Information OperationsNewsletter

Compiled by: Mr. Jeff Harley

US Army Strategic CommandG39, Information Operations Branch

Table of Contents

ARSTRAT IO Page on Intelink-U

The articles and information appearing herein are intended for educational and non-commercial purposes to promote discussion of research in the public interest. The views, opinions, and/or findings and recommendations contained in this summary are those of the original authors and should not be construed as an official position, policy, or decision of the United States Government, U.S. Department of the Army, or U.S. Army Strategic Command.

Table of ContentsVol. 8, no. 01 (1 – 9 October 2007)

1. USAF: Cyber War Needs New Laws, not More Money

2. China Tests New Electronic Battlefield System

3. Chinese Buglers: Front Line Information Warriors? (op-ed)

4. Field Marketing In Fallujah

5. 'If You Don't Go After The Network, You're Never Going To Stop These Guys. Never.'

6. Pacific Northwest National Lab Does Cyber Security

7. Analysis: USAF's Counterinsurgency Plan

8. Why Syria's Air Defenses Failed to Detect Israelis

9. Israel Suspected Of 'Hacking' Syrian Air Defences

10. The War in Iraq Through the Eyes of a Soldier

11. Leak Severs Link to Al-Qaeda’s Secrets

12. Qaeda Goes Dark after a U.S. Slip

13. Propaganda: Can a Word Decide a War?

14. Strategic Communication

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USAF: Cyber War Needs New Laws, not More Money By John T. Bennett, Defense News, 1 October 2007 The U.S. Air Force will not need to spend billions of dollars to step up its activities in cyberspace — but it will need changes to DoD guidelines and U.S. and international laws, service officials say.“The people are there, the resources are there already,” said Lani Kass, a special assistant to the Air Force chief of staff for cyberspace issues. “But do we need one command to be the umbrella and bring everything together? I would say so.”The offensive and defensive missions of Air Force Cyber Command (AFCYBER) will require changes to DoD guidelines and U.S. and international law, Kass said. She provided no examples.“Technology has far outpaced policies at all levels,” she said.Lt. Gen. Robert Elder, Eighth Air Force chief, who has been leading the yearlong effort to build the new outfit, said he hopes no service programs will be cut to fund cyber warfare, and that “we can provide capabilities in a way that won’t break the bank.”Kass said the service already has “40,000 of the total force” who are “doing cyber today.” Service officials are working to develop “cyber career fields” as cyber takes its place alongside the air and space battlefields.What has been missing for decades, however, is one organization to tie all cyber-related jobs, budgets and systems together. That changed last November, when service Secretary Michael Wynne announced plans to create AFCYBER.The young outfit, which is to be completely operational in 2009, received its first commander in late September, when Wynne announced that Maj. Gen. William Lord would lead it. Lord now is the director for cyberspace transformation in the service’s Warfighting Integration directorate.The new unit will bring “some changes in joint [U.S.] doctrine and in how we do business — this is not just a C4ISR enabler anymore,” Elder said.The term “cyber operations” goes beyond a brainiac using fancy computers to hack into enemy networks, Elder and Kass said.AFCYBER may draw on nonactive personnel. “This will be a huge mission for the Guard and reserves,” said Kass, who said she is looking for “a bunch of trained killers who understand that nonkinetic — meaning there’s no big explosion — doesn’t mean nonlethal.”Despite years of operations in the electronic spectrum, “the U.S. is late to this fight,” Kass said.Russia, China and extremist groups have developed a level of mastery in cyber attacks, experts say. Elder cited an alleged Russian strike on Estonia’s cyber mainframe, which brought government functions and commerce to a halt for several days. Moscow has denied it was behind the strike, but America “has some peer competitors out there already doing this,” Elder said.More recently, a strike on Pentagon e-mail systems that was allegedly linked to China shows that cyberspace is now “a war-fighting domain,” Elder said.Protecting civilian networks could be a role if nonmilitary agencies are not up to the challenge.Kass said she often asks people, “Who protects your sovereign right to shop on Amazon.com?”Most assume the military has the mission, Kass said. But by law, the mission belongs to the Department of Homeland Security. “If you liked Katrina, that will give you a lot of confidence,” she saidTable of Contents

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China Tests New Electronic Battlefield System By Wendell Minnick, Defense News, 19 Sep 07 China revealed its version of the “digital soldier” concept at its annual North Sword 0709 live-fire exercise, begun Sept. 18 at the Zhurihe training base in northern Inner Mongolia. According to a Xinhua press report, the exercise involved 2,000 soldiers, tanks and other vehicles equipped with electronic devices that instantly relayed data about battlefield conditions back to the command center. The system collected data on causalties, food, ammunition and supplies.“The system could let us know the exact conditions our troops are in under combat; how much ammunition, water and food remain; and when we should support them with logistics,” said Zhang Jixiang, vice commander of the Zhurihe training base, according to Xinhua.Richard Fisher, vice president of the Washington-based International Assessment and Strategy Center, said the system is China’s attempt at creating a digital soldier system. The system would “shrink and graft computer/satnav/digital-video connectivity to the individual soldier,” Fisher said. “The idea is for the individual soldier to be able to broadcast intimate details of his combat condition and receive data of a magnitude to give him a thousandfold more situational awareness than before. Weight, power supply and ruggedness issues have been the main technical barriers.“In 2002, the PLA [People’s Liberation Army] revealed a limited digital soldier rig following a special forces exercise,” Fisher added. “It involved an unwieldy-looking digital camera and a small viewing screen lashed to a helmet. It did not look like it would really survive a jump from a helicopter, but it at least signaled the PLA work in that area.”Larry Wortzel, commissioner of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, said this is part of the Qu Dian System, or Project 995 Regional Integrated Electronic System.“This is probably a full test of the Qu Dian system,” he said. “It’s important. And it means that the PLA now has a redundant, China-wide, multilevel command-and-control system. Clearly, they have mastered the challenges of the information age. Now, when we talk about the PLA using electronic means, missiles, information warfare and anti-satellite weapons, it is no longer an asymmetric form of attack. Many of the PLA’s systems are similar to those used by the U.S. and other advanced militaries. They are a modern fighting force, even if they are somewhat behind the U.S.”The Qu Dian system is an advanced theater-level command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, target-acquisition and reconnaissance network. As an automated battlefield management system, it combines the air force, navy and army communications networks. The heart of the system is the Feng Huo-1 military communications satellite, launched in 2000, that provides China’s military units with C-band and ultra-high frequency communicationsTable of Contents

Chinese Buglers: Front Line Information Warriors? (op-ed)By Rahul K Bhonsle, News Blaze, 29 Sep 07One of the most interesting news about the People's Liberation Army (PLA) flashed recently by Xinhua is return of buglers in the PLA. Quoting, Sgt. Zhang Gaosen, of the Jinan Military Area Command the report stated that, "Being a bugler was not a promising career in the past," but things are changing and buglers are much in demand he claimed. Some may believe that buglers may be, "on call" for the Beijing Olympics less than a year away. However, there are deeper operational reasons for the PLA reviving the art of bugling. In the years gone by, buglers would rouse an army to battle or simply soldiers from their sleep at the break of dawn. Identification of a bugle call was one of the first lessons in training young recruits for unless one recognized the call correctly one could be missing an important routine or order of the day. The bugle call of Retreat at the end of the day was especially significant as it not just signified preparations for the night but also was a tribute to the innumerable martyrs who had laid down their lives for the country and the state or the King as the case may be.However, over the years as alarm calls, sirens, hooters and networked wireless megaphones have proliferated the buglers have taken a back seat in the armed forces. However as the favorite maxim goes, the more things change they continue to remain the same and buglers have made a

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triumphant come back in the PLA. Therefore, what has been the reason for revival of the art of bugling in the Chinese PLA which as many claim is on a modernizing spree. It is plain and simply the threat of jamming of electronic systems in the thick of a modern battle; electronic and information warfare.Such fall back on old systems to beat modern technology in Armed Forces has many precedents. As the world was moving on to transistorized communications, some observers were surprised to find that the then Soviet Army persisted with valve radios on their critical communication equipment. Obviously, the Soviets were protecting themselves from the Electro Magnetic Pulse that would have neutralized the transistors but not the valves. The Chinese seem to drawing similar lessons based on a much more antiquated yet reliable tradition of armies of the World, bugling to beat break down of radios by the enemy.The PLA is no novice to organizational innovation. It has the unique ability of maximizing its strengths. Thus, it was People's War when Mao's Army lacked big guns, or human wave attacks in Korea or an anti satellite strike in 2007. Information warfare has been the PLA's key focus over the years. In the 1990's, two Chinese Colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui of the PLA Air Force Political Department published a seminal work, "Unrestricted Warfare" which revealed the PLA's thinking on new methods and techniques for gaining political advantage against possible adversaries. Information warfare was a key concept propagated then. Today PLA is reportedly having full-scale information warfare capability with an offensive and defensive component. Recent reports in the media indicate that possibly one or many cyber attacks were carried out by the Chinese military on US military's computer system. These Cyber attacks were reportedly carried out in June and US officials claim that these have been by China's People's Liberation Army (PLA). One such attack even led to shutting down of computers in the offices of Robert Gates, the US Defense Secretary. While official comments were guarded, as it is always difficult to trace out such attacks and a number of states as well as non state entities are reported to be carrying out such attempts regularly, yet alarm bells are already reading in information security circles across the globe.Another report speaks of hacking by Chinese into German government systems including computer networks at Chancellor Merkel's office. This issue was reportedly raised during the meet between Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Beijing recently. One would have imagined that the networks of the German Chancellor and Secretary Gates would be virtually penetrable. Yet the all pervasiveness of information warfare perhaps provides opportunities for penetrating even such highly secure systems.Therefore, what do we do with Chinese buglers when they give their calls to the PLA soldiers, "counter bugler warfare", may increasingly engage the hyperactive security specialists across the globeTable of Contents

Field Marketing In Fallujah PSYOP teams build trust with patience, determination By Allison Batdorff, Stars and Stripes Mideast edition, September 28, 2007FALLUJAH, Iraq — Getting into the Iraqi male mind-set requires a shift in focus for the average American, said U.S. Army Capt. Andrew Duprey.For instance, you wouldn’t self-aggrandize when recruiting Iraqi men to join the local police force.The lone-hero-with-badge-and- gun appeal wouldn’t work here.You would talk about how joining the Iraqi Security Forces would reflect honor on their families, tribes and community.“The concept of honor is paramount,” explained Duprey, 44, from Ardmore, Pa., “Instead of emphasizing the individual, it’s the collective that counts.”

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If he wasn’t a psychological operations team leader in the Army, Duprey’s job would be marketing, he said. Like marketers, he tries to exert influence to get a certain outcome. Like marketers, he uses “product,” “demographics,” and “lines of persuasion” to do the job.And, like marketers, his field is growing as more and more people plug in to the Information Age.“Information warfare is a big part of fighting this war out here,” said Sgt. Stephen M. Burnham, 31, a team leader from Mount Upton, N.Y., who works in Fallujah. “Every day is a new battle.”By law, the military cannot use psychological operations on the American public. The law also stipulates that messages geared to influence foreign nationals must be factual and “beyond reproach,” Duprey said.In Iraq, this means everything from blasting the enemy with Western music from Humvee-mounted loudspeakers to promoting adult literacy programs. Leaflets are air-dropped into communities where insurgents are suspected. Loudspeaker announcements tell people to stay away from their windows during a raid.But now that Fallujah is relatively secure, PSYOP teams are more likely to be out of their Humvees and mingling with Iraqis, they said.“Our job now is to go out and talk to Habib, Mohammed and Mustafa to see what they think about the situation in their communities and country and tell them that we are working to make things better for them,” Burnham said. They also combat misinformation, he said. Even in Iraq – where electricity is dicey — a lot of people have access to the Internet, Burnham said.“Al-Qaida in Iraq uses the Internet and bin Laden posts his messages there all the time,” Burnham said.“We also have to combat the idea that we’re waging a war against Islam. A lot of people don’t understand why Americans are here.”Duprey, extended twice in Iraq for a 17-month stay, works in a Tactical PSYOP Team based in Ramadi. His shining moment was a campaign against toy guns, he said.Last Ramadan, people were giving their children plastic guns that looked like AK-47s. Duprey’s unit immediately circulated leaflets targeting mothers telling them not to let their children on the street with them, lest troops confuse the toys with the real thing.“I know that there are probably kids alive today because we got the message out and people listened to it,” Duprey said.But operations don’t usually see immediate results, he said. They’re in it for the long haul.“Attitudes and behaviors take a long time to influence,” said Duprey. “Firing a gun is instant — with our job, it’s ‘wait and see.’”Table of Contents

'If You Don't Go After The Network, You're Never Going To Stop These Guys. Never.'

