thedrifter
12-03-04, 06:20 AM
12-02-2004
From the Editor:
Information as a Weapon of War
By Ed Offley
In the spirit of the post-9/11 world in which we find ourselves, I would like to announce a personal, pre-emptive strike: To my brethren in the news media one and all, I would like to say, “Get over it.”
I’m referring, of course, to the emerging and all-but-inevitable hissy fit that my colleagues in the news media are beginning to mount against disclosure of the U.S. military’s recent “information operation” (IO) in Iraq designed to confuse and throw off-balance the insurgents that our soldiers and Marines are fighting in Iraq.
A reporter for The Los Angeles Times* disclosed this week that prior to the U.S. attack on Fallujah, a Marine Corps spokesman on Oct. 14 had made a dramatic – and misleading – announcement on troop movements. The reporter breathlessly reported:
“On the evening of Oct. 14, a young Marine spokesman near Fallujah appeared on CNN and made a dramatic announcement.”
“ ‘Troops crossed the line of departure,’ 1st Lt. Lyle Gilbert declared, using a common military expression signaling the start of a major campaign. ‘It’s going to be a long night.’ CNN, which had been alerted to expect a major news development, reported that the long-awaited offensive to retake the Iraqi city of Fallujah had begun.”
“In fact, the Fallujah offensive would not kick off for another three weeks. Gilbert’s carefully worded announcement was an elaborate psychological operation – or ‘psy-op’ – intended to dupe insurgents in Fallujah and allow U.S. commanders to see how guerrillas would react if they believed U.S. troops were entering the city, according to several Pentagon officials.”
Here in a nutshell is the eternal, irresolvable conflict between reporters and soldiers that has plagued military-media relations since the first clay-tablet-and-chisel bloke traipsed after the legions of Rome: The use of information itself as a weapon of war inevitably collides with the modern journalist’s mandate to present information as an objective – that is, ostensibly neutral – truth, independent of the harsh realities of urban warfare.
The Marine’s minor act of disinformation was designed to reveal what the insurgents would do – what actions they would take and what movements they would make – with the assault underway. Anyone who wants to criticize the Marine Corps for taking steps to minimize the number of Marines who would be killed in the Fallujah fight should hold his or her tongue until watching this one in-depth report by the BBC examining at close range what those Marines had to go through.
The *Los Angeles Times* writer did correctly identify the root issue at hand: “Several top [Bush administration] officials see a danger of blurring what are supposed to be well-defined lines between the stated mission of military public affairs – disseminating truthful, accurate information to the media and the American public – and psychological and information operations, the use of often-misleading information and propaganda to influence the outcome of a campaign or battle.”
But to that I would caution: The issue is much larger than the instance of one Marine Corps flack using the news media to prod the insurgents into a premature – and observable – reaction to a tactical ruse. The bigger issue is that the Untied States has failed to mount a coherent and successful campaign to win public opinion in the Middle East. This has allowed the insurgents and their enablers at al Jazeera and al Arabiya television to define the struggle in their bloody, jidahist terms.
Until now. A “broad effort [is] underway within the Bush administration to use information to its advantage in the war on terrorism,” the newspaper reported this week. My politically incorrect response to that disclosure is, “It’s about time.”
The stakes in this effort are huge, and will have a direct impact on the men and women we have sent into harm’s way in Iraq.
Consider the fate of Marine Cpl. Steven J. Crowley. You won’t find his name on the roster of those killed in Fallujah in the past three weeks. He died on Nov. 21, 1979 when a Pakistani mob assaulted and torched the U.S. Embassy in the capital of Islamabad.
Why did thousands of Pakistanis storm the wall and burn the embassy? Cpl. Crowley, another American soldier and two Pakistani employees died that day because of a deliberate disinformation campaign against the United States that the U.S. government failed to counter.
Several days earlier, radical Islamists had taken over the Muslim holy shrine of the Grand Mosque at Mecca in Saudi Arabia, at the height of the annual Muslim pilgrimage. There was chaos, confusion and a total information blackout. Then, Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini suggested that Americans were behind the attack on Islam's holiest place, a falsehood repeated in news media reports. The U.S. government’s response was silence, and an enraged mob believing the United States to blame attacked our embassy.
