Albany Blog

As Washington Post columnist David Ignatius noted recently, the Rolling Stone article that did for Gen Stanley McChrystal is a “wake-up call for both sides [the military and the press] that the cosiness that has evolved over the past decade.” Perhaps the fact that McChrystal made such unguarded remarks in the first place is merely symptomatic of the cosiness that Ignatius describes.

This clearly marks an unhealthy measure of disarray in the American camp. When Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, flew to Afghanistan to promise and reassert continuity of American purpose to the key stakeholders: “We need to tell our story. It needs to be done well. It needs to be told smartly.”

However, there are differences of opinion on how to go about this, a fact which contributes to the sense of disarray. Ignatius suggests Mullen, for one, prefers a more traditional approach to public affairs “in which military spokesmen provide as much information as possible, and offer access to the media, but without the “stratcom” ambitions and dangers.”

Indeed, Mullen set out his stall in the October 2009 issue of the Joint Force Quarterly (though the article was made public in late August 2009) to which he contributed an article “Strategic Communication: Getting Back to Basics.”

“Our messages lack credibility because we haven’t invested enough in building trust and relationships, and we haven’t always delivered on promises.”

He goes on:

“I would argue that most strategic communication problems are not communication problems at all. They are policy and execution problems.”

Mullen’s bottom line is essentially less strat and more comm: sound, successful policy and action speaks for itself, rather than requiring the services of a third party to spin a good news story from inadequate sum parts, or parts that aren’t performing, and that resorting to the use of ‘strat comms’ is a tacit admission of being on the back foot. As Mullen states,

“To put it simply, we need to worry a lot less about how to communicate our actions and much more about what our actions communicate.”

However, if Mullen favours the more the traditionalist, pared down method of spokesmen, regular press briefings and (presumably escorted / embedded) media access, then this need not preclude any strat comm element.

In fact, it is useful to look at why the traditional position evolved, expanding to encompass many more techniques and initiatives within its repertoire.

Firstly, target audience is important to acknowledge. Spokesmen are fine, yet communicate less well with the local population. It is frequently observed that in many post-conflict or transitional societies, establishing a radio station in the local language is crucial as one of the first steps.

Furthermore, as out and out military solutions are seen as less and less suited to the type of problems faced in many theatres, more innovative ways of arriving at political solutions are being sought. The asymmetry of counter-insurgency has forced a rethink.

Secondly, when Mullen identifies credibility as an important area of focus, credibility among the local population also extends to credibility among journalists. The cosiness that Ignatius identifies between the military and the press (assuming for a moment that this assertion is true) has not always been the case.

Thus Mullen is a bit hopeful when he seems to hope that journalists simply swallow the line they are given in official press briefings as merely representative of what’s happening. Such briefings during the Vietnam War were referred to by journalists as the Five O’clock Follies.

The veteran British war correspondent, and later editor, Max Hastings, recalls in his memoirs a final bit of advice about dealing with military officials given to him by his editor as he left for Vietnam on one of his first assignments: “they lie, they lie, they lie.”

It seems possible / likely that Mullen was spurred into writing this piece by a combination of frustration at the perceived lack of progress on the ground, and earlier statements from within the administration with which he disagreed, where there had been some history to the debate on strategic communications among senior figures.

A few months prior to Mullen’s article, Richard Holbrooke, Special Envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, stated to the Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs of the House of Representatives (24 June 2009) that “a new integrated civilian-military strategic communications effort in Afghanistan and Pakistan” was being implemented.

He identified three ‘simultaneous goals’:

-          redefining our message;

-          connecting to the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan on the ground in new ways through cell phones, radio, and other means;

-          identifying and supporting key communicators who are able, through local narratives, to counter extremists’ propaganda and present a positive alternative.

This would seem to contain elements of the ‘new’ strategic communications that Mullen is sceptical of. There is enough evidence here, Mullen would argue, to criticise the approach as excessively jargonised and dotted with buzz words: a triumph of style over substance, when substance should be bolster by the right support for the boots on the ground.

Although there are no proven links between the difference of opinion between Holbrooke and Mullen, to speculate that there are is quite convincing. They certainly don’t seem to be singing from the same hymn sheet (McChrystal likewise was no fan of Holbrooke, apparently).

As one commentator noted at the time, however, whether the links are tenuous or not, such differences in opinion suggest that the administration can’t make its mind up about what to do in Afghanistan; the Rolling Stone episode suggests this continues to be true.

The difference between what Mullen and Holbrooke intend is the relative positioning of the arguments. If Mullen seeks to dismiss strat comms as style over substance, surely strat comms would respond that his is his department to supply the substance. No communications practitioner cannot communicate what is patently without foundation, if his or her reputation is to remain in one piece.

So far none of this is mutually exclusive or contradictory. One is positioned further downstream than the other, and strat comms must take account of the increasingly complex media environment in which conflicts are fought. Mullen is essentially on the frontline, at the coalface of policy execution, while Holbrooke is a civilian charged with communicating the positives when they are few and far between.

If critics point to the often jargon- and theory-heavy discourse of narratives, counter-narratives, information ecology and so on – “the ambitions and dangers” – as a cynical ploy to blind and bend opinions falsely in the absence of any mediation from an objective sense of justice or equanimity, then at this point strat comms becomes distasteful to many, papering over injustice and legitimate grievances of the injured.

The crucial factor is the mediating sense of justice that must be seen to prevail, whether we are talking about a spokesman and press briefing or a newly-set up radio station, whether things are going well or not.

Of course, communications becomes much easier when what is to be communicated is going well, but when it doesn’t, more than ever the newer and the more traditional school of comms need to communicate first and foremost among themselves, and reconcile their relative positions as mutually beneficial, not mutually exclusive.

Guy Gabriel