By Rick Atkinson, Washington Post, October 3, 2007BAGHDAD -- In the early spring of 2006, perhaps the most important document in Baghdad was known as the MOASS -- the Mother of All Spreadsheets-- a vast compilation of radio frequencies that insurgents used to trigger roadside bombs.In some areas of Iraq, 70 percent of all improvised explosive devices were radio-controlled, and they caused more than half of all American combat deaths. An overworked Army intelligence officer tracked the frequencies, and an equally overworked Navy electrical engineer matched them against 14 varieties of electronic jammer used by coalition forces.As new frequencies popped up, the updated MOASS was analyzed by the National Security Agency, by Navy electronic warfare specialists in Maryland and by Army specialists in New Jersey, which led to recommended adjustments in the jammer settings. Those modified "loadsets" were then e-mailed to U.S. military forces throughout Iraq so that the jammers could be reprogrammed. The

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cumbersome process took weeks, by which time new frequencies had been logged into the spreadsheet, requiring further analysis and further reprogramming even as hundreds of new jammers arrived in Iraq each month. "It was a mess," a senior defense official recalled.By the end of 2006, the Department of Defense had spent more than $1 billion during the year just on jammers. Fielding them "proved the largest technological challenge for DOD in the war, on a scale last experienced in World War II," according to Col. William G. Adamson, a former staff officer for the Joint IED Defeat Organization (JIEDDO), the Pentagon office coordinating the campaign.The U.S. strategy was defined in six words: "Put them back on the wire." By neutralizing radio-controlled bombs, the jammers would force insurgent bombmakers to use more rudimentary triggers, such as command wire. Those triggers would be simpler to detect, in theory, and would bring the triggermen closer to their bombs, where U.S. troops could capture or kill them.That strategy has succeeded. In the subsequent 18 months, radio-controlled bombs would shrink to 10 percent of all IEDs in Iraq. Today, bombs triggered by simple command wire have increased to 40 percent of the total.But the threat from IEDs has barely diminished. In the first seven months of this year, there were 20,781 roadside bomb attacks in Iraq, one every 15 minutes. And as of this morning, IEDs have killed 440 U.S. troops this year. Putting them back on the wire has proved a mixed blessing.***Different jammers worked by different means. Active jammers screamed constantly, disrupting radio-controlled bombs with a barrage of radio waves on pre-selected frequencies that drowned out the triggering signal. Reactive jammers "scanned and jammed" by monitoring the electromagnetic spectrum -- like a human ear in a crowded restaurant listening for a voice that whispered "detonate, detonate, detonate" -- and then blocked the frequencies they were programmed to block.Since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, a hodgepodge of jammers had arrived in Mesopotamia, both active and reactive, weak and powerful: Warlock Green, Warlock Red, Warlock Blue, ICE, MICE, SSVJ, MMBJ, Cottonwood, Jukebox, Symphony. Collectively they were now known as CREW, an awkward acronym within an acronym: counter radio-controlled IED electronic warfare.As more jammers flooded the war zone, the mess grew messier. For many months, the shortcomings in electronic warfare expertise had been evident among Army and Marine units. "We had all these boxes over there and people didn't know how to use them," said Rear Adm. Arch Macy, commander of the Naval Surface Warfare Center. "They'd turn them on, thinking they were protected when they weren't."Electronic "fratricide" intensified, with more instances of jammers disrupting coalition radios and even the radio links to unmanned aerial vehicles. More troops switched off their CREW systems rather than risk disrupting their radios; rumors circulated that jammers actually detonated IEDs.In some instances, according to a senior officer in Baghdad, investigations of fatal IED attacks revealed that "the device that killed them was triggered by a frequency that could have been stopped by proper jamming." A now-retired Army lieutenant colonel said, "There were a whole lot of things that made you just want to cry."Among the biggest problems was simply the crowded electromagnetic environment in Iraq. Most fiber-optic and above-ground telephone lines had either been destroyed during the 2003 invasion or subsequently looted by copper-wire scavengers. Now 27 million Iraqis used unregulated cellphones, walkie-talkies, satellite phones, long-distance cordless phones and, in hundreds of instances each month, radio-controlled bombs.About 150,000 coalition troops also sent out a great spray of electronic emissions, which mutated dramatically every time new equipment or a new contingent of soldiers arrived, including some with old Warsaw Pact electronics. "People have said it's the most challenging electromagnetic place in the world," a Navy captain said. "It's very complex." Trying to make sense of the signals, he added, was "like having your head underwater."This was especially true in Baghdad, where the electromagnetic environment seemed to vary between neighborhoods, between seasons, between times of day. "No one realized," the senior Pentagon official said, "how much tougher jamming was going to be in the ground plane" -- the

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ground-air interface, where earth meets sky. The Army logistician added: "We didn't scientifically map out the problem set, so we didn't know the normal electronic noise of a taxi driver doing his thing, the doorbells, the garage door openers, the satellite communications. . . . You have to know the normal program of life."The Pentagon would spend millions of dollars trying to replicate Baghdad's idiosyncratic airwaves in laboratories and at Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona. Senior commanders in Baghdad "were going bonkers," the Army colonel recalled. "They were saying, 'How do we fix this?' "Worse yet, there were problems with Duke, the sophisticated reactive jammer the Pentagon had decided would replace the various models being used in Iraq. Syracuse Research Corp., a not-for-profit company created by Syracuse University in 1957, had won the competition for Duke using design concepts developed by Army engineers at Fort Monmouth, N.J. The contract was signed in June 2005, with the first Duke -- a big box with a big antenna -- completed in November. But deployment to Iraq was delayed to allow adjustments and more tests.This state of affairs pleased no one, but it particularly displeased the Marine Corps. Marine casualties had been severe in Anbar province, where high-powered radio-controlled IEDs were pernicious. Some Marine officers also feared that they could be shortchanged as Dukes reached the field, that the Army was "taking all the good stuff," as one source put it. "The issue got ugly with recriminations.""It was part service rivalry, part delivery schedules, and partly that no one could make stuff fast enough," said Macy, the rear admiral. "You can't walk into Circuit City and say, 'I want 25,000 high-powered jammers.' "The Marines had already hedged their bets. Med-Eng Systems, a Canadian firm, made an active jammer that worked by "blasting away, locking up everything," according to a retired Navy captain. As a foreign firm, Med-Eng needed a U.S. partner to work on classified programs. Soon a corporate marriage was arranged with General Dynamics Armament and Technical Products in Charlotte.If inelegant, the jammer had showed promise in tests conducted in the summer of 2005. Because it could be reprogrammed to meet changing insurgent threats, from key fobs to cellphones, the gadget was named Chameleon.The Marines bought 1,000 Chameleons in November 2005. After encouraging tests at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and elsewhere, the Marines announced on Feb. 8, 2006, a $289 million contract that increased the purchase to 4,000 Chameleons, which later grew to 10,000.General Dynamics threw its considerable heft into the project, even using a corporate jet as a delivery van to pick up components nationwide, according to company sources. "Marines take care of their own," a General Dynamics talking point advised, but the company also eyed a bigger prize. The first Dukes had deployed overseas in February 2006, yet the jammers' difficulties in Iraq's electromagnetic environment persisted.Noting an "Army requirement of 20,000 systems" worth $1.5 billion by 2008, General Dynamics intended to "pursue the Army requirement and displace Syracuse Research," according to a defense industry document. A corporate information campaign would promote Chameleon's virtues to Army and congressional leaders."We've pursued business opportunities," a General Dynamics spokesman said last week. "We were well aware of the Army requirement." A spokesman for Syracuse Research declined to comment, citing "contract restrictions."In Baghdad, confusion only intensified as hundreds and then thousands of new jammers flooded in, some active and others reactive. Duke's shortcomings -- "it was looking like a turkey," the senior Pentagon official said -- grew so grievous by late spring that officials considered scrapping the jammer altogether in favor of Chameleon.A naval officer, Capt. David J. "Fuzz" Harrison, had spent the winter of 2005-2006 in Baghdad trying to figure out how to fix the jammer problem. "The ground electronic warfare fight that's killing so many soldiers and Marines would be greatly aided by having people here who know electronic

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warfare," Harrison reported. That meant the Navy, which had extensive experience in electronic combat and had recently been chosen to coordinate all of the military's CREW systems.Retired Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs, head of the Pentagon's counter-IED effort, returned from Baghdad in early February 2006 with similar conclusions. Expertise was needed in divisions, brigades, regiments and battalions. Harrison and Col. Kevin D. Lutz, commander of Task Force Troy, the counter-IED brigade in Iraq, calculated that nearly 300 electronic warfare officers would be required. The Navy agreed to provide them.After brief training at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island in Washington state, the first batch of 33 Navy electronic warfare experts -- including submarine, aviation, surface ship and engineer officers and sailors -- arrived in Baghdad on April 15, 2006. Hundreds followed. Distributed throughout the force, they made an immediate impact.Now soldiers and Marines had an expert to adjust those finicky boxes and antennas, and to offer advice on using jammers as a weapon against radio-controlled bombs. "It was," Meigs later said of the Navy's commitment, "a stroke of genius."***By the summer of 2006, radio-triggered IEDs had dropped to less than half the total, and they would keep plummeting for the next year. Duke became a valued battlefield asset in Iraq, and 2,300 eventually reached Afghanistan to begin replacing the venerable Acorn, which had first arrived in 2003. The integration of active and reactive jammers in both theaters proceeded apace. "Scar-tissue learning," as Meigs called the process, turned soldiers and Marines into capable electronic warriors.Yet insurgent bombers found other options. Simple pressure plates -- two metal strips that completed an electrical firing circuit when pressed together by a tire or an unsuspecting boot -- appeared in great numbers. More than one-quarter of bomb triggers were soon classified as "VO": victim-operated.These included growing numbers of explosively formed penetrators (EFPs), which often used passive infrared triggers tripped by a passing victim. EFPs became as flamboyant as they were deadly; a bomb with 54 warheads configured in nine "arrays" was discovered before detonation on May 17, 2006. Despite increasingly sharp warnings from the Bush administration to Iran, which was accused of supplying the bombs and other war materiel, EFPs continued to take a horrific toll in Shiite-controlled sectors of Iraq.Six cavalry troopers would be killed in a blast on March 15 of this year, and from April 1 through July 31 roughly 300 EFP attacks occurred. EFPs still account for only about 3 percent of all roadside bombs in Iraq, but the 250 Americans killed by the devices since 2004 amount to 17 percent of all bomb deaths, according to military sources.Underbelly or "deep buried" IEDs continued to take an even greater toll -- more than half of all coalition forces killed early this summer, for example, although only 15 percent of all bombs were classified as deep buried. The Pentagon agreed to buy at least 7,800 sturdy Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles with V-shaped hulls for approximately $1 million each. Prudent soldiers on patrol now searched every road culvert; some units began welding shut manhole covers.An incident on June 28 in the East Rashid neighborhood of Baghdad illuminated a disquieting trend: A single underbelly IED, so violent that investigators initially believed the blast came from several car bombs, killed five soldiers and wounded seven.Bombmakers increasingly used homemade explosives brewed from fertilizer-based urea nitrate in kiddie swimming pools or huge aluminum cauldrons, then spread on flat rooftops to dry and packed in rice bags. On July 17, bombers detonated 1,500 pounds of homemade explosives in a culvert north of Baghdad. The blast heaved a 26-ton armored vehicle 60 feet through the air, killing two Navy crewmen, according to investigative documents. Other bombmakers in late 2006 began using acetone to leach the explosives from artillery and mortar shells; much lighter and more portable, the stuff could then be molded into car wheel wells or hidden almost anywhere.

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Multiple suicide truck bombs were orchestrated to penetrate sturdy perimeter defenses, like the twin blasts in late April of this year that killed nine soldiers from the 82nd Airborne in a schoolhouse command post north of Baghdad.Another nasty variation first appeared in October 2006 with the first use of chlorine gas in an IED. Sixteen more chlorine attacks would occur, but insurgents found, as World War I soldiers had, that "it is very difficult to create a lethal concentration of chlorine gas," an Army colonel in Baghdad reported. "The gas cloud rapidly dissipates."***Defeat the device. Train the force. Attack the network.Meigs, a retired four-star Army general, had repeated those three phrases a thousand times since becoming JIEDDO director in December 2005.In the early years of the Iraq war, the U.S. government's counter-IED efforts had focused overwhelmingly on defeating the device, and more than half of Meigs's budget still went to preventing detonation and, if that failed, mitigating the blast. In fiscal 2007, for example, $113 million would be spent on mine rollers, a World War II technology using heavy cylinders to trip pressure plate triggers in front of a convoy.The "molecular sniffer" long coveted by U.S. Central Command arrived on the battlefield in the guise of Fido, a $25,000 machine developed by an Oklahoma company as part of a Pentagon program called Dog's Nose. Modern explosives have very low vapor pressures, and therefore emit few molecules for a sniffer to detect; but Fido's sensor -- heated above 200 degrees Fahrenheit -- was effective enough that hundreds were deployed, including more than 70 mounted on mobile robots. "This is the closest thing we can get to a dog," a government engineer said.Some technologies thrived: Warrior Alpha drones; surveillance cameras on towers and blimps; ground penetrating radar mounted on a South African-built Husky vehicle to detect buried IEDs. In trying to "pre-det" -- prematurely detonate -- bombs with radio signals, EA-6B Prowler electronic warfare planes flew above roads in Iraq and Afghanistan. The missions were called "burning the route."Other technologies flopped. Forerunner, an unmanned vehicle carrying counter-IED gear, was to be "tele-operated" with remote controls by soldiers in a trailing vehicle. It "simply did not work" and was banished from the theater, according to a JIEDDO document. The controls proved sluggish, and some operators developed motion sickness while trying to drive Forerunner via a television monitor in the jouncing trail Humvee.Still more disappointing was Blow Torch, a high-powered microwave emitter built at Letterkenny Army Depot in Pennsylvania after besting four rivals in a government competition. Similar to an Israeli gadget called Dragon Spike, Blow Torch was intended to defeat the electronic circuitry in EFPs. At $175,000 each, 101 of the devices took to the field for operational testing early this year. But enduring shortcomings halted the deployment and Blow Torch was diverted to New Mexico for more testing.Also frustrating was the scientific effort to detect the gossamer-like copper wires increasingly used to arm or detonate bombs, including about one-third of all EFPs by this summer. Certain airborne search radars gave good resolution -- a clear picture -- when looking for a thin wire strung from a hidden roadside bomb to a triggerman. But those radars failed to penetrate beneath the surface for wires slightly buried, while radars that penetrated gave poor resolution. Different soils produced varying results, depending on moisture content, alkaline levels and other arcane variables. False positives were legion in wire-strewn, trash-cluttered Iraq.Meanwhile, the jammer saga rolled on. By midsummer, 13,000 Dukes had arrived, to be followed by an improved Duke 2. The Pentagon also signed contracts with EDO Corp. for more than $535 million to buy the first 7,450 of an eventual 11,000 jammers -- known collectively as Spiral 2.1 -- intended as the next CREW generation in Iraq and Afghanistan. Research and development has already begun on Spirals 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3, according to the Navy.Few issues were more emotionally charged. Since early 2006, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, had urged a "Take Back the Roads" campaign in

