Rumsfeld's Speech 2/17/06

We are in a long struggle unlike any other we’ve seen.

Zawahiri says, “More than half of this battle will take place in the Media, a hearts and mind struggle for the people.”

Rumsfeld issues a slight on our ‘modern’ perspective: this is from Zawahiri, “not a modern day image consultant.”

We live in a new Media Age.

Al’Qaeda has Media Relations Committees, and they meet and talk about strategy.

Many critical battles will be in the News Rooms.

They are highly successful at manipulating the opinion elites of the world.

The violent extremists have established media relation committees.

Not with bullets, but with words.

Plan and design the attacks using every means to communicate to intimidate and break the collective wills of free peoples.

They know that communication transcends borders.

A single news story handled skillfully can be as damaging to our cause, and as helpful to theirs, as any other method of military attack. And their doing it.

Our enemy is able to act quickly, with relatively few people. The government is only beginning to adapt to the 21st century.

This is the first war in history, unconventional and irregular as it may be, in an error of emails blogs and cellphone, blackberry, instant messaging etc. There has never been a war fought in this environment before.

Even in the poorest neighborhoods in the Muslim world you find satellites on building and after building. A couple of years ago in Iraq, the penalty for a satellite was disfigurement or death.

Regrettably, many of the news channels in the Muslim world are hostile to the west

A growing number of foreign media outlets have immature standards and practices; they serve to inflame and distort, rather than enlighten and inform.

We have barely begun to compete for reaching their audiences. A lie can be half way…

Desecration of the Koran, the history of its dissemination and effect. Posted on websites, repeated on emails, etc.

The US had to be sure they had the facts before they responded. Could not compete with the few days it took to be spread. Appropriately and of necessity, took the time it needed to try and ensure they had the facts before responding.

But in the meantime some lives had been lost and damage had been done to our country.

What complicates the ability to respond quickly is that, unlike our enemies who lie with impunity, with no penalty ‘whatsoever, our government does not have the luxury of relying on other sources of information, ‘Anonymous or otherwise, our government has to be the source and well tell the Truth.

Today’s correspondents are under ‘hyper-pressure, to meet a constant news scrawl deadline and produce exclusives, daily deadlines have turned into hourly. The fact is gov at the speed in which it operates doesn’t always make their job easier. The standard gov foreign affairs operation was built to respond to individual requests for information, it is reactive not proactive, still operates at a 8 hour five or six day a week basis, while world events and our enemies are operating 24/7 across ‘every time zone.’

That’s an unacceptable dangerous deficiency.

Our government is seeking to adapt. US government has sought non-traditional means to provide accurate information to Iraqi people, yet this has been portrayed as inappropriate. For example, the allegations of someone in the military hiring a contractor to pay someone to print a story, a True story, but paying to print a story.

The resulting explosion of critical press stories caused all activity and initiative to stop. It has a chilling effect, for those who are asked to serve in the military p affairs field. The conclusion is that there is no toleration for innovation, much less for human error that could be seized upon by a press that demands perfection from the government but does not from the enemy nor, sometimes, themselves.

Consider for a moment for the column inches and broadcast time was used on ‘unauthorized detainee’ mistreatment. The policy of the government was clear, it was against inhumane treatment of the exact type that took place. These were just some people who did some things on one night shift in a prison in Iraq. “And consider that the whole world knew simultaneously.”

Manchester manual, terrorists are trained to put out misinformation. Communications planning a central aspect of government at all levels. Trained to lie, to put out misinformation.

In some cases military public affairs officials have little communications training or grounding in the importance of timing and rapid response and the realities of digital and broadcast media. We’ve become somewhat more adept, but progress is slow and ‘importantly public affairs posts have proven not to be enhancing for careers.

Anyone that looks at those careers and recognizes the near instantaneous public penalty imposed on someone who is in the military who is involved in anything the media judges instantaneously to be imperfect, or improper, and that then requires a long time to figure out what actually took place. Military people are intelligent, they’ll move away from those careers.

