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Maggie Gamberton's avatar

Thank you for another invigorating essay, Paul, and for pointing to Sean McFate's well-reasoned piece on strengthening US irregular warfare theory and practice. Comparing your piece with McFate's, my conclusion is that you are arguing for a whole-of-government coordination of and strengthening of influence operations, of which IW would be a component piece. Similar issues of coordination, training, policy, and projects arise at the higher level of integration needed for whole-of-government influence ops. which must include but supersede DoD IW. These concerns remind me of the Biden 2009 report, 'National Framework for Strategic Communication.' Biden argued for creating a national 'home' organisation for USG Strategic Communications, which would coordinate Stratcomms across USG organisations while at the same time mandating stratcomm capabilities within each organisation. Obama decided to implement the stratcomm capability requirement within USG organisations (without additional funding to implement the mandate), and dismissed the call for a home organisation to coordinate across government (since we didn't need 'another bureaucracy'), with predicatable outcomes - small functional gains and big performativity on mandate meeting.

Would you agree with the Biden approach of 2009 to bolster USG influence capabilities?

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Paul Cobaugh's avatar

Terrific insight and commentary Maggie. Thanks for adding these thoughts. DoD pretty much killed off Strategic communications somewhere around 2011/ 12 in a complete deviation from any logic. Too many in the national security community are protecting their "turf" and are afraid of losing their budgets. The Public Affairs community were behind this mostly and thought they could do the job, poorly defined as it is.

My professional opinion on this error is that still, the Pentagon doesn't understand what it takes to influence. SC / Strategic Communications is but one tiny piece of the influence apparatus. The apparatus though is disjointed and hence, dysfunctional with zero ability to influence in support of our NSS/ National Security Strategy. To make matters worse, DoD is almost clueless as to what narrative is and its operating principles. Not only does the IC/ Intelligence Community not collect what they need to in order to achieve a clear understanding of NI/ narrative identity but without understanding narrative, they wouldn't know how to do the analysis, even if they did collect the proper information. Your points and comments are insightful indeed.

As is, we are forced to depend almost entirely on the WH and State Dept. for SC. Until they are forced to adjust away from a failed set of doctrine, the Pentagon will remain a dysfunctional but critical piece of our influence potential. They are the only USG entity with the tools, resources and people to actually play a significant role. Too bad they are stuck in 1990 and have stopped forward progress.

This is my version of telling the "Emperor, that he has no clothes." ;)

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