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Iraq. Among other solutions, he advocated a backpack jammer known as the Quick Reaction Dismounted (QRD), which would succeed the little Warlock Blue he had pushed into the field a year earlier. When a staffer called Hunter from Yuma and told him that "they have 163 more iterations of the tests still to go" on the QRD, the chairman angrily accused Meigs of "the slows" and of "delaying things from getting into the hands of the troops," according to sources familiar with the incident.Meigs was furious. The backpack jammer was not ready for deployment, he countered, and the Duke's persistent difficulties had disrupted the test schedule at Yuma. Eventually the Pentagon announced that 1,400 backpack jammers -- a QRD model called the Guardian won the competition -- would be sent to the theater by spring of this year. (Hunter lost his chairmanship in January when Democrats took control of the House.)Armor remained the last line of defense, and armor grew ever thicker, heavier and more expensive. Seven major vendors toiled to build the V-shaped MRAPs, and the Pentagon pondered whether to triple the buy, to 23,000 vehicles, in order to replace all Humvees in Iraq, according to senior officials. By the end of 2007, 1,300 MRAPs were to be built each month, compared with fewer than one a day a year earlier. For expediency, plans were made to fly at least some MRAPs to the war zone at a cost of $135,000 each, seven times the expense of sea transport.A Marine general this spring publicly declared the MRAP to be "four to five times safer" than an uparmored Humvee, but Pentagon officials conceded that it remains vulnerable to EFPs and large underbelly bombs, as well as to anti-tank missiles and rocket-propelled grenades. An even stouter model, designed to better parry EFPs, is under consideration.The Pentagon in the past year also financed more than 8,000 anti-fragmentation kits, known as Frag Kit 5, which added still more armor plating to Humvees. Frag Kit 6, a still heavier version, will have doors weighing 650 pounds each -- so bulky that soldiers may need a "mechanical assist device" to open and close them. "It's over the top," said an Army colonel in Baghdad.***Training the force, Meigs's second imperative, has saved innumerable lives over the years. Soldiers who once spotted few roadside bombs in Iraq now detect more than half before detonation.The "Mark 1 Human Eyeball," as troops sardonically call it, is more adept at finding IEDs than any machine. Studies to determine which soldiers made the best bomb spotters found that "it's those who hunted and fished and were much closer to their environment," an Army scientist reported. Because approximately half of all casualties occurred in the first three months of a soldier's deployment, according to a senior intelligence official, units headed overseas began receiving extensive counter-IED instruction at the Army's National Training Center in California and elsewhere.In Iraq, SKTs -- "small kill teams" -- of five to eight soldiers learned to ambush bomb emplacers, often hiding for hours or days near IED "hot spots." Under a $258 million contract, Wexford Group International of Vienna, Va., and the Asymmetric Warfare Group, a new Army unit formed last year at Fort Meade, Md., dispatched field teams to the theater to help sharpen tactics and techniques. Troops were advised to "get off the X" -- the blast seat in an IED attack -- and to "build a box," with surveillance cameras, for example, in which to spot and trap insurgent bombers.The new unit, now 250 strong, adopted an eccentric motto: "Normal is a cycle on a washing machine." Field commanders were urged to be unorthodox, by leaving an eavesdropping bug after searching a suspected insurgent hideout, or by shutting down microwave towers to neutralize cellphone triggers before entering a dangerous sector."Our mission is to challenge the culture of the whole Army," said Col. Robert Shaw, the group commander. "The institution is not designed to react as fast as our enemy reacts."Last winter, another new Army unit, Task Force ODIN -- the acronym derives from "observation, detection, identification and neutralization" -- began hunting IED emplacers with unmanned aerial vehicles, attack helicopters and spotters in C-12 airplanes. Operating from Tikrit in northern Iraq, the task force eventually averaged "40 to 50 engagements per month," according to a senior Army official. A sequence of operations in northern Iraq -- code-named Snake Hunter, Snake Killer and Black Widow -- increased the number of suspected emplacers killed from a weekly average of 22 last fall to 71 per week this spring, an Army lieutenant colonel said.

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"The enemy's killing us with a thousand cuts, and we're trying to kill him with a thousand cuts, too," the lieutenant colonel added. "Can you kill your way to victory?"***Ultimately, eliminating IEDs as a weapon of strategic influence -- the U.S. government's explicit ambition -- is likely to depend on neutralizing the networks that buy, build and disseminate bombs. Military strategists have acknowledged that reality almost since the beginning of the long war, but only in the past year has it become an overarching counter-IED policy. "Left of boom" -- the concept of disrupting the bomb chain long before detonation -- is finally more than a slogan."If you don't go after the network, you're never going to stop these guys. Never. They'll just keep killing people," the senior Pentagon official said. "And the network is not a single monolithic organization, but rather a loosely knotted web of networks."The resemblance of bomber cells to a criminal enterprise has meant a greater reliance on law enforcement techniques, an approach Meigs had stressed as commander of NATO forces in Bosnia in the late 1990s. In Iraq, that has included such tactics as analyzing the copper found in an EFP slug to determine where it was mined and bringing modern forensics to Mesopotamia."We were policing up guys on the battlefield and turning them over to the Iraqi judicial system, which was releasing them because we didn't have any experience in gathering evidence," the senior intelligence official said. Convictions in 2006 ran as low as 20 percent in some areas.Eventually, 18 weapons intelligence teams, drawn largely from the Air Force, began collecting evidence both from bombs that detonated and from those that did not. At Task Force Troy in Baghdad, four cyanoacrylate fuming chambers now use a concoction of Super Glue and high humidity to tease latent fingerprints from electrical tape or IED components. One million known Iraqi fingerprints are stored at a Pentagon biometrics center in West Virginia. In the first seven months of this year, technicians examined 112,000 items and recovered an average of 600 latent prints each month.In June, for example, 17 fingerprint matches led to the detention of 10 Iraqi suspects and a hunt for seven others, officials said. Because the Iraqi judicial system traditionally has relied on confessions, witness statements and photographic evidence, two American forensics experts on July 13 gave 30 judges at the Central Criminal Court in Baghdad a 90-minute tutorial on fingerprinting. U.S. officials hope to begin introducing fingerprint evidence in Iraqi trials this year.Ninety retired agents from the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and other agencies also have been hired as field investigators in a $35 million pilot program that began a year ago. About 150 prosecutions for bombmaking activities have taken place in Anbar province alone, according to a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst.Other unconventional initiatives include "human terrain teams," made up of anthropologists, social scientists and sundry experts who advise brigade commanders on tribal structure, local customs and cultural nuances. A preliminary assessment last month of an HTT in eastern Afghanistan concluded that the team had "a profound effect" in reducing "kinetic operations" -- gunplay -- and had even discerned that a local village would help stop Taliban rocket attacks against U.S. troops in exchange for a volleyball net. From an original $20 million plan for half a dozen teams, the Pentagon now envisions nearly 30.To anticipate future bomb designs, scientific "red teams" last year began building IEDs that insurgents might build, while "blue teams" calculated how best to defeat them. Other red teams include 100 cadets and midshipmen from the nation's military academies, who have also been recruited as surrogate bombmakers. "Show me how many different ways you can flip a switch at a distance," the students were told. "Be conceptually sophisticated, but use the most simple, cheap and available material that you can."Last fall, in an office building in Northern Virginia, a JIEDDO operation began fusing data from the CIA, the DIA, the NSA other organizations in an effort to give brigade commanders timely intelligence for targeting IED networks. Telephone eavesdropping, surveillance video, spy reports, roadside-bomb trends: all are packaged electronically and sent forward. The operation can build in 12 hours a three-dimensional video showing, for example, a street in Ramadi or Baqubah where an

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Army patrol intends to drive tomorrow, with extraordinary detail about past IED events on this corner or down that alley.Attack-the-network results have been heartening in recent months, according to Pentagon officials, who cite the seizure of bomb caches and the destruction of several cells. Still, scarcely an hour passes in Iraq without someone planting a bomb."It's a hard problem. There is no solution, just better ways of dealing with it," Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon R. England said in an interview. "You keep mitigating as much as you can, but at the end of the day, it's warfare."***At 9:30 p.m. on Monday, May 7, a convoy of four uparmored Humvees rolled through the heavily fortified gate at Camp Falcon in southern Baghdad before turning north onto Route Jackson at 35 mph. Each Humvee carried a jammer against radio-controlled bombs, either a Duke or an SSVJ. Each had been outfitted with Frag Kit 5, and a Rhino II protruded from each front bumper as protection against EFPs detonated by passive infrared triggers. As recommended, the drivers kept a 40-meter separation from one another.The senior officer in the third Humvee, Lt. Col. Gregory D. Gadson, 41, had driven to Falcon to attend a memorial service for two soldiers killed by an IED. Now he was returning to his own command post near Baghdad International Airport. As commander of the 2nd Battalion of the 32nd Field Artillery, a unit in the 1st Infantry Division, Gadson was a gunner by training. But as part of the troop "surge" that President Bush announced in January, the battalion had taken up unfamiliar duties as light infantrymen in Baghdad.After 18 years in the Army, including tours of duty in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and in Afghanistan, Gadson was hardly shocked by the change of mission. He knew that, proverbially, no plan survived contact with the enemy. Raised in Chesapeake, Va., he had been a football star in high school and an outside linebacker at West Point before graduating in 1989. The nomadic Army life suited him and his wife, Kim, who had been a classmate at the academy before resigning her commission to raise their two children.In the darkness on Route Jackson, no one noticed the dimple in the roadbed, where insurgents had loosened the asphalt with burning tires and buried three 130mm artillery shells before repairing the hole. No one saw the command wire snaking to the east through a hole in a chain-link fence and into a building. No one saw the triggerman.They all heard the blast. "The boom is what I think about every day," Gadson would say three months later at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. A great flash exploded beneath the right front fender. Gadson felt himself tumbling across the ground, and he knew instantly that an IED had struck the Humvee. "I don't have my rifle," he told himself, and then the world went black.When he regained consciousness, he saw the looming face of 1st Sgt. Frederick L. Johnson, who had been in the trail vehicle and had brought his commander back from the dead with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Lying on the road shoulder 50 meters from his shattered Humvee, Gadson was the only man seriously wounded in the attack, but those wounds were grievous. Another soldier, Pfc. Eric C. Brown, managed to knot tourniquets across his upper thighs. Johnson hoisted Gadson, who weighed 210 pounds, into another Humvee, an ordeal that was "extremely complicated due to the extensive injuries Lt. Col. Gadson sustained to his lower extremities," an incident report later noted.Thirty minutes after the blast, Gadson was flown from Camp Falcon to the 28th Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad's Green Zone. For hours he hovered near death, saved by 70 units of transfused blood. "Tell Kim I love her," he told another officer.Two days later, he was stable enough to fly to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany; two days after that, he reached Walter Reed, where Kim was waiting for him. On May 18, a major artery in his left leg ruptured; to save his life, surgeons amputated several inches above the knee. The next day, the right leg blew, and it, too, was taken off at the thigh.Gadson would be but one of 22,000 American casualties from IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan, but that isolated incident along Route Jackson on May 7 was emblematic of the nation's long struggle against roadside bombs.

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He had been wounded despite the best equipment his country could give him and despite the best countermeasures American science could contrive. His life had been saved by the armored door that shielded his head and torso, and by the superior training of his soldiers, the heroic efforts of military medicine and his own formidable grit. He had lost his lower limbs despite flawlessly following standard operating procedure. He faced months, and years, of surgery, rehabilitation and learning to live a life without legs.Gadson's war was over, but for his comrades and for the country it goes on. An additional $4.5 billion has been budgeted for the counter-IED fight in the fiscal year that began this week. JIEDDO, which started four years ago this month in the Pentagon basement as an Army task force with a dozen soldiers, now fills two floors of an office building in Crystal City and employs almost 500 people, including contractors.The House Armed Services Committee concluded in May that the organization "has demonstrated marginal success in achieving its stated mission to eliminate the IED as a weapon of strategic influence." Others disagree, including England. "Monty Meigs was the best thing that ever happened to us," he said, "and to the [Pentagon], and to the guys in the field."Whether because of the surge, or despite it, total IED attacks in Iraq declined from 3,200 in March to 2,700 in July, an 8 percent drop. IED-related deaths also declined over the summer, sharply, from 88 in May to 27 in September.If heartened by the recent trend, Meigs is cautious. He notes that sniping, another asymmetrical tactic, tormented soldiers in the Civil War. "Snipers are still around, and they're darned effective," he said. "Artillery has also been around a long time. There are some tactical problems that are very hard to solve. There are no silver bullets, no panaceas."Virtually everyone agrees that regardless of how the American expeditions in Iraq and Afghanistan play out, the roadside bomb has become a fixture on 21st-century battlegrounds."IEDs are a factor in the future," Macy added. "Wherever we go, for whatever reason we go there, if there are people who don't like us, we're going to have to be prepared to deal with IEDs."Table of Contents

Pacific Northwest National Lab Does Cyber SecurityBy Rob Preston, Information Week, Oct 3, 2007 Jerry Johnson, CIO of one of the country’s top national laboratories, is “amazed” at the level of insecurity that persists at many organizations. More CIOs should consider protecting their data like this world-class research institution does.Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, a U.S.Department of Energy Office of Science lab, provides foundational science and applied research in energy, the environment, and national security for DOE, other government agencies, universities, and industry. So its intellectual property is its lifeblood.That IP is also extremely valuable, one reason PNNL is under constant cyber attack. On a “quiet day,” Johnson estimates, the lab’s firewalls block 50,000 to 100,000 malicious connections per HOUR -- everything from script kiddies banging on its network to denial of service attacks to attempts by foreign entities to steal information pertinent to national security. In addition, PNNL’s firewall turns away another 800,000 spam messages per day, he says.PNNL deploys a classic "defense in depth" to protect its information assets. First, it divides its network into security "enclaves" based on the sensitivity of information and the assessed threat levels. Its extranet enclave hosts publicly accessible servers, and several internal enclaves are segmented by wired network, wireless network, enterprise services (databases, servers), and others housing the most sensitive information. On the Internet perimeter and between intranet enclaves, PNNL uses conventional network-layer firewalls to manage access. Two-factor authentication is required for all intranet access from locations not under the lab’s physical control. At the next layer are application-layer firewalls for extranet Web services and for Internet mail that scan and eliminate known malware attacks before they reach a server or user's workstation. All servers and workstations have host-based antivirus

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protection, and all workstations have host-based firewalls and intrusion detection software. Rounding out PNNL’s defenses are patch management, vulnerability scanning, and log analysis systems. But the most important layer of PNNL’s defense strategy, Johnson maintains, is the organization’s end users. All employees must go through an internally developed cyber security program, updated and renewed every year. The program includes interactive online training, as well as exercises that apply the course material to real-world situations. Awareness campaigns -- focused on phishing, downloading peer-to-peer software, and other common pitfalls -- feature postcards mailed to each employee and matching posters placed in common areas. (Read what one imprisoned cyber punk says about how he regularly cracked commercial systems.)PNNL’s user awareness program has had a measurable impact. For example, less than 1% of employees responded to a targeted phishing message recently generated by a security review team, Johnson says, compared with the 15% response rate typical in other organizations.PNNL has no chief information security officer per se, but Johnson works closely with his peer at the lab’s Safeguards & Security organization, who’s responsible for both physical and logical security. PNNL has about six full-time infosec professionals.For its fiscal year ended last Sunday, about 6% of PNNL’s $45 million IT budget was spent on cyber security. Excluding research computing--that is, looking at cyber security costs relative only to business computing, office automation, and core infrastructure--that percentage rises to nearly 8%.Given the nature of PNNL’s business, it’s money well spent. But you don’t have to be a world-class research lab to take security so seriously.Table of Contents

Analysis: USAF's Counterinsurgency PlanBy Shaun Waterman, UPI, Oct. 3, 2007WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 (UPI) -- The new U.S. Air Force doctrine on insurgency and irregular warfare was fast-tracked to completion so the service could get a seat at the table for discussions about an overarching policy on the topic for the U.S. military as a whole. But critics say the new Air Force approach takes insufficient account of the need to win hearts and minds in such fighting.A senior Air Force official said last week that planning had begun over the summer for the so-called joint doctrine on insurgency -- policy for all three services and the Marine Corps.“In order to have a voice at that table,” Maj. Gen Allen Peck told the Air Force Association conference in Washington, “We had to have doctrine written down … so we fast-tracked (it).”The Air Force wants a voice because the way the joint doctrine is written “appears likely to affect service budgets, programs, and more,” observed Robert Dudney, editor in chief of the association’s magazine. The new Air Force policy document was published in August. Peck, who runs the Air Force Doctrine Center at Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala., said it aimed to leverage the “asymmetric advantages” that U.S. airpower produced.Insurgents have “dedicated and experienced ground forces,” but “they don’t have our access to air and space,” he said.U.S. air dominance gave its forces strategic advantages that were “almost like cheating,” he said.The doctrine defines irregular warfare as “a violent struggle among state and non-state actors for legitimacy and influence over the relevant populations.”But Peck cautioned this was not necessarily the same as a battle for hearts and minds.“It doesn’t have to be kinder and gentler,” he said, citing the Viet Cong, who he charged had “won influence over the population how? Not by going in and immunizing the kids and building schools. … They’d go in and they’d grab a couple of the tribal elders and hang them.”The doctrine also emphasized that counterinsurgency could not be won with military power alone, said Peck, enumerating the so-called DIME concept -- Diplomacy, Information operations, Military force and Economic power -- of a four-pronged approach to the problem.

