via email from Donald Bishop
This
is a compilation of news, articles, essays, and reports on strategic
communications, Public Diplomacy, public affairs, U.S. government international
broadcasting, and information operations. The editorial intent is to:
●
share with busy practitioners the academic and policy ferment in Public
Diplomacy and related fields
●
from long speeches, testimonies, and articles, flag the portions that bear on
Public Diplomacy
●
provide a window on armed forces thinking on the fields that neighbor Public
Diplomacy such as military public affairs, information operations,
inform-influence-engage, and cultural learning, and
●
introduce the long history of Public Diplomacy by citing some of the older
books, articles, reports, and documents that are not available on the internet.
Public
Diplomacy professionals always need a 360-degree view of how ideas are
expressed, flow, and gain influence. Many points of view citied here are
contentious, partisan, and/or biased; inclusion does not imply endorsement.
Edited by
Donald M. Bishop, Bren Chair of Strategic Communications, Marine Corps
University
Jeffery W. Taylor, University of Mary Washington, Assistant
TABLE
OF CONTENTS
In
the News
Instruments
of Informational Power
Professional
Topics
Countries
and Regions
19.
RUSSIA
23.
NORTH KOREA
Toolkit
In
the News
● Today, thanks to
the Internet and social media, the manipulation of our perception of the world
is taking place on previously unimaginable scales of time, space and
intentionality. That, precisely, is the source of one of the greatest
vulnerabilities we as individuals and as a society must learn to deal with.
Today, many actors are exploiting these vulnerabilities.
Senate Armed
Services Committee, April 27, 2017.
● To date, there is not a single
individual in the US government below the President of the United States who is
responsible and capable of managing US information dissemination and how we
address our adversaries in the information environment.
Senate Armed
Services Committee, April 27, 2017
● I describe three such trends .... • The
first is a new geography wherein people and organizations increasingly see the
internet as a jurisdiction in its own right .... • The second is a new social
order wherein people increasingly organize by ideology .... • Finally, there is the increasing propensity
of private citizens, organizations and nation-states to see cyberspace as a
means of collaborating, competing, or engaging in conflict ....
Senate Armed Services Committee, April 27,
2017
[Hearing
on U.S. Pacific Command, Senate Armed Services Committee]
●
. . .this is not about winning wars on the cheap, as some critics may suggest.
It’s about winning wars on the smart.
Senate Armed Services Committee, April 27,
2017
● The North’s special operations forces
are its best trained and equipped units and its cyber capabilities are
maturing, with cyberwarfare operators capable of conducting a variety of
offensive operations including computer network attack and network
exploitation.
Senate Armed
Services Committee, April 27, 2017
● The Department of
State has renewed the Charter for the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public
Diplomacy. The bipartisan Commission appraises U.S. government activities
intended to understand, inform, and influence foreign publics. It may conduct
studies, inquiries, and meetings, as it deems necessary.
U.S. Department of State, April 20, 2017
● The Department of State is pleased to
welcome Heather Nauert as the new State Department Spokesperson. Nauert comes
to the Department with more than 15 years of experience as an anchor and
correspondent covering both foreign and domestic news and events, including the
9-11 terror attacks, the war in Iraq, and the genocide in Darfur, Sudan.
Nauert's media experience and long interest in international affairs will be
invaluable as she conveys the Administration’s foreign policy priorities to the
American people and the world.
U.S. Department of State, April 24, 2017
● The constant use of
[Twitter] by President Trump has allowed him to create a sense of personal
connection with reporters, constituents, and even international leaders,
alluding to real-time and unfiltered content, but also weakening the role of
the PA and PD officers who have a pervasive role of communicating policy. . . .
analyzing the tweets from the current administration’s officials ... will give
inside [sic] unto how the three should represent themselves and their policies
on a social media platform such as Twitter.
Amanda Rae Menas, Take Five,
April 20, 2017
●
... journalists should provide more context in their coverage of deployed
units: more “why” and “how,” in addition to the “who,” “what,” and “where.” ***
Stories about individual soldiers or actions miss the forest for the trees,
after all, while talking-head stories about deforestation of the Amazon are too
large and abstract for useful public conversation. Aim, then, for something in
the middle. Don’t settle for writing “it’s fighting season again.” Tell readers
what’s going to make this year at war different than last year.