A quarter of a century later, the U.S. government is just beginning to understand that it cannot afford to allow others to define truth and reality on the Arab street.
If the battleground is as much the opinions, hearts and minds of the people of Iraq and its surrounding neighbors, as it is the tactical objectives of the streets of Fallujah and the Sunni Triangle, the U.S.-led coalition in Baghdad should be faulted not for occasional IO operations such as that of Lt. Gilbert, but for surrendering the larger “psyop” battlefield to the radical imams and Iraqi insurgents.
Consider our friends at *the al Jazeera TV network, who blanketed the Arab media audience for days with the NBC video of a Marine’s shooting of an injured Iraqi insurgent. Al Jazeera at the same time refused to televise the videotaped brutal murder by Iraqi insurgents of Iraqi hostage Margaret Hassan, director of CARE International in Iraq.
The anti-American TV networks have gone 24/7 in showing American Marines shooting at the historic mosques of Fallujah, but somehow failed to note that those very same religious sites had lost their neutrality and protection under the Geneva Conventions because insurgents had turned them into weapons caches and sniper’s nests.
I believe that it is imperative that the Pentagon fully embrace the potential of information operations as a weapon in the ongoing struggle for the future of Iraq. I recognize that my colleagues in the news media will find it easier to fault DoD for this approach than to admit that there is no neutrality on this battlefield and that for the military to forswear such a campaign is to yield that very battlefield to our enemies.
There is a very simple solution to the problem of the Pentagon waging IO operations while simultaneously managing day-to-day relations with the news media: Base those operations on the facts and avoid disinformation as a tactic unless it is critical to saving lives.
Central Command and the DoD have no choice but to wage an aggressive information campaign throughout the Middle East to overcome the unbalanced, biased and dangerously inaccurate reports that media outlets such as al Jazeera have trumpeted for so long without challenge.
Ed Offley is Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at dweditor@yahoo.com. Please send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com. © 2004 Ed Offley.
Ellie
From the Editor:
Information as a Weapon of War
By Ed Offley
In the spirit of the post-9/11 world in which we find ourselves, I would like to announce a personal, pre-emptive strike: To my brethren in the news media one and all, I would like to say, “Get over it.”
I’m referring, of course, to the emerging and all-but-inevitable hissy fit that my colleagues in the news media are beginning to mount against disclosure of the U.S. military’s recent “information operation” (IO) in Iraq designed to confuse and throw off-balance the insurgents that our soldiers and Marines are fighting in Iraq.
A reporter for The Los Angeles Times* disclosed this week that prior to the U.S. attack on Fallujah, a Marine Corps spokesman on Oct. 14 had made a dramatic – and misleading – announcement on troop movements. The reporter breathlessly reported:
“On the evening of Oct. 14, a young Marine spokesman near Fallujah appeared on CNN and made a dramatic announcement.”
“ ‘Troops crossed the line of departure,’ 1st Lt. Lyle Gilbert declared, using a common military expression signaling the start of a major campaign. ‘It’s going to be a long night.’ CNN, which had been alerted to expect a major news development, reported that the long-awaited offensive to retake the Iraqi city of Fallujah had begun.”
“In fact, the Fallujah offensive would not kick off for another three weeks. Gilbert’s carefully worded announcement was an elaborate psychological operation – or ‘psy-op’ – intended to dupe insurgents in Fallujah and allow U.S. commanders to see how guerrillas would react if they believed U.S. troops were entering the city, according to several Pentagon officials.”
Here in a nutshell is the eternal, irresolvable conflict between reporters and soldiers that has plagued military-media relations since the first clay-tablet-and-chisel bloke traipsed after the legions of Rome: The use of information itself as a weapon of war inevitably collides with the modern journalist’s mandate to present information as an objective – that is, ostensibly neutral – truth, independent of the harsh realities of urban warfare.