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Critics in Afghanistan have charged that increasing U.S. reliance on airpower has led to a growing number of civilian casualties -- and increasing alienation of the local population from the international military presence in the country -- undermining the U.S. mission.Peck acknowledged that the Air Force was now much more active in Afghanistan. “It’s become much more kinetic over there,” he said. But he added that airpower often got the rap unfairly, when it was essentially acting in a support role to the ground forces. “Rarely does the ground commander ask for a weapon to be delivered and then we miss. Normally the weapon goes there and then due to poor intelligence or something else” it turns out the target was wrong.Nonetheless, “We end up reading about ‘airstrike kills’” in such situations, Peck said. “The airman takes the blame.” He rejected criticism that the new doctrine took too little account of the potentially negative effects of employing powerful explosives from the air.“If there’s a troop in a contact event … that’s where you gotta do what you gotta do to save (the personnel) on the ground.”But for operations that don't involve immediate danger to U.S. forces, he said, “We have a pretty strict matrix that we have to run through” before the use of certain kinds of weapons is approved. “We’re restricting ourselves.”It was “flat not true” that lawyers were in the decision-making process, he said, but they were advising the commanders who were.“The bottom line is,” he said earlier, “I don’t think airpower is being used to its full potential capabilities in either Iraq or Afghanistan.”A longtime critic of U.S. strategy, retired Air Force Col. Chester Richards told UPI that airpower was inherently unsuited to counterinsurgency.“When you blow things up from the air, there’s a good chance that you’ll kill civilians,” he said. “Almost any kinetic application of airpower is bound to be counterproductive” in counterinsurgency conflicts.“Shooting at people from airplanes (makes) you look like a physical and moral coward,” he said, adding that he was not impugning the character of any U.S. personnel, but rather emphasizing the propaganda value of an enemy narrative about U.S. airpower.The storyline that “They are afraid to fight us face-to-face but not to bomb us from the air and kill our women and children” is “a good recruiting tool for the enemy,” he said.“I don’t even know how to respond to that,” said Peck, when a reporter put Richards’ views to him.“I take great pride in the fact that we can do these things without putting our forces at risk -- to me that’s the goal. We don’t want to fight a fair fight.”Table of Contents

Why Syria's Air Defenses Failed to Detect IsraelisBy David A. Fulghum, Aviation Week, 10/3/2007 Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said the Israelis struck a construction site at Tall al-Abyad just south of the Turkish border on Sept. 6. Press reports from the region say witnesses saw the Israeli aircraft approach from the Mediterranean Sea while others found unmarked drop tanks in Turkey near the border with Syria. Israeli defense officials admitted Oct. 2 that the Israeli Air Force made the raid.The big mystery of the strike is how did the non-stealthy F-15s and F-16s get through the Syrian air defense radars without being detected? Some U.S. officials say they have the answer.U.S. aerospace industry and retired military officials indicated today that a technology like the U.S.-developed “Suter” airborne network attack system developed by BAE Systems and integrated into U.S. unmanned aircraft by L-3 Communications was used by the Israelis. The system has been used or at least tested operationally in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last year.

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The technology allows users to invade communications networks, see what enemy sensors see and even take over as systems administrator so sensors can be manipulated into positions so that approaching aircraft can’t be seen, they say. The process involves locating enemy emitters with great precision and then directing data streams into them that can include false targets and misleading messages algorithms that allow a number of activities including control. A Kuwaiti newspaper wrote that "Russian experts are studying why the two state-of-the art Russian-built radar systems in Syria did not detect the Israeli jets entering Syrian territory. Iran reportedly has asked the same question, since it is buying the same systems and might have paid for the Syrian acquisitions."The system in question is thought to be the new Tor-M1 launchers which carries eight missiles as well as two of the Pachora-2A system. Iran bought 29 of the Tor launchers from Russia for $750 million to guard its nuclear sites, and they were delivered in Jan., according to Agency France-Press and ITAR-TASS. Syrian press reports they were tested in February. They also are expected to form a formidable system when used with the longer-range S-300/SA-10 which Iran has been trying to buy from Russia. Syria has operated SA-6s for years and more recently has been negotiating with Russians for the Tor-M1. What systems were actually guarding the Syrian site are not known.Table of Contents

Israel Suspected Of 'Hacking' Syrian Air DefencesBy John Leyden, the Register 4th October 2007Questions are mounting over how Israeli planes were able to sneak past Syria's defences and bomb a "strategic target" in the country last month.Israeli F-15s and F-16s bombed a military construction site on 6 September. Earlier reports of the attack were confirmed this week when Israeli Army radio said Israeli planes had attacked a military target "deep inside Syria", quoting the military censor.Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said it reserved the right to retaliate when he took the unusual step of offering interviews to Western media.Syria and Israel have remained formally at war since the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, during which Israeli forces seized the Golan Heights.The motives for the strike, much less what was hit and what damage was caused, remain unclear. One theory is that a fledgling nuclear research centre, the fruits of alleged collaboration between Syria and North Korea, may have been hit. Others speculate that a store of arms shipments bound for the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah might have been targeted. A test against Syria's air defences has also being suggested in some quarters. None of these theories appear to be much better than educated guesswork.Bombers carrying out the raid are believed to have entered Syrian airspace from the Mediterranean Sea. Unmarked fuel drop tanks were later found on Turkish soil near the Syrian border, providing evidence of a possible escape route. Witnesses said the Israeli jets were engaged by Syrian air defences in Tall al-Abyad, near the border with Turkey.This location is deep within Turkey, prompting questions about how the fighters avoided detection until so long into their mission. Neither F-15s nor F-16s used by the Israeli air force in the raids are fitted with stealth technology.Flying under the radar is a dangerous tactic, no longer favoured since a number of British fighters went down during the first Gulf War over the liberation of Kuwait. That leaves the possibility that jamming techniques, or some even more sophisticated electronic warfare tactic, was brought into play.Aviation Week reckons the success of the attack might be down to use of the "Suter" airborne network attack system. The technology, was developed by BAE Systems and integrated into US unmanned aircraft by L-3 Communications, according to unnamed US aerospace industry and retired military officials questioned by Aviation Week.Instead of jamming radar signals, Suter uses a more sophisticated approach of "hacking" into enemy defences.

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"The technology allows users to invade communications networks, see what enemy sensors see, and even take over as systems administrator so sensors can be manipulated into positions so that approaching aircraft can't be seen," Aviation Week explains. "The process involves locating enemy emitters with great precision and then directing data streams into them that can include false targets and misleading message algorithms."Suter is said to have being "tested operationally" in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last year, according to Aviation Week. Syria reportedly recently bought two state-of-the art radar systems from Russia, reckoned to be Tor-M1 launchers that carry a payload of eight missiles, as well as two Pachora-2A systems. Iran recently bought 29 of these Tor launchers from Russia for $750m in order to defend its nuclear sites.The apparent failure of these systems in detecting and responding to the Israeli raid therefore poses questions for arms manufacturers and armies all the way from Damascus to Moscow and over to Tehran.Table of Contents

The War in Iraq Through the Eyes of a SoldierBy Kathy Temple, Associated Content, 4 Oct 07 President Bush once said, "We will end a brutal regime, whose aggression and weapons of mass destruction make it a unique threat to the world." The question still remains in the minds of Americans: When will it end? The United States of America is filled with conflicting viewpoints when it comes to the War in Iraq. There are a percentage of people who believe the President should evacuate all troops immediately. Conversely, there are individuals who believe we should stay until our goal is attained. When talking to the active military, it is extremely interesting to hear what they have to say about the war they are fighting. It is one thing to be an outsider looking in, but to be the one inside is a whole different story. SGT Joe McGibney was in the active army from January 2000 until November 2004. He was stationed in Fort Bragg, N.C., Yongsan South Korea, Fort Carson, C.O. and went to Iraq from April 2003 to April 2004. A few months after his homecoming, he was placed in the Inactive Ready Reserve (I.R.R.) to complete his eight-year commitment. Without warning, in September of 2006, Joe received a letter calling him out if I.R.R. for an 18 month mobilization. On November 5, 2006 SGT Joe McGibney headed out to Fort Jackson for processing, medical and psychological evaluations. After extensive weapons training and learning tactical situations, he was moved to Fort Bragg, N.C. and eventually to Fort Dix, N.J. for re-classification as a Civil Affairs Operator. This is where he learned that his responsibility in Iraq would be to educate the people who live on the battlefield and involve them in making their neighborhoods better than before the U.S. troops arrived in 2003. Eventually, Joe went back to Fort Bragg and was assigned to B. Company 492nd Civil Affairs Battalion and deployed with them in early March of this year.Joe's Civil Affairs team arrived in Kuwait then moved north to Iraq. Currently, they are stationed at Camp Liberty in Baghdad. B. Company 492nd Civil Affairs Battalion is responsible for a neighborhood in Baghdad called Ameriya. Historically, this community once housed some of the richest and prestigious leaders (both political and religious) in all of Iraq. Before the predominately Sunni town left it in shambles, a beautiful shopping district was widely visited by the high-class residents. Amongst several projects being worked on within this Battalion, water and electric restoration is a top priority. They are also repaving roads, renovating schools and health clinics and going door to door to find doctors, teachers and government leaders. "Keeping the people busy keeps the enemy from getting to them and either killing them and their families or making them place roadside bombs or store weapons." Some people of Ameriya are even employed by local contractors to aid in rebuilding the community. "By rebuilding the community we are making friends and getting the people to trust us, therefore, if an insurgent comes to them they will tell us and not feel afraid for their family. The army calls this 'winning the hearts and minds' of the people."According to SGT Joe McGibney it will take many years to rebuild this country. "I think that with email, fast food and On Demand TV, the people of the United States want instant gratification in

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Iraq. This is impossible." After my interview with Joe, I have come to the realization that we can't just leave. It makes sense to us to get them out so we don't lose any more soldiers and we stop spending massive amounts of money on the war, but in actuality it would make the whole situation worse. Per my conversation with Joe, the troops are fighting battles so their families and friends at home don't have to. He feels the negative comments about the War in Iraq hurt moral and decreases the motivation to fight. He even reminded me how after September 11th, the U.S. flags and yellow ribbons were everywhere. "Where did it go? It made the troops feel good and made them want to eliminate this from ever happening again."Needless to say, there are still wars going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have troops in Africa and Kosovo, South America and Asia. The United States Military is the "best military in the world with the best equipment and the best training." According to Joe, "we are defeating enemies and rebuilding the country. We are and will continue to win this fight!"As mentioned earlier, this is Joe's 2nd deployment to Iraq. This time is better than the last because he is on a larger Forward Operating Base (F.O.B.) which means they have internet, cable TV, air conditioning and showers - none of which he had before. He was also able to rest on a 4-day trip to Qatar and he came home for a two week visit. Receiving care packages always brings a smile to his face, especially when he received one from the Preston and Steve Show, a local radio show in Philadephia!After coming home for two weeks, Joe is back in Baghdad where he will continue to put his heart into winning this war. He and his team will strive to complete their tasks and increase the trust of the people in Ameriya. He expects to come home for good in 2008 where he will resume serving as a firefighter for Oakmont Fire Company in Havertown, PA. He looks very forward to spending time with his family and friends!Table of Contents

Leak Severs Link to Al-Qaeda’s Secrets Firm says Bush administration’s handling of video ruined its spying effortsBy Joby Warrick, Washington Post Oct 8, 2007A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release.Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company's Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group's communications network."Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless," said Rita Katz, the firm's 44-year-old founder, who has garnered wide attention by publicizing statements and videos from extremist chat rooms and Web sites, while attracting controversy over the secrecy of SITE's methodology. Her firm provides intelligence about terrorist groups to a wide range of paying clients, including private firms and military and intelligence agencies from the United States and several other countries.The precise source of the leak remains unknown. Government officials declined to be interviewed about the circumstances on the record, but they did not challenge Katz's version of events. They also said the incident had no effect on U.S. intelligence-gathering efforts and did not diminish the government's ability to anticipate attacks.While acknowledging that SITE had achieved success, the officials said U.S. agencies have their own sophisticated means of watching al-Qaeda on the Web. "We have individuals in the right places