We need to get better at engaging experts from both within and outside of government to help communicate rapidly, deploying the best military communications capabilities to theaters of operation, executing multifaceted media campaigns, print, radio, television, and the internet, but let their be no doubt!

The longer it takes to put together a strategic communication framework into place, the more we can be certain that the vacuum will be filled by the enemy, and news informers who most assuredly not paint an accurate picture of what is actually taking place.

There are some signs of modest progress. Within the past year and a half the military’s joint forces command has developed a rapidly deployable communication team. They are organized and focused on specific geographical areas of the world. For example, soon after the devastating earthquake in Pakistan I had occasion to fly over the areas where entire sides of mountains had collapsed from the quake, and entire buildings and homes gone.

One of these military teams went into the disaster area, working with the commander in charge, to help focus the attention on the US government’s truly extraordinary commitment to helping the Pakistani people.

Public opinion surveys, by private groups in Pakistan, taken before and after the earthquake, suggest that public opinion of the United States changed dramatically because of the new awareness by the Pakistani public.

It was not long before the favorite toy in Pakistan was a small replica of a Chinook helicopter—they were just everywhere in that country—because of the many lives our helicopters saved in the mountains with relief supplies they delivered.

The communication team was attached to it and rapidly deployable and needed because, frankly, we were concerned about out troops safety, given the number of people in that country that do not favor the west and the, ah, potential difficulties that occur, we were uncertain as to what the reception would be. The reception over time was terrific.

Reorient staffing and schedules and culture to engage full ranged of media that are having such an impact today. US central command has launched an online communications effort that includes electronic news updates and links campaign that has several hundred blogs receiving and publishing the cent-com content. The US government will have to develop an institutionalized capability to anticipate and act within the same news cycle. That will require instituting 24 hour press operation centers, expanding internet operations, and other channels of communication, to equal status with other 21st century press organizations.

It will result in much less reliance on the print press, just as the publics of the US and the world are relying less on newspapers as their principle source of information. And it will require attracting more experts in these areas from the private sector to government service. This also will likely mean embracing new institutions to engage people across the world.

During the Cold War, institutions such as the US Information Agency, Radio Free Europe just to name an example, proved to be valuable instruments for the United States. We need to take the opportunity to develop programs that would serve a similar valuable role in the War on Terror in this new century.

What should that look like? Most of us remember when USIA was criticized for making a film about President Kennedy. It was announced that this was taking tax payers dollars to promote a person running for public office in the United States, and was propagandizing the American people. Of course, when you speak today, there is no one audience. There are multiple audiences. We can’t avoid communicating whatever it is we communicate that will then be heard by multiple audiences. So I don’t know the answer. I don’t know what an Information Agency should look like in the 21st Century. There’s no guidebook for this, no roadmap, that says here’s what you got to do if you get up in the morning and you are the government of the United States. These are tough questions and its tough to find the answers for them, and to do it right.

So that we can tell our hard working folks what to do to meet these challenges, we’re having to figure it out as we go along. The country is trying to figure it out.

People need time to adjust and adapt to new ideas. For the past minutes I’ve been commenting on the challenges facing our country—not just our government but our country—in the new media age. I’ve noted the advantages the enemy has in his ability to manipulate the media.

But we have advantages as well. And that is quite simply that the Truth is on our side. And ultimately, in my view, Truth wins out. I believe with every bone in my body that free people exposed to sufficient information will over time find their way to right decisions.

Throughout the world, advances in technology are forcing massive information flow that dictators and extremists will ultimately not be able to control. Blogs are rapidly appearing in countries even where the press is controlled. Pro democracy are communicating and organizing by email, pagers, and blackberries.

Today in Iraq an energetic media has emerged from the rubble of Saddam Hussein’s police state, with nearly three hundred newspapers, over 90 radio stations, and more than forty television stations. They are now accessing the web.

We are fighting a battle where the survival of our free way of life is at stake, and the center of gravity is not simply on the battlefields overseas, it’s a test of wills and it will be won or lost with our publics and the publics of other nations. We’ll need to do all we can to attract supporters to our efforts, and to correct the lies which are told that are so damaging to our country, and are repeated, and repeated, and repeated.