#4 Phil, good questions. I suspect it is not only the lawyers but the politicians who are holding up the exploitation of new technology. If the Pentagon "goes direct" in the PR battle, what are the second and third order implications? It's one thing to mount a PR campaign to get a weapons system approved by Congress, quite another to convince the American people that we are "winning" a war the media wants to convince them we are losing.
The other guys seem to be doing a much better job than we in the information war. But a lot of it is junk and lies. Their audience is less sophisticated and cynical than our own. I don't think we need an al-Jezeera and I doubt it would work.
Some of our failure is due to the fact that ocupation and reconstruction is a defensive activity. Embeds worked very well to transmit the feel of combat to the homefront without sending too much information to the enemy. There is nothing exciting or newsworthy about the convoy that gets through. Only the one that gets ambushed.
It isn't just the lawyers and politicians either. Gen. Schoomaker and Sec. Brownlee had an article in the summer 2004 Parameters. They begin: "President Bush told us that this war will be unlike any other in our Nation’s history. He was right. After our initial expeditionary responses and successful major combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, those operations have become protracted campaigns where we are providing the conditions of security needed to wage a conflict—a war of ideas." Wow, I said, they get it.
The the article went on to discuss Change, Modular Units, Training, Doctrine, Logistics and Installations among others. These are important topics, but what is the conection to the war of ideas? Do these guys realize they could lose another war in the living rooms of America again? Embeds were great, but there was no follow up.
Still, it is a critical front on which we are losing, in many respects because we are fighting the last war with old weapons. |