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dealing with all these issues, across all 16 intelligence agencies," said Ross Feinstein, spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.‘Tremendously helpful’But privately, some intelligence officials called the incident regrettable, and one official said SITE had been "tremendously helpful" in ferreting out al-Qaeda secrets over time.The al-Qaeda video aired on Sept. 7 attracted international attention as the first new video message from the group's leader in three years. In it, a dark-bearded bin Laden urges Americans to convert to Islam and predicts failure for the Bush administration in Iraq and Afghanistan. The video was aired on hundreds of Western news Web sites nearly a full day before its release by a distribution company linked to al-Qaeda.Computer logs and records reviewed by The Washington Post support SITE's claim that it snatched the video from al-Qaeda days beforehand. Katz requested that the precise date and details of the acquisition not be made public, saying such disclosures could reveal sensitive details about the company's methods.SITE -- an acronym for the Search for International Terrorist Entities -- was established in 2002 with the stated goal of tracking and exposing terrorist groups, according to the company's Web site. Katz, an Iraqi-born Israeli citizen whose father was executed by Saddam Hussein in the 1960s, has made the investigation of terrorist groups a passionate quest."We were able to establish sources that provided us with unique and important information into al-Qaeda's hidden world," Katz said. Her company's income is drawn from subscriber fees and contracts.Katz said she decided to offer an advance copy of the bin Laden video to the White House without charge so officials there could prepare for its eventual release.She spoke first with White House counsel Fred F. Fielding, whom she had previously met, and then with Joel Bagnal, deputy assistant to the president for homeland security. Both expressed interest in obtaining a copy, and Bagnal suggested that she send a copy to Michael Leiter, who holds the No. 2 job at the National Counterterrorism Center.Administration and intelligence officials would not comment on whether they had obtained the video separately. Katz said Fielding and Bagnal made it clear to her that the White House did not possess a copy at the time she offered hers.Around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, Katz sent both Leiter and Fielding an e-mail with a link to a private SITE Web page containing the video and an English transcript. "Please understand the necessity for secrecy," Katz wrote in her e-mail. "We ask you not to distribute . . . [as] it could harm our investigations."Fielding replied with an e-mail expressing gratitude to Katz. "It is you who deserves the thanks," he wrote, according to a copy of the message. There was no record of a response from Leiter or the national intelligence director's office.Exactly what happened next is unclear. But within minutes of Katz's e-mail to the White House, government-registered computers began downloading the video from SITE's server, according to a log of file transfers. The records show dozens of downloads over the next three hours from computers with addresses registered to defense and intelligence agencies.Page markers an indicatorBy midafternoon, several television news networks reported obtaining copies of the transcript. A copy posted around 3 p.m. on Fox News's Web site referred to SITE and included page markers identical to those used by the group. "This confirms that the U.S. government was responsible for the leak of this document," Katz wrote in an e-mail to Leiter at 5 p.m.Al-Qaeda supporters, now alerted to the intrusion into their secret network, put up new obstacles that prevented SITE from gaining the kind of access it had obtained in the past, according to Katz.A small number of private intelligence companies compete with SITE in scouring terrorists' networks for information and messages, and some have questioned the company's motives and methods, including the claim that its access to al-Qaeda's network was unique. One competitor, Ben Venzke,

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founder of IntelCenter, said he questions SITE's decision -- as described by Katz -- to offer the video to White House policymakers rather than quietly share it with intelligence analysts."It is not just about getting the video first," Venzke said. "It is about having the proper methods and procedures in place to make sure that the appropriate intelligence gets to where it needs to go in the intelligence community and elsewhere in order to support ongoing counterterrorism operations."Table of Contents

Qaeda Goes Dark after a U.S. SlipEnemy Vanishes From Its Web Sites By Eli Lake, New York Sun, October 9, 2007WASHINGTON — Al Qaeda's Internet communications system has suddenly gone dark to American intelligence after the leak of Osama bin Laden's September 11 speech inadvertently disclosed the fact that we had penetrated the enemy's system.The intelligence blunder started with what appeared at the time as an American intelligence victory, namely that the federal government had intercepted, a full four days before it was to be aired, a video of Osama bin Laden's first appearance in three years in a video address marking the sixth anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001. On the morning of September 7, the Web site of ABC News posted excerpts from the speech.But the disclosure from ABC and later other news organizations tipped off Qaeda's internal security division that the organization's Internet communications system, known among American intelligence analysts as Obelisk, was compromised. This network of Web sites serves not only as the distribution system for the videos produced by Al Qaeda's production company, As-Sahab, but also as the equivalent of a corporate intranet, dealing with such mundane matters as expense reporting and clerical memos to mid- and lower-level Qaeda operatives throughout the world.While intranets are usually based on servers in a discrete physical location, Obelisk is a series of sites all over the Web, often with fake names, in some cases sites that are not even known by their proprietors to have been hacked by Al Qaeda.One intelligence officer who requested anonymity said in an interview last week that the intelligence community watched in real time the shutdown of the Obelisk system. America's Obelisk watchers even saw the order to shut down the system delivered from Qaeda's internal security to a team of technical workers in Malaysia. That was the last internal message America's intelligence community saw. "We saw the whole thing shut down because of this leak," the official said. "We lost an important keyhole into the enemy."By Friday evening, one of the key sets of sites in the Obelisk network, the Ekhlaas forum, was back on line. The Ekhlaas forum is a password-protected message board used by Qaeda for recruitment, propaganda dissemination, and as one of the entrance ways into Obelisk for those operatives whose user names are granted permission. Many of the other Obelisk sites are now offline and presumably moved to new secret locations on the World Wide Web.The founder of a Web site known as clandestineradio.com, Nick Grace, tracked the shutdown of Qaeda's Obelisk system in real time. "It was both unprecedented and chilling from the perspective of a Web techie. The discipline and coordination to take the entire system down involving multiple Web servers, hundreds of user names and passwords, is an astounding feat, especially that it was done within minutes," Mr. Grace said yesterday.The head of the SITE Intelligence Group, an organization that monitors Jihadi Web sites and provides information to subscribers, Rita Katz, said she personally provided the video on September 7 to the deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Michael Leiter.Ms. Katz yesterday said, "We shared a copy of the transcript and the video with the U.S. government, to Michael Leiter, with the request specifically that it was important to keep the subject secret. Then the video was leaked out. An investigation into who downloaded the video from our server indicated that several computers with IP addresses were registered to government agencies."

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Yesterday a spokesman for the National Counterterrorism Center, Carl Kropf, denied the accusation that it was responsible for the leak. "That's just absolutely wrong. The allegation and the accusation that we did that is unfounded," he said. The spokesman for the director of national intelligence, Ross Feinstein, yesterday also denied the leak allegation. "The intelligence community and the ODNI senior leadership did not leak this video to the media," he said.Ms. Katz said, "The government leak damaged our investigation into Al Qaeda's network. Techniques and sources that took years to develop became ineffective. As a result of the leak Al Qaeda changed their methods." Ms. Katz said she also lost potential revenue.A former counterterrorism official, Roger Cressey, said, "If any of this was leaked for any reasons, especially political, that is just unconscionable." Mr. Cressey added that the work that was lost by burrowing into Qaeda's Internet system was far more valuable than any benefit that was gained by short-circuiting Osama bin Laden's video to the public.While Al Qaeda still uses human couriers to move its most important messages between senior leaders and what is known as a Hawala network of lenders throughout the world to move interest-free money, more and more of the organization's communication happens in cyber space."While the traditional courier based networks can offer security and anonymity, the same can be had on the Internet. It is clear in recent years if you look at their information operations and explosion of Al Qaeda related Web sites and Web activities, the Internet has taken a primary role in their communications both externally and internally," Mr. Grace said.Table of Contents

Propaganda: Can a Word Decide a War? By Dennis M. Murphy and James F. White, Parameters, Autumn 2007, pp. 15-27Two years ago, the Lincoln Group, a government contractor, sold unattributed pro-United States stories to Iraqi newspapers in an effort to win the war of ideas and counter negative images of the US-led coalition. The mainstream American press, members of Congress, and other government leaders immediately and loudly condemned these actions as “propaganda” and contrary to the democratic ideals of a free press.1 A Pentagon investigation, however, found that no laws were broken or policies violated. Nor was the term propaganda ever used by the Lincoln Group or US military in its efforts to apply the information element of power in a war in which the center of gravity (in Clausewitzian terms) is defined as “extremist ideology.”2 Which begs the question: How do you fight a battle of ideas with one hand tied behind your back? The ways and means of winning that battle are both informed and ultimately restricted by an innate US culture that struggles with democratic ideals seemingly at odds with the use of information to win over hearts and minds even while the enemy maintains no such inhibitions. Propaganda is “any form of communication in support of national objectives designed to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, or behavior of any group in order to benefit the sponsor, either directly or indirectly.”3 Certainly propaganda has been used from time immemorial as a tool in warfare. But it is only since the US experience of World War I that this rather innocuously defined term has become pejorative in the national psyche. A review of recent history is necessary to examine the challenges of today and open a window to understanding the dilemma of balancing principles of a free, democratic society with the need to counter lies and half-truths in an effort to establish trust and credibility. A look through this historical lens allows focus on the requirement for strong national leadership capable of driving the procedural and cultural changes necessary to ultimately win the generational ideological struggle the United States currently faces. Propaganda and the Two World Wars: Shaping American Attitudes The US experience employing information as an element of power during both World Wars still colors the way Americans view the federal government’s foreign and domestic information programs. America’s collective experience with what may be called government propaganda—a term that the US government eschewed from the start—has been mixed. This reflects the tensions between the branches of government, and also the resistance of the national media to any restraints on their operations. Congress, from the beginning, developed a wariness of organizations that publicized the personality and role of the President to overseas audiences. Media became

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skeptical of “canned” government information releases that reflected the administration’s perspective and were provided as news. When the United States finally entered the World War in April 1917 it had already been the target of propaganda efforts for two and a half years. The British influence operation based at Wellington House in London used several means, including the Reuters news agency, to reach target audiences worldwide. Sir Gilbert Parker, who had wide familiarity with America, directed the work targeted at the United States. His technique was aptly characterized by James Squires as being a “gentle courtship” versus a “violent wooing.”4 It was subtle, understated, and highly effective. Specific British disinformation programs were also aimed directly at Germany. These included efforts to incite anti-American feelings there through false “news” items such as reports of the seizure of German seamen, shipping, and other property before the United States entered the war.5 Despite each side’s efforts to sell its cause, the United States remained officially neutral while carrying on substantial trade, including armaments, with Britain. President Woodrow Wilson narrowly won reelection in November 1916, capturing just half of the more than 18 million votes cast, with a campaign proclaiming, “He kept us out of war.” Beginning 1 February 1917 Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare. US ships were sunk with loss of life; the Germans had wagered that they could defeat Britain and France before the United States could effectively mobilize. Wilson still resisted war, but on 1 March the Zimmermann Telegram, offering German support to Mexico in exchange for parts of the American Southwest, became public. Wilson asked for and received a declaration of war on 6 April 1917. US Propaganda and World War I The Secretaries of State, War, and the Navy immediately sent the President an insightful memo which recommended the creation of the Committee on Public Information (CPI). They understood the magnitude of the task required to mobilize disparate elements of the population behind the war effort and the critical role information played in achieving it: America’s great present needs are confidence, enthusiasm, and service, and these needs will not be met completely unless every citizen is given the feeling of partnership that comes with full, frank statements concerning the conduct of the public business.6 A later report (April 1918) by the Army General Staff, “The Psychologic [sic] Factor: Its Present Application” is an early twentieth century paraphrasing of the instruments of national power (diplomatic, information, military, economic) and a recognition of the importance of the information element, noting that the “strategic equation” of war has four factors, all coequal: combat, economic, political, and psychological.7 George Creel, a pro-Wilson newspaperman, headed CPI, which became popularly known as the Creel Committee. The organization as a whole continued to evolve throughout the war in an effort to meet specific needs. Wilson had great confidence in his own ability to go directly to the American public and later the people of the world through his pronouncements, and he used CPI’s apparatus to assist him in doing this. From the start the CPI had Wilson’s full confidence and attention. It was also unified: both domestic and overseas propaganda fell within CPI’s domain. Creel disassociated CPI’s work with a term that was just starting to come into common use: We did not call it “propaganda,” for that word in German hands had come to be associated with lies and corruptions. Our work was educational and informative only, for we had such confidence in our case as to feel that only fair presentation of its facts was needed.8 James Mock and Cedric Larson noted in their 1939 history of CPI’s activities, Words That Won the War, that Americans came to associate propaganda as a term with the work of German agents and saboteurs in the United States.9 CPI’s organization evolved quickly. Its activities included development and distribution of various print materials, primarily in the form of pamphlets and press releases. It commissioned movies specifically for the war effort, producing such silent films as “Pershing’s Crusaders.” Later films took on a sharper anti-German edge, including such titles as “The Prussian Cur.” Movie houses also provided one of the venues for a new corps of public speakers. These so-called “four-minute men”

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eventually numbered more than 75,000 individuals who spoke on themes developed by CPI covering the range of preparedness activities. In 1918, as the war continued, the four-minute men were encouraged to include stories of enemy atrocities. CPI also facilitated development of education packages for schools and universities addressing the war’s aims and the nature of the enemy. The packages later came to be criticized for their one-sidedness and simplicity. Overseas, Creel dispatched representatives to cities such as Berne, the Hague, Madrid, Copenhagen, Mexico City, and Buenos Aires, where they could reach various neutral populations. Operatives also reached the German and Austrian publics from bases in neutral neighboring nations via German-language newspapers and travelers. The CPI representatives issued news releases, pamphlets, and posters, and distributed American movies with news or allied advertising attached. Although CPI rules prohibited payment of bribes or subsidies to foreign news organizations its operatives did so in Spain and elsewhere.10 CPI could move information very quickly to target audiences worldwide when needed. When Wilson gave his “Fourteen Points” speech in January 1918, CPI representatives in Saint Petersburg and Moscow received the text by way of transatlantic radio and telegraph, and were able to pass it to the Russian man on the street via posters and handbills just four days later. CPI eventually became an instrument with which Wilson could bypass the political leadership of both enemy and friendly countries and talk directly to the populace. By the end of the war and the start of peace negotiations, CPI made Woodrow Wilson and his ideas famous worldwide; a fact that did not please his opponents in Congress.11 CPI’s domestic efforts during the war met with a high-degree of success: draft registration—the first since the tumultuous call-up of the Civil War—occurred peacefully, bond drives were over-subscribed, and the American population was, generally, supportive of the war effort. CPI operations in foreign capitals enabled Wilson to relate his war ideals and aims to a world audience. Indeed, Wilson was taken aback by this effective dissemination of his peace aims and the world’s reaction. He remarked to George Creel in December 1918, “I am wondering whether you have not unconsciously spun a net for me from which there is no escape.”12 The Interwar Years: Propaganda Introspective The post-war appraisal of CPI was darker. George Creel compiled his official report on the committee’s activities in June 1919, and soon after authored a public account, How We Advertised America. But at home and overseas, the reality of the peace lagged behind Wilsonian aspirations. The Allies forged a treaty that many Americans and others believed unfair and incomplete. Americans also started to reflect on an ugly side to the war enthusiasm in the United States. Germans and their culture had been vilified. Sauerkraut had become liberty cabbage, hamburger was Salisbury steak, but more seriously, teaching the German language and subject matter in schools became viewed as disloyal, and authorities banned it in some states. There were incidents of physical attacks and even lynchings of suspected German sympathizers and war dissenters. The Attorney General enlisted volunteer “loyalty enforcers” who carried official-looking badges and were encouraged to report those of their neighbors who spoke out against the war.13 Brett Gary, in his book The Nervous Liberals, recounts the range of reaction to American propaganda and also the wartime restraints on free speech and political dissent. Felix Frankfurter, future appointee to the Supreme Court, co-authored the critical “Report Upon Illegal Practices of the U.S. Justice Department” in 1920. It charged (among other things) that the Creel Committee helped create what the report termed a “vigilante atmosphere” that was part of an environment in which civil liberties and the democratic process were undermined.14 Propaganda as an instrument had become respected, or feared, as a highly effective force giving “the power to capture men’s hearts and to bypass their rational processes.”15 Newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann, an early advocate of America’s entry into the war, examined democratic processes and institutions in a new light. He had become concerned with the way that public opinion could be manipulated. His 1920 book Liberty and the News examined the role of public consent in the development of government policy. Earlier theories held freedom of the press was integral to functioning democracy, but Lippmann saw that a free press by itself would not serve this purpose if it could be manipulated through prejudice or by outside organizations.

