managed separately, since it cannot build support for policies that audiences view negatively. Simply put, consideration of communication and its effects must be integrated into operational planning, decision-making, and execution cycles, not considered as an afterthought.

Just as the operating environment has changed from the cold war era, so must the methods and tactics of communication and the organizational constructs that facilitate them. During the cold war U.S. communication techniques focused on influencing the ideology of communist populations; the intended effect of the consistently repeated message was deterrence. However, the communication challenge in the Global War on Terror is to reach a massive, global audience — one that includes many members who are united by common religious beliefs — to change negative perceptions and beliefs regarding Western values.

Indeed, the intent of the U.S. government's efforts in strategic communication is to transcend the information instrument of national power by synchronizing and integrating efforts between all instruments of power: diplomatic, information, military and economic. There must be harmony between the instruments of power to realize their full potential and the DoD's current efforts in strategic communication are designed to provide a process to coordinate efforts to achieve desired effects.

Therefore, strategic communication development efforts must take place at the enterprise level: every public information resource must be developed with a consideration of its strategic communication role. Simultaneously, a massive culture shift must occur to counteract the tribal instincts of those who manage varied information resources — instincts that have them focused on funding and career-field-specific issues instead of on enhanced coordination to achieve the enterprise's communication goals. A culture shift also must occur within the leadership hierarchy of each service, the DoD as a whole, and the U.S. government to value public communication, provide access to decision-making and planning efforts, support efforts in this area with new training programs, and clearly articulate the enterprise goals and objectives. Without such changes, current efforts to communicate strategically likely will fail.

A fine balance must be achieved to ensure strategic communication efforts are well coordinated without creating a sluggish bureaucratic structure. A top-heavy, cumbersome bureaucratic process built to control and perfect information is not compatible with the modern information environment, characterized in part by its rapid flow of information. Although centralized control and decentralized execution have great merit in most military operations, the DoD needs to be careful to avoid destroying its strategic communication process with the very bureaucracy it is building to create it. While the strategic goals and priorities delivered through the strategic communication process may serve as guideposts for the desired outcome, information tactics and communication strategies at the tactical and operational levels must be agile and creative. Our adversaries in the Global War on Terror are adept at using new technologies to communicate for their own benefit and have organized themselves to ensure the ability to maneuver rapidly in this modern battlespace.

The DoD's perspective on strategic communication has evolved to a much broader interpretation since the Strategic Communication Execution Roadmap was signed in September 2006. The broader, operational view of the DoD's desired strategic communication process goes far beyond the basic communication construct of "sender - message - receiver" to interpret every DoD action or statement as a form of communication. This new approach is intended to establish a strategic communication process in which all DoD strategy, planning, and operational decisions are made.

However, DoD strategic communication efforts currently often leave leaders in need of guidance. One possible reason for the cacophony of discordant messages — in addition to the sheer volume of information — is the lack of a clear, articulate strategy from the national leadership. Without this, the leaders of each department, agency, and office are left to decide what is important. In most cases the answer is to use the organization's communication efforts to advance its own interests.

The absence of a DoD enterprise approach is a significant limiting factor for the DoD's success in strategic communication. At face value, the services' interdependence of roles and missions makes it easy for the individual military services to support the DoD's strategic mission goals: victory is a shared claim. However, at a deeper level, the services are in constant competition with each other for limited budgetary authority, recruits and development of roles, missions, and their associated weapons systems. To this end, the services must out-communicate one another — successfully telling their stories to Congress, the American people, and their own forces.

The desired end state for the DoD's work is to build a strategic communication process that will help to integrate and synchronize the department's efforts and prepare it to collaborate in the interagency and coalition strategic communication processes. To reach that state, the team charged with leading development of the DoD's strategic communication strategy envisions a process that helps the United States achieve desired strategic effects, either independently or in cooperation with other intergovernmental organizations, nations, and nongovernmental organizations.

Leadership must understand, however, that specific, intended strategic communication effects may be difficult to attain and that unintended second- and third-order effects are possible, especially in the near term. Effective communication strategies will bring near-term results and successes, but patience, persistence, and messages consistent with actions are requisite for communication to achieve its intended strategic effects. Often, the outcomes of strategic efforts are beyond the horizon: the efforts are generational in nature, with their results years in the future.

Strategic communication is not the silver bullet, but it does present the potential for a more tightly focused informational contribution to the strength of the other instruments of national power to achieve national strategies.

The primary methodology used for this paper was personal interviews with people either engaged in the DoD's development of strategic communication processes, or able to give perspective from another part of the U.S. government. The paper also relies heavily on published information from the academic and open press environments.

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