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Failure to communicate

By Daniel Gallington
March 2, 2008

If there ever was a truly objective assessment of how effectively we have waged the war on terrorism, at the top of the "failures" side of the list would be our inability to get our strategic message out in a way that was coordinated and consistent with our objectives on the battlefield.

In a nutshell, we allowed the traditional "public affairs" functions of our government to take precedence over the strategic "information operations" necessary to win the hearts and minds of local populations. You might say: "So what?" or "What's the difference?" or even "Why should I care?" All good questions and ones that we haven't (so far) asked ourselves as part of a conscious, decision-making process to favor traditional public affairs over strategic information operations.

So, what is the difference? Simple: Public affairs is telling people what's happening in government — but to an audience that can be reasonably sophisticated. In short, it's what press secretaries do. Information operations and/or public diplomacy is what the bad guys are doing to us so effectively: telling their side of the story, advertising their successes, maximizing our failures and minimizing their losses. In short, it's campaign advertising with a central and persistent message. And, we know that it's extremely effective — especially with less sophisticated audiences, such as those who populate much of the Muslim world. If you want to see some of these operations relentlessly at work against us, look at most of the material on Al Jazeera.

Well, if it works so well, why haven't we been doing it? After all, we invented modern advertising. The answer is simple: internal Bush administration politics.

It started innocently enough in 2001 when President Bush brought his public affairs team with him from Texas, and put the person in charge of it (a close friend and confidant) in a predominant position of influence in the White House. Furthermore, the president's public affairs person was in direct "staff to staff" communication with her counterparts at Defense and State, and as a result, the public affairs functions at these agencies quickly gained disproportionate "clout" in comparison to other key staff functions, e.g., policy, legal and special operations. And, because the president's public affairs person was accustomed to "speaking for the president," she often communicated this to her State and Defense counterparts, who used it to further enhance their own influence in their departments.

This may have been harmless enough for a nation at peace, and would have merited at most a footnote in someone's historical account of the George W. Bush administration. In addition, and prior to September 11, 2001, the public affairs function at the White House saw no reason to — and therefore did not — understand the nature, purpose and function of the National Security Council (NSC), and the two functions worked in vertical "pipelines" with their counterparts at State and Defense.

September 11, and our reaction to it, changed all of that: In essence, White House public affairs quickly claimed all of the bureaucratic turf that involved telling any part of any public anything concerning the war — and they got away with it. The newly organized "Office of Strategic Information" in the Pentagon, for example, was ordered shut down because it was inconsistent with the public affairs predominance in all things related to information about the war. In other words, the war didn't need a strategic information component, it just needed a press secretary.

Believe it or not, there was even a serious effort — in 2002 — to subordinate the NSC to the public affairs function at the White House, in direct contradiction of public law. While this ultimately failed, it was a very determined internal takeover attempt and demonstrated the fragility of the current NSC structure at the White House.

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