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In 1922 he took his examination farther in the book Public Opinion, questioning the premise of an informed and rational citizenry, even if balanced, reliable information was available. Lippmann believed that the average person has neither the time nor the ability to make informed opinions about the questions of public policy. He or she must rely instead on specialists who are freed by their education and training from prejudices and stereotypes. John Dewey, the American philosopher and educator, later termed Public Opinion “the most effective indictment of democracy as currently conceived ever penned.”16 Across the Atlantic, 35-year-old Austrian war veteran Adolf Hitler produced another perspective. He published the first volume of Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”) in 1925 outlining his belief that Germany had been defeated from within by invidious Allied propaganda, as well as subversive elements within the German society—particularly German Jews. Chapter 6, titled “War Propaganda,” specifically and concisely addressed what Hitler called the real lessons in the field. These, he felt, were to be learned from British and American examples during the war. The short chapter presents a cynical, amoral primer on publicity techniques in the service of a dark objective: The very first axiom of all propagandist activity: to wit, the basically subjective one sided attitude it must take toward every question it deals with . . . . What, for example, would we say about a poster that was supposed to advertise a new soap and that described other soaps as “good”? . . . The whole art [of propaganda] consists in doing this so skillfully that everyone will be convinced that the fact is real, the process necessary, the necessity correct, etc. . . . . The masses are slow moving, and they always require a certain time before they are ready to even notice a thing, and only after the simplest ideas are repeated thousands of times will the masses finally remember them. . . For instance a slogan must be presented from different angles, but the end of all remarks must always and immutably be the slogan itself. Only in this way can propaganda have a unified and complete effect.17 Hitler later created the “Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda,” appointing Dr. Joseph Goebbels as minister. World War II: Propaganda and Misinformation When the United States entered WWII its public information efforts were very much shaped by the experiences of some 20 years earlier. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had witnessed the Creel operation at close range from his position as Under Secretary of the Navy and did not want a similar centralized organization. American opinion leaders were also increasingly concerned by what they saw as an organized, sophisticated, and highly successful German propaganda effort in the early 1930s, increasingly aimed at North and South America. Some were concerned about the susceptibility of large segments of the population to foreign propaganda and misinformation, others about the effect of comprehensive US government influence organizations on American society and its political balance. These included members of the media who did not care for the Creel style of a centralized clearinghouse and censorship for stories concerning the World War. There was also continued congressional suspicion of any effort that could be viewed as serving to publicize the administration. Still, as the menace of Nazi Germany increased, people such as Archibald MacLeish, the Librarian of Congress, and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Robert Sherwood (who read Mein Kampf and understood Hitler’s aims) called for an American information response. Roosevelt proceeded cautiously. William J. Donovan, Wall Street attorney and WWI Medal of Honor recipient, became the chief of the Office of Coordinator of Information in mid-1941 which soon included a Foreign Information Service under Sherwood. Donovan was impressed with the effectiveness of Goebbels’ propaganda efforts in Germany and believed that propaganda should include deceit in order to fight Nazi methods. Sherwood believed that American propaganda must be truthful in order to not compromise credibility and national ideals. He would, however, later admit that his product often selectively concentrated on one part of the truth. In early 1942 Milton Eisenhower (younger brother of Dwight D.) surveyed wartime information needs for the Bureau of the Budget. Eisenhower was also cautious of the Creel Committee experience, but recommended the creation of an Office of War Information (OWI), that would address both domestic and foreign information requirements. President Roosevelt accepted the

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recommendation and selected popular and respected radio news broadcaster Elmer Davis to head up the new organization which would include the Overseas Branch and a Domestic Branch.18 There were several significant differences between the OWI and its CPI predecessor. Some of these were by design but others reflected the style of the President. FDR was highly adept at communicating to the public, doing so directly via radio in his addresses and “fireside chats.” In 1941 60 million radio receivers encompassed 90 percent of the American population.19 Roosevelt was, however, not entirely comfortable with a formal propaganda apparatus and Davis, unlike Creel, did not have direct access to the President. Unlike Wilson, Roosevelt provided little political cover for OWI in its skirmishes with the Congress, and often preferred to be ambiguous regarding policy guidance. Operating in the absence of such policy guidance the OWI staff, particularly in the Foreign Branch, sometimes got ahead of stated government pronouncements, or it responded with what its members thought American policy should be. For example, with regard to Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s initial departure from Italy in 1943, the OWI broadcast statements that King Victor Emmanuel and his premier remained essentially fascist, directly contradicting British and American intentions. A domestic product published by OWI, “Battle Stations for All,” sought to explain the rationale for several wartime rationing and control measures. Congressional critics voiced loud objections because some of the controls it outlined had not yet been approved. The Foreign Branch inaugurated publication of an attractive magazine, Victory, aimed at overseas audiences. Its first issue featured an article titled “Roosevelt of America, President - Champion of Liberty,” with a prominent picture of FDR over an American flag background. This incensed congressmen who viewed OWI as a Roosevelt publicity organ. Leaders such as Senator Harry Byrd vowed to investigate US propaganda efforts and Congress, in a precursor to later restrictions, prohibited dissemination within the United States of products intended for foreign audiences. Some OWI techniques came under very pointed criticism. The use of pseudonyms by OWI authors in their articles was denounced by prominent newspapermen, such as Arthur Krock of the New York Times. The New York World Telegram said that such an incident “smells of dishonesty.”20 President Harry S. Truman disbanded OWI in 1945. Congress passed the Smith-Mundt Act in 1948, recognizing the importance of marshalling US cultural and information outreach efforts in support of national engagement in what was coming to be called the Cold War. But it carefully stipulated that such programs, fashioned for foreign audiences, could not be disseminated at home. Propaganda Today: Fighting Back While Fighting the Past American attitudes and concerns about propaganda today sound eerily familiar to the criticism voiced during the first half of the twentieth century. That historical context and the way it shaped opinion may likely be the reason that information as an element of power remained mostly absent from recent official government strategy documents until the May 2007 publication of a National Strategy for Public Diplomacy and Strategic Communication, well over five years after 9/11.21 Even that important and well-intended document does not directly address information as power but rather considers the ways in which the United States should wield it.22 In fact, one needs to go back to the Reagan Administration to find the most succinct and pointed mention of information as power in formal government documents.23 National security documents since that time allude to different aspects of information but lack a specific definition.24 Given this dearth of official documentation, Drs. Dan Kuehl and Bob Neilson proposed the following definition of the information element: Use of information content and technology as strategic instruments to shape fundamental political, economic, military, and cultural forces on a long-term basis to affect the global behavior of governments, supra-governmental organizations, and societies to support national security.25 This is not to imply that the US government doesn’t recognize the value and importance of information to wield power, but it appears the term “propaganda” keeps getting in the way.26 The Lincoln Group experience described earlier is but one example. “After disclosure of the secret effort to plant articles, angry members of Congress summoned Pentagon officials to a closed-door session to explain the program, saying it was not in keeping with democratic principles, and even White

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House officials voiced deep concern. . . . The question for the Pentagon is its proper role in shaping perceptions abroad.”27 But even prior to this the Department of Defense showed both its need to use information as power and its squeamishness toward accusations of propaganda use. The Pentagon established the Office of Strategic Influence (OSI) within weeks of 9/11. Its stated purpose was simple: to flood targeted areas with information. It didn’t take long for the mainstream media to discover the office and posit that “disinformation” was being planted abroad and would leak back to the American public. These claims of propaganda were all it took to doom OSI which was shut down soon after, even though subsequent investigations proved that information it provided was, in all cases, truthful.28 This conundrum, where the United States must fight using propaganda but faces internal criticism and backlash whenever it does, allows for an information environment that favors an adversary bent on exploitation with his own strategic propaganda. The historical use of information as power was primarily limited to nation-states. Today a blogger can impact an election, an Internet posting can recruit a terrorist, and an audiotape can incite fear in the strongest of nation-states, all with little capital investment and certainly without the baggage of bureaucratic rules, national values (truthful messaging), or oversight. Propaganda is the weapon of the insurgent franchised cell. It costs little, is easy to distribute, and has near-immediate worldwide impact. The improvised explosive devices that have killed and maimed so many US troops in Iraq are propaganda weapons. They are manned by two insurgents: the detonator and the videographer. Their impact is not the tactical kinetic victory but the strategic propaganda victory. In a broader sense, terrorist organizations have learned the lessons of propaganda well. Hezbollah integrated an aggressive strategic propaganda effort into all phases of the summer 2006 conflict with Israel. “Made in the USA” signs sprung up on Lebanese rubble immediately after the war, courtesy of an advertising firm hired by the insurgents. No doubt who the intended audience was since the banners were in English only.29 Getting Past the Propaganda Barrier So the question remains how the United States can succeed in wielding information as power and overcome American societal attitudes colored by our own history and that of some of our most hated enemies. How do you work within a bureaucracy that is cumbersome and slow, when nimbleness of responsiveness is essential to counter propaganda? The answer lies in both procedural and cultural change and the leadership necessary to force that change. Procedurally, the United States must approach strategic communication as an integral part of policy development.30 To do otherwise will doom the United States to remain on the defensive in the war of ideas, something that has not worked well to date. The resulting communication plans will still be viewed as propaganda by the definition provided at the beginning of this article, but having such a plan in the development process permits strategists to anticipate potentially negative foreign reaction and possesses the proactive ability to explain the policy to all audiences. On the other hand, poor policy will not be salvaged by any message or theme that attempts to explain it. As former Pentagon spokesperson Torie Clarke said, “You can put a lot of lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.”31 Failure to quickly and accurately react to propaganda cedes the international information environment to the enemy. “Quickly” is often measured in minutes, not hours, days, or weeks. The reality of instant communications means that individuals on the ground at the lowest tactical level should be empowered to respond to propaganda to the best of their ability. This requires a cultural change on the part of both individual “messengers” and their leaders. Training and education can provide the baseline competencies to equip Americans (soldiers, diplomats, or others) to appropriately respond to propaganda. But the driving force in affording the freedom to do so will come from senior leaders willing to delegate the authority necessary. This comes with an understanding that “information fratricide” may occur and with an expectation that to react otherwise takes the United States out of the information fight. A culture of information empowerment down to the lowest levels needs to be inculcated among senior government officials, permitting for clear guidance provided to subordinates, risk mitigation procedures established, and, perhaps most importantly, acceptance that this will not be a zero-defect undertaking.

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Winning hearts, minds, trust, and credibility, in the end, requires a local approach. Consider a major US metropolitan area. Neighborhoods take on their own personalities, driven by socio-economic factors and ethnic and racial identity, among other considerations. Value sets are different among the diversity of communities that make up the melting pot that is a large American city. It should not be difficult then to understand how it is nearly impossible to influence perceptions among audiences in a foreign country with a “one size fits all” set of messages and actions. Long-term US presence and engagement in foreign nations allows for a deeper understanding of cultural differences. These cultural underpinnings combined with the hard work of relationship building allow for effective tailoring of messages and the successful identification of key influencers. Engagement is the key whether it is by US soldiers in their area of operations, diplomats on Provincial Reconstruction Teams, US Agency for International Development workers, or nongovernmental organizations.32 Where no US presence exists, efforts must include recruiting key individuals for US exchange programs, people who will tell this nation’s story upon their return home. The National Strategy for Public Diplomacy and Strategic Communication discusses the “diplomacy of deeds.” The US hospital ship Mercy completed a five-month humanitarian mission to South and Southeast Asia late last year resulting in improved public opinion of the United States in those predominately Muslim nations. Similar increases in favorability ratings occurred following the US response to the Indonesian tsunami and Pakistani earthquake.33 These low-cost, high-visibility efforts pay significant dividends in improving the image of the United States abroad. Leaders need to understand that strategic communication is more than programs, themes, and messages; it is actions as well. But this analysis doesn’t answer the dilemma of the need for the United States to fight and win in the information environment and its inherent aversion to the “propaganda” such a fight entails. The answer lies in both the process and culture supported by a nation’s leadership. A US governmental organization selling articles (under Iraqi pseudonyms) directly to Iraqi newspapers, regardless of the legality, is asking for trouble in today’s information environment. Supporting the government of Iraq in an effort to tell its own story is a much better strategy. Leading from the rear in the information war still gets the message told while avoiding any direct confrontation with democratic ideals. On the other hand, the Office of Strategic Influence had the potential to provide focus, resources, and potentially significant results in the information war, but a few misguided articles in the mainstream press was all it took to bring about its quick demise. And so, ultimately, countering American angst over the effective use of propaganda will require strong stewardship. National leaders need to admit that the United States actually does want to (truthfully) influence foreign audiences. To do anything less abrogates the information battlespace to America’s adversaries. Attempts to influence foreign audiences, however, will almost certainly produce some bleedover to American audiences. That needs to be accepted and, with knowledge of forethought, preparations can be made to proactively educate the media with regard to these information efforts and any potential backlash. The recent initiatives to incorporate strategic communication into the policy development process are encouraging in this regard. Conclusion The National Strategy for Public Diplomacy and Strategic Communication is a positive step in permitting the United States to compete against propaganda and proactively tell its story. Defeating an enemy whose center of gravity is extremist ideology requires nothing less than an all-out effort in this regard. But changing perceptions, attitudes, and ultimately beliefs is a generational endeavor. It remains to be seen whether processes can be instituted that endure beyond political cycles or if the nation’s leadership is capable of changing the current culture of reticence related to the application of information as power. Only then can the information battlefield be leveled and the battle of ideas won.NOTES 1. Lynne Duke, “The Word at War; Propaganda? Nah, Here’s the Scoop, Say the Guys Who Planted Stories in Iraqi Papers,” The Washington Post, 26 March 2006, D1. 2. National Strategy for Combating Terrorism (Washington: The White House, September 2006), 7.