The Marine’s minor act of disinformation was designed to reveal what the insurgents would do – what actions they would take and what movements they would make – with the assault underway. Anyone who wants to criticize the Marine Corps for taking steps to minimize the number of Marines who would be killed in the Fallujah fight should hold his or her tongue until watching this one in-depth report by the BBC examining at close range what those Marines had to go through.
The *Los Angeles Times* writer did correctly identify the root issue at hand: “Several top [Bush administration] officials see a danger of blurring what are supposed to be well-defined lines between the stated mission of military public affairs – disseminating truthful, accurate information to the media and the American public – and psychological and information operations, the use of often-misleading information and propaganda to influence the outcome of a campaign or battle.”
But to that I would caution: The issue is much larger than the instance of one Marine Corps flack using the news media to prod the insurgents into a premature – and observable – reaction to a tactical ruse. The bigger issue is that the Untied States has failed to mount a coherent and successful campaign to win public opinion in the Middle East. This has allowed the insurgents and their enablers at al Jazeera and al Arabiya television to define the struggle in their bloody, jidahist terms.
Until now. A “broad effort [is] underway within the Bush administration to use information to its advantage in the war on terrorism,” the newspaper reported this week. My politically incorrect response to that disclosure is, “It’s about time.”
The stakes in this effort are huge, and will have a direct impact on the men and women we have sent into harm’s way in Iraq.
Consider the fate of Marine Cpl. Steven J. Crowley. You won’t find his name on the roster of those killed in Fallujah in the past three weeks. He died on Nov. 21, 1979 when a Pakistani mob assaulted and torched the U.S. Embassy in the capital of Islamabad.
Why did thousands of Pakistanis storm the wall and burn the embassy? Cpl. Crowley, another American soldier and two Pakistani employees died that day because of a deliberate disinformation campaign against the United States that the U.S. government failed to counter.
Several days earlier, radical Islamists had taken over the Muslim holy shrine of the Grand Mosque at Mecca in Saudi Arabia, at the height of the annual Muslim pilgrimage. There was chaos, confusion and a total information blackout. Then, Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini suggested that Americans were behind the attack on Islam's holiest place, a falsehood repeated in news media reports. The U.S. government’s response was silence, and an enraged mob believing the United States to blame attacked our embassy.
A quarter of a century later, the U.S. government is just beginning to understand that it cannot afford to allow others to define truth and reality on the Arab street.
If the battleground is as much the opinions, hearts and minds of the people of Iraq and its surrounding neighbors, as it is the tactical objectives of the streets of Fallujah and the Sunni Triangle, the U.S.-led coalition in Baghdad should be faulted not for occasional IO operations such as that of Lt. Gilbert, but for surrendering the larger “psyop” battlefield to the radical imams and Iraqi insurgents.
Consider our friends at *the al Jazeera TV network, who blanketed the Arab media audience for days with the NBC video of a Marine’s shooting of an injured Iraqi insurgent. Al Jazeera at the same time refused to televise the videotaped brutal murder by Iraqi insurgents of Iraqi hostage Margaret Hassan, director of CARE International in Iraq.
The anti-American TV networks have gone 24/7 in showing American Marines shooting at the historic mosques of Fallujah, but somehow failed to note that those very same religious sites had lost their neutrality and protection under the Geneva Conventions because insurgents had turned them into weapons caches and sniper’s nests.
I believe that it is imperative that the Pentagon fully embrace the potential of information operations as a weapon in the ongoing struggle for the future of Iraq. I recognize that my colleagues in the news media will find it easier to fault DoD for this approach than to admit that there is no neutrality on this battlefield and that for the military to forswear such a campaign is to yield that very battlefield to our enemies.
There is a very simple solution to the problem of the Pentagon waging IO operations while simultaneously managing day-to-day relations with the news media: Base those operations on the facts and avoid disinformation as a tactic unless it is critical to saving lives.
Central Command and the DoD have no choice but to wage an aggressive information campaign throughout the Middle East to overcome the unbalanced, biased and dangerously inaccurate reports that media outlets such as al Jazeera have trumpeted for so long without challenge.
Ed Offley is Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at dweditor@yahoo.com. Please send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com. © 2004 Ed Offley.
Ellie