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3. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, Joint Publication 1-02 (Washington: Department of Defense, 22 March 2007), 430. While there are numerous definitions found in any number of publications, this one is chosen because it reflects the accepted US government definition. 4. James Duane Squires, British Propaganda at Home and in the United States: From 1914 to 1917 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1935), 49. 5. American newspaperman H. L. Mencken, in Berlin for the Baltimore Sunpapers prior to April 1917, observed the effect on the German population of false reports by the British news bureau Reuters of American mobilization and vessel and property seizures in the United States. 6. James R. Mock and Cedric Larson, Words That Won the War: The Story of the Committee on Public Information, 1917-1919 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1939), 50. 7. Ibid., 238. 8. George Creel, How We Advertised America (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1920), 5. 9. Mock and Larson, 236. After the war it was determined that the massive explosion at “Black Tom Pier” in Jersey City was the work of German-financed saboteurs. The incident on Sunday, 30 July 1916, destroyed munitions bound for Great Britain, rattled the Statue of Liberty’s structural support, and caused massive property damage as far away as Times Square, but fortunately little loss of life. See the following Internet sites: http://www.state.nj.us/dep/parksandforests/parks/liberty_state_park/liberty_blacktomexplosion.html, and http://www.njcu.edu/programs/jchistory/Pages/B_Pages/Black_Tom_Explosion.htm. 10. Mock and Larson, 238. 11. Ibid., 235. 12. Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2002), 15. 13. David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980), 81. 14. Brett Gary, The Nervous Liberals: Propaganda Anxieties from World War I to the Cold War (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1999), 22. Gary discusses the post-WWI reexamination of Allied propaganda, to include the print debate between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey. 15. Allan Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War Information, 1942-1945 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1978), 4. 16. Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston, Mass.: Little Brown, 1980), 183. 17. Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1943), 176-86. 18. Winkler, 29. Donovan argued unsuccessfully against losing the Foreign Information Service. His intelligence and espionage organization became the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency. 19. Ibid., 60. 20. Ibid., 97. 21. US Department of State, Strategic Communication and Public Diplomacy Policy Coordinating Committee, U.S. National Strategy for Public Diplomacy and Strategic Communication, http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/87427.pdf. 22. While the National Strategy for Public Diplomacy and Strategic Communication describes the “ways” and “means” of using information as power, it does not define the information element of power as a foundational starting point for those descriptions. 23. National Security Decision Directive 130, “US International Information Policy” (Washington: The White House, 6 March 1984), http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsdd/nsdd-130.htm. 24. The National Strategy for Combating Terrorism refers frequently to the “battle of ideas” but again without a foundational description of how the United States wields information as power. 25. Robert E. Neilson and Daniel T. Kuehl, “Evolutionary Change in Revolutionary Times: A Case for a New National Security Education Program,” National Security Strategy Quarterly, 5 (Autumn 1999), 40. 26. Interestingly, the US government avoids using the term “propaganda” in any of its official publications (short of the DOD definition). Instead, the terms “psychological operations,” “information operations,” “public diplomacy,” and “strategic communication” are found, apparently as an ironic twist to change American perceptions favorably toward the use of information to influence foreign audiences. 27. Thom Shanker, “No Breach Seen in Work in Iraq on Propaganda,” The New York Times, 22 March 2006, 1. 28. David E. Kaplan, “How Rocket Scientists Got Into the Hearts-and-Minds Game,” U.S. News and World Report, 25 April 2005, 30-31. 29. Kevin Peraino, “Winning Hearts and Minds,” Newsweek International, 2 October 2006. 30. The Department of Defense produced a roadmap as an outcome of the Quadrennial Defense Review in September 2006 that defines strategic communication as “focused USG processes and efforts to understand and engage key audiences in order to create, strengthen, or preserve conditions favorable to advance national interests and objectives through the use of coordinated information, themes, plans, programs and actions synchronized with other elements of national power.” See Doctrine for the Armed Forces of the United States, Joint Publication 1, 14 May 2007, Chp. 1, I-9. 31. Torie Clarke, Lipstick on a Pig: Winning in the No-Spin Era by Someone Who Knows the Game (New York: Free Press, 2006), 1. Ms. Clarke was the chief spokesperson for the Pentagon during the first George W. Bush administration. The quote is the title of the first chapter of her book.

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32. An excellent overview of the effectiveness of a local military approach can be found in an article written by Colonel Ralph Baker, on his application of information operations as a brigade commander in Baghdad. See “The Decisive Weapon: A Brigade Combat Team Commander’s Perspective on Information Operations,” Military Review, 86 (May-June 2006), 13-32. 33. Anju S. Bawa, “U.S. Aid Ship Cures Public Opinion,” Washington Times, 17 November 2006, A15.Colonel Dennis M. Murphy (USA Ret.) is Professor of Information in Warfare at the US Army War College, Center for Strategic Leadership. He is a 1976 graduate of the US Military Academy and holds a master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Pennsylvania State University. Professor Murphy has lectured and published widely on the topic of information in warfare. His most recent articles have appeared in Military Review and the NECWORKS Journal. Lieutenant Colonel James F. White (USA Ret.) is a former curriculum development analyst with the Center for Strategic Leadership’s Information in Warfare Group at the US Army War College. He holds degrees from Fordham University, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, and Pennsylvania State University, as well as a Masters in Military Arts and Sciences from the US Army Command and General Staff College.Table of Contents

Strategic Communication By Richard Halloran, Parameters, Autumn 2007, pp. 4-14. The late Colonel Harry Summers liked to tell a tale familiar to many who served in Vietnam. In April 1975, after the war was over, the colonel was in a delegation dispatched to Hanoi. In the airport, he got into a conversation with a North Vietnamese colonel named Tu who spoke some English and, as soldiers do, they began to talk shop. After a while, Colonel Summers said: “You know, you never defeated us on the battlefield.” Colonel Tu thought about that for a minute, then replied: “That may be so. But it is also irrelevant.”1 If that conversation were to be held in today’s vocabulary, it would go something like this. Colonel Summers: “You know, you never defeated us in a kinetic engagement on the battlefield.” Colonel Tu: “That may be so. It is also irrelevant because we won the battle of strategic communication—and therefore the war.” On a contemporary note, a US officer returning from Iraq said privately: “We plan kinetic campaigns and maybe consider adding a public affairs annex. Our adversaries plan information campaigns that exploit kinetic events, especially spectacular attacks and martyrdom operations. We aren’t even on the playing field, but al Qaeda seeks to dominate it because they know their war will be won by ideas.” For five years, Americans have been struggling to comprehend strategic communication as they have seen the standing of the nation plummet around the world and political support at home evaporate for the war in Iraq. They have lamented the seeming failure of their government to persuade the Islamic world of America’s good intentions while Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda operate in the best fashion of Madison Avenue. A perceptive Singaporean diplomat and scholar, Kishore Mahbubani, was asked two years ago what puzzled him about America’s competition with Osama bin Laden. Mahbubani replied: “How has one man in a cave managed to out-communicate the world’s greatest communication society?”2 Communication Campaigns The White House, Defense Department, State Department, Central Intelligence Agency, and other agencies in Washington have floundered in trying to organize a strategic communication campaign. The White House formed the Office of Global Communications in 2003, but it never really took hold and soon faded into the background as a minor office within the national security staff. President George W. Bush appointed a close adviser, Karen P. Hughes, to be Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs in 2005 but she has proven to be less than effective. Among the latest efforts is the Counterterrorism Communication Center (CTCC), set up in April 2007. In a memo, the CTCC says it “is an interagency office, housed within the State Department’s Bureau of International Information Programs. The center was set up to provide leadership and coordination for interagency efforts in the war of ideas, and to integrate and enhance the US government’s diverse public diplomacy counterterrorism efforts.”3 Moreover, the nation’s political and military leaders have yet to agree on what they mean by strategic communication. If five government people were put in a room and told to come up with a definition, eight different answers would come out. The definitions that have been drawn up are mostly bureaucratic gibberish. One, for example, reads: “Focused United States government efforts

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to understand and engage key audiences to create, strengthen, or preserve conditions favorable for the advancement of United States government interests, policies, and objectives through the use of coordinated programs, themes, messages, and products synchronized with the actions of all instruments of national power.”4 Maybe that sentence answers Ambassador Mahbubani’s question because it is 50 words long, and any primer on good writing would say that is 25 words too many. There should be no great mystery about what strategic communication is nor an unnecessarily complicated definition of it. In short, strategic communication is a way of persuading other people to accept one’s ideas, policies, or courses of action. In that old saw, it means “letting you have my way.” Strategic communication means persuading allies and friends to stand with you. It means persuading neutrals to come over to your side or at least stay neutral. In the best of all worlds, it means persuading adversaries that you have the power and the will to prevail over them. Vitally important, strategic communication means persuading the nation’s citizens to support the policies of their leaders so that a national will is forged to accomplish national objectives. In this context, strategic communication is an essential element of national leadership. As a former Chief of Staff of the Army, General Edward C. “Shy” Meyer, once said, “Armies don’t fight wars, nations fight wars.” None of this is new. Strategic thinkers have touched on aspects of strategic communication for centuries. Sun Tzu, the Chinese strategist, wrote 2,500 years ago, “To fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.”5 In the West, Carl Phillip Gottfried von Clausewitz, the Prussian strategist, wrote in 1832 of the “wonderful trinity” of violence, chance, and reason personified by the people, the general and his army, and the government.6 Strategic communication was not in his vocabulary, but clearly he envisioned persuasive communication as an element of leadership among the three elements of national will. Like Clausewitz, General Vo Nguyen Giap, who commanded North Vietnam’s forces against France and then the United States, wrote not about strategic communication but said, “To educate, mobilize, organize, and arm the whole people in order that they might take part in the Resistance was a crucial question.”7 In the spirit of what the Chinese call “the rectification of names,” strategic communication has its roots in the true and classic meaning of “propaganda.” The word “propaganda” itself, however, has taken on too much baggage over the last century to be useful in today’s context. The Roman Catholic Church seems to have fashioned the modern concept of propaganda. In 1622, Pope Gregory XV established in the curia in Rome the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. Its marching orders were to spread the Catholic faith, “propagate” and “propaganda” being derived from the Latin, “propagare,” meaning to spread.8 Until World War I, propaganda was a neutral term that meant using information, which should be factual and accurate, to advance whatever cause one was promoting. In World War I, however, the Germans began to distort the meaning of propaganda and even more in World War II when Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, made it a prominent weapon in the Nazi arsenal. They enhanced the technique of the “Big Lie,” a colossal distortion of the truth. A report from the US Office of Strategic Services contended that the Nazi rules were “never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”9 The author George Orwell referred to the Big Lie in his novel 1984, saying that when it was applied to an opponent, “it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts.”10 The United States was no slouch in promoting propaganda during WWII. The Office of War Information coordinated flows of information directed at the American people, allies, and the German, Italian, and Japanese enemies. A prominent radio newscaster, Elmer Davis, led that office. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the allied commander in Europe, had solid advice for military leaders for dealing with the press and fostering strategic communication, even if he didn’t use that term. After the war, Eisenhower wrote: “The commander in the field must never forget that it is his duty to cooperate with the heads of his government in the task of maintaining a civilian morale that

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will be equal to every purpose.”11 In any case, the word “propaganda” has been tainted and compromised beyond repair as it has become a synonym for untruth or deception. “Strategic communication” is a worthwhile replacement. Sending the Message Successful strategic communication assumes a defensible policy, a respectable identity, a core value. In commercial marketing, the product for sale must be well-made and desirable. The strategic communication stratagem hasn’t been built that can pull a poor policy decision out of trouble. Strategic communication begins with identifying audiences. In military terms, what are the targets? In most cases, that should be fairly easy—the government and public of an ally, the pro-American leaders in a neutral nation, the dissidents in a potential adversary, American citizens regardless of political party or geographic region whose support is essential. Some may be immediate believers, others may be dubious. All need to be addressed. Strategic communicators should be aware of what might be called “eavesdropping audiences.” The pervasive nature of communication technology today—news agencies, radio, television, newspapers, magazines, the Internet, movies, blogs, cell phones—makes it impossible to address a discrete audience. A single audience may be in mind but many other groups will hear, see, or read about the transmitted message. You cannot say one thing to one audience and something else to another. Crafting the message is a critical factor. This can be hard work, and strategic communication should begin while a policy is being fashioned, not added later. All too often, strategic decisions are made without considering how various audiences will receive them. President John F. Kennedy, as he put his administration together in 1961, asked the preeminent television newscaster of the time, Edward R. Murrow, to become head of the US Information Agency. Murrow reluctantly agreed but set one condition, that he be consulted when decisions were being made, not just when things went wrong. “If you want me to be there on the crash-landings,” he is reported to have told the President, “I better be there on the takeoff.”12 The message itself needs to say precisely what is meant. It must be clear, thought through, and tested for possible misunderstanding. Often the shorter the message, the better. Shakespeare says in Henry V, “Men of few words are the best men.” Perhaps the best war slogan of the twentieth century was “Remember Pearl Harbor.” It summarized the resolve of the American people, buoyed American allies, and threatened Japanese adversaries. President Bush’s phrase, “Axis of Evil,” did not necessarily generate applause at home or abroad but surely everyone remembers it and no one doubts its meaning. Words are important and doubly important when addressed to people in different cultures where the words don’t have the same meaning. That can be true even among Australians, Britons, Canadians, New Zealanders, and Americans, all claiming English as their mother tongue. A Briton who was a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq during the days of Saddam Hussein tells about a multinational raid on a suspected nuclear facility getting fouled up because the Americans counted the ground floor as the first floor while the British counted the first floor as the one above the ground floor.13 Communications researchers at Arizona State University say “this dynamic is illustrated by the efforts of the United States to promote democracy in the Middle East.” While it is hard for westerners to imagine anyone disagreeing with this goal, Middle Eastern “extremists interpreted this message as yet another attempt by the western crusaders to impose their foreign values on Muslims.” Consequently, the scholars conclude, “the more the United States promotes its goal of democracy for Muslims, the more evidence the extremists have to reproduce their crusader analogy.”14 European Christians launched nine crusades against Islam from 1095 to 1291. Christians saw them as campaigns with a noble purpose; Muslims saw them, and still see them, as European attempts to destroy Islam. It gets more complicated when the message must go through translation to reach an audience whose language is not that of the sender. A Japanese friend once said, “You carry around a dictionary in your head, and I carry around one in my head. But sometimes your dictionary and my dictionary don’t say the same thing.”15 America’s relations with Japan are replete, in peace and war,

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with misunderstandings that grew out of dictionaries not saying the same thing. In September 2005, Robert Zoellick, then Deputy Secretary of State, gave a speech that was touted to be a definitive statement of the Bush Administration’s policy toward China. Among other things, Zoellick said the United States wished China to become a “responsible stakeholder” in the international arena. That sent Chinese translators in Beijing scurrying for their dictionaries, which weren’t helpful. It turns out that “stakeholder” was a word coined in the middle of the nineteenth century in the gambling saloons of the American West. The stakeholder held the money, or stake, put up on a bet until a winner was declared and paid. That puzzled the Chinese even more, and it took some days for the Americans to explain what they really meant, which was for China to play a constructive role in seeing that the present international political and economic system remained stable.16 The written word is often more effective and less likely to be misunderstood than the spoken. When he was commander of the US Pacific Fleet, Admiral Gary Roughead found that communication in multinational naval exercises had improved because new technology allowed written messages to be encoded, transmitted, and decoded swiftly. Many Asians read English reasonably well but often have not been exposed to spoken English. The receiver of a written message whose mother tongue is not English thus need not fight through a variety of American accents, differences in word usage, slang, and jargon. In effect, “now hear this” had been replaced by “now read this.”17 The most difficult part of strategic communication is finding a means to get the message across to the intended audiences. Not only is that difficult in itself, but the sender must cut through all the static, clutter, and competing messages flooding the scene. This solution is straightforward even if complicated—use every channel possible and as many as possible. Sometimes a message is sent through only one channel, but more often it should go through a combination of media. Some officers and officials seem to think that strategic communication is little more than hyped public affairs. Not so. Strategic communication subsumes speechwriting for the President and senior leaders in government and military service, testimony before congressional committees, and remarks at ceremonies such as decorations for valor and changes of command. It includes public diplomacy and information operations, both of which are themselves still ill-defined, as well as public affairs and civil affairs. Intelligence should play a large part in strategic communication. Government officials, especially in the intelligence community, should be persuaded that information is gathered to be used, not squirreled away, in the war of ideas. Sources and methods must be guarded, of course, but with thought and a bit of sandpaper, that can be cleaned up so that the intelligence itself can be entered in the lists. Actions or Words Actions are among the better purveyors of strategic communication. Army engineers dispatched to Honduras in the 1980s built ramps over the beach in case heavy weapons and equipment needed to be landed to fight the forces of Daniel Ortega in next-door Nicaragua. The engineers also built a road that allowed farmers to get their produce to market more easily and economically, dug wells in a village so that women need not walk five miles with large tins balanced on sticks over their shoulders to get water for their families, and erected a tropical hut that was the best building in the village. The Hondurans turned half of it into a village hall, the other half into a school.18 A more publicized effort was Operation Sea Angel conducted by the US Marines in Bangladesh in 1991 under Lieutenant General H. C. Stackpole, commanding the III Marine Expeditionary Force (MEF). The Marines were returning by ship from the Persian Gulf to their base in Okinawa when they were diverted to Bangladesh in the wake of Cyclone Marian, a catastrophic natural disaster. Marian’s 140-mile-per-hour winds and 25-foot tidal wave had devastated Bangladesh, killing nearly 140,000 people and leaving over five million people homeless. Within 24 hours of a request for help from the Bangladeshi government, advance teams from III MEF arrived. Operation Sea Angel engaged 7,000 soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen. They provided food, water, and medical care to nearly two million people. Their efforts are credited with saving 200,000 lives.19 When a tsunami hit Indonesia and other countries bordering on the Indian Ocean on Sunday, 26 December 2004, the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln was in Hong Kong. The ship finished its replenishment on Monday and sailed on Tuesday morning to the Indian Ocean. About Wednesday, the Indonesian government grasped the magnitude of the disaster and asked for international

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assistance. On Saturday, Lincoln took up station about ten miles off the Sumatran coast and started flying relief missions. The strike group’s 17 helicopters were in constant operation during daylight hours and delivered 50,000 pounds of food and water ashore a day. Forces from Singapore, Australia, France, Germany, Russia, Japan, and China joined in. A US officer said, “We burned through our first quarter budget in two weeks,” implying an operations tempo six to seven times the normal rate. “We have a flight surgeon who spends a lot of time with the crews, and whenever people hit the 100th monthly flight hour mark we have them go for a checkup,” he said. “But morale is high, performance is high.” Day-to-day operations were directed by the Indonesian armed forces. “We take direction from them and provide feedback,” said the officer.20 Each of these humanitarian operations could have been highlighted in a strategic communication campaign. In the case of Honduras, the Army supported correspondents who covered the engineers, but minimally. The Marines got more mileage out of Operation Sea Angel, perhaps because General Stackpole was press-savvy. The Indian Ocean tsunami was so devastating that all sorts of media showed up to cover it. Violent military actions often send forceful messages. In 1972, US negotiations with North Vietnam intended to end the war in South Vietnam had stalled. President Richard M. Nixon then unleashed an operation called Linebacker II, bombing North Vietnam in an attempt to break Hanoi’s will. Before Christmas that year, the Air Force violated the military principle of mass by sending B-52 bombers three at a time into North Vietnam’s powerful air defenses, where they were chewed up and suffered heavy losses. After a stand-down on Christmas Day, the Air Force returned the next day to the principle of massed formations, dispatching an armada of 120 B-52s from Guam and Thailand to strike ten targets in Hanoi and Haiphong within a period of 15 minutes. The day after, Hanoi asked that negotiations resume; an agreement ending the war was signed in a month. In this case, the US government sought to block all media coverage and let the bombing itself carry the message. That didn’t work, however, as correspondents in Guam, for instance, managed to find aviators willing to talk.21 Strategy for This Century The traditional channels for communication—the printed press, radio, television, and motion pictures—are supposedly well understood by political leaders, government officials, diplomats, and military officers. Despite years of experience in dealing with journalists of all stripes, however, those leaders are often inept. James Lacey, a reserve Army colonel and a freelance journalist, once wrote: “Thousands of officers who spend countless hours learning every facet of their profession do not spend one iota of their time understanding or learning to engage with a strategic force that can make or break their best efforts.”22 The same could be said of leaders in other walks of public life. Thus the role of the printed press, television news, and radio news are needs to be underscored. They are an essential element of strategic communication—not the only element, by any means, but one that is vital to successful mass communications. Seven basic principles for dealing with the press are:23 • Project a professional and civil attitude, neither pandering to the press nor evincing hostility. The old saying applies: “You catch more flies with a spoonful of honey than with a barrel of vinegar.” Besides, the journalists own the printing presses and buy ink by the 55-gallon drum. • Understand that there is no such institution as “the media.” The press, television, and radio are too diverse, too competitive, and too unruly to be classed as an institution. The biggest difference is between print and broadcast. Print reporters need time and explanation; broadcasters need pictures and sound bites. • Learn the ground rules, which is press lingo for the rules of engagement. Know what is on the record, on background and not for attribution, and off the record. The safest rule is always tell a journalist only what you want to see in the newspaper or on the air. • Lying to the press is never permissible. Idealistically, it would be an ethical violation. Realistically, the liar will probably get caught and his credibility will be destroyed. A time may well come when you need the press to believe you, and they won’t. Lastly, the truth is easier to remember the next time around.

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• Mind your own business and discuss matters pertinent to your nation, service, rank, and position. Never speculate since what you say could be overtaken by events. Never answer a hypothetical question, for the same reason. Never submit to an ambush interview, when the camera catches you off guard. • Anticipate, don’t wait for the news to happen, go make the news. Muslims are killing more Muslims than are Americans, but US officials rarely make a point of this. Also, be ready to react as the press and TV will be there. Like Murphy’s Law, assume that “what can leak out will leak out.” • Never let a mistake stand. Form robust “truth squads.” Uncorrected mistakes get into the public domain and databases to acquire a life of their own and are often repeated and compounded. Moreover, journalists don’t learn unless their mistakes are pointed out. The Internet is the newest battlefield for strategic communication, and one that the United States so far has conceded to Islamic terrorists. The Economist magazine had a solid report on the Muslim infiltration of the Internet for its “jihad,” or struggle, against America. It said “the Internet gives jihadists an ideal vehicle for propaganda, providing access to large audiences free of government censorship or media filters, while carefully preserving their anonymity. Its ability to connect disparate jihadi groups creates a sense of a global Islamic movement fighting to defend the global ummah, or community, from a common enemy.” The Economist, which is edited and published in London but circulates widely in the United States, continued: “The ease and cheapness of processing words, pictures, sound, and video has brought the era not only of the citizen-journalist but also the terrorist-journalist.” The magazine asserted that “battlefield footage of American Humvees being blown up to shouts of ‘Allahu Akbar!’ (God is Great) appear on the Internet within minutes of the attacks taking place. In short, the hand-held video camera has become as important a tool of insurgency as the AK-47 or the RPG rocket-launcher.”24 In the past when soldiers were trained to adjust artillery fire, they were instructed to make bold corrections because the eye often underestimates the distance to the right or left, up or down that the gun’s aim must be adjusted to hit the target. So it is with strategic communication. To date, the American effort to get into the game has been half-hearted and limited to bureaucratic fixes. Now is time for bold change. To compete, the United States should establish in the White House an Office of Strategic Communication with a Director of Cabinet rank, like the US Trade Representative, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. The strategic communication director would sit in meetings of the Cabinet and National Security Council so that, like Edward R. Murrow, he or she would weigh in before the takeoff and thereby hope to prevent a crash-landing. The office would devise and issue guidelines to all departments of government on every aspect of their strategic communication and would seek, as the cliché holds, to get them to sing from the same sheet of music. A priority mission would be to devise ways to counter the infiltration of the Internet by Islamic terrorists. Deception should be rigorously forbidden in strategic communication. Sun Tzu reminds us “all warfare is based on deception,” an adage that lieutenants leading platoons and admirals commanding fleets have long embraced.25 In the modern world of pervasive communication, however, it is all but impossible to deceive an adversary without also deceiving allies, friends, neutrals, and most important, the citizens of one’s own nation. For this reason, psychological operations, which rightly include disinformation and other deceptions, should not come under the purview of the Office of Strategic Communication. Rather, psyops should be kept in the Special Operations Command or spun off to the Central Intelligence Agency or wherever else might be appropriate. Everything in the realm of strategic communication should be as truthful as human endeavor can make it. Tell the truth even though sometimes, for security, you can’t tell the whole truth. Lastly, a mission next to impossible: The Office of Strategic Communication needs to be kept out of partisan politics. That will take extraordinary leadership on the part of the Director and a fidelity to integrity on the part of the staff. Everyone from the President on down must be instructed to keep hands off the office and its work. Otherwise, it will no longer be an Office of Strategic Communication serving the nation but a propaganda ministry beholden to a political party—and therefore probably useless. NOTES

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1. Harry G. Summers, Jr., On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1982), 1. Colonel Summers also related this vignette to the author. 2. Interview by Kishore Mahbubani, “China, U.S., Europe - Whose Century?” The Globalist, 2 March 2005, http://www.theglobalist.com/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=4406. 3. US Department of State, “Introducing the Counterterrorism Communication Center,” memo, 12 July 2007. 4. Department of Defense, Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, Joint Publication 1-02, 511. 5. Sun Tzu, On the Art of War, trans. Lionel Giles (London: The British Museum, 1910), 17. 6. Carl Maria von Clausewitz, On War, ed. Roger Ashley Leonard (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1967), 59. 7. Vo Nguyen Giap, People’s War, People’s Army (Hanoi, Vietnam: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961), 27. 8. “Propaganda,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda. 9. “Big Lie,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Lie. 10. Ibid. 11. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1948), 299. 12. A variety of sources give differing versions of the words Murrow said but they agree on the general tone. 13. Recounted to the author by the British inspector, 2003. 14. Steven R. Corman, Angela Tretheway, and Bud Goodall, A 21st Century Model for Communication in the Global War of Ideas (Tempe: Arizona State Univ., Consortium for Strategic Communication, 3 April 2007), 8. 15. Recounted to the author by a fellow graduate student, University of Michigan, 1957. 16. Compiled from press reports and US officials speaking on background. 17. Interview with the author, November 2006. 18. Witnessed by the author, then a military correspondent for The New York Times. 19. For a full account of Sea Angel, see “Operation Sea Angel/Productive Effort,” Global Security.org, http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/sea_angel.htm. 20. For a full account of the USS Lincoln’s actions in tsunami relief, see Frank Lavin, “America’s Response to the Tsunami: A Visit to the USS Lincoln,” Embassy of the United States, Singapore, 24 January 2005, http://singapore.usembassy.gov/012405.html. 21. The author covered Linebacker II from Guam in December 1972. For a full account, see James R. McCarthy and George B. Allison, Linebacker II: A View from the Rock (Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala.: Air War College, Airpower Research Institute, 1979). 22. James Lacey, “Who’s Responsible for Losing the Media War in Iraq?” Proceedings, 130 (October 2004), 37. 23. These principles are derived from courses and lectures given by the author at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu and in other venues. 24. “A World Wide Web of Terror,” The Economist, 14 July 2007, 28-30. 25. Sun Tzu, 6. Richard Halloran writes a weekly op-ed column on the United States and Asia, with a focus on security issues. For 20 years he was a foreign and military correspondent for The New York Times. He now lives in Honolulu where he has served as Director of Communications and Journalism at the East-West Center and editorial director of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. He was a lieutenant of infantry with service in Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Vietnam. He is the author of six books and the recipient of several journalistic awards.Table of Contents

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