Randy Brown, Small Wars Journal, April 22,
2017
●
... our research suggests that British efforts may be being thwarted, at least
in part, by a peculiarly British problem – the culture of no comment that
surrounds much of its counterterrorism activity abroad. There is an increasing
trend in British defence and security policy of secretive yet growing military
commitments in areas where the UK is not generally considered to be at war, but
where it faces threats from terrorist groups.
Abigail
Watson, Small Wars Journal, April 22, 2017
● . . . in the latest influence operation
involving the 2016 election . . . . Cyber was the vector used to extract the
information, but how the stolen information is used “is not necessarily a cyber
issue,” Christopher Painter, Coordinator for Cyber Issues at the State
Department said . . . . Information warfare has happened for centuries, he
added, and while cyber has been either an accelerant or an enabler for these
types of activities, it is just a small part.
Mark Pomerleau, C4ISRNet, April 25, 2017
● The nature of war is not
changing but rather the character of war is with social media, cyber
operations, information operations and small commercially available unmanned
aerial vehicles, which all lead to an increasingly lethal battlefield in which
all domains will be contested and congested.
Mark Pomerleau, C4ISRNet, April 7, 2017
Professional Topics
● In more innocent times, the
rise of the Internet was seen by many people as a boon to democracy. *** in
what are clearly less innocent times, the Internet is viewed as a far less
benign force. It can be a haven for spreading fake news and rewarding the
harshest and most divisive of political rhetoric. It . . . has dark corners
populated by anonymous actors . . . whose influence appears to be growing but
not easily measured.
Dan Balz, The Washington Post, April 22,
2017
● In an age of presidential tweets,
protest hashtags and online petitions, corporate America must take warning.
Pepsi paid top dollar for that flashy ad with Kendall Jenner — because they
listened to marketers, and not to consumers. Consumers talked back in a tidal
wave of negative attention.
. . . Companies should avoid the
controversy and continue doing what they do best: making, marketing and selling
quality products that Americans — and indeed the entire world — can enjoy.
Angela Morabito, Washington Examiner,
April 17, 2017
● Key Findings: While Social Media Is Still Relatively New, Many
of the Best Practices for Using It Are Based on Well-Understood Marketing
Approaches * * *A Bottom-Down Messaging Strategy Using Influencers in the Arab
World Can Be Effective * * *Tailoring Top-Down Messaging by Targeting Specific
Themes to Different Communities also Helps Facilitate the Social Conversation
Todd Helmus and Elizabeth Bodine-Baron, RAND Corporation, 2017
● When we think of the cyber domain, we should start thinking
about social media because we sense in these domains, and then the question
becomes how do we pull together all the sensing and turn it into
decision-quality information? How do we take pre-effects from those same
domains? It is sensing, effects, decision speed, and operational agility that
are going to define the victors in future campaigns.
William T. Eliason, Joint
Force Quarterly, April 1, 2017
6. CYBER
● Russia’s cyberwarfare operations are built on the back of their
cybercriminal networks. Can the US and its allies take them down?
Sheera Frenkel, Buzz Feed, April 20, 2017
● In 2016, [Pawn Storm] attempted to influence public opinion, to
influence elections, and sought contact with mainstream media with some
success. Now the impact of these malicious activities can be felt by various
industries and enterprises operating throughout the world.
Feike Hacquebord, Trend Micro, 2017
● ... this response must forever strip
Moscow of the possibility of playing on human ignorance with lies and
disinformation and promote a new generation of Russian leaders who are
committed to integration with rather than the destruction of the globalized
world, Pavlova concludes.
Paul Goble, Window on Eurasia—New Series,
April 13, 2017
● The report [about revisions to the
Republican platform] sounded damning—unless one knew, of course, that the
“language” to which Acosta managed to refer four times in the space of thirty
seconds did not exist—no statement on Ukraine was inserted into the Republican
platform by the Trump campaign—and that the sentiment ostensibly ascribed to
candidate Trump falls squarely in the foreign-policy mainstream and was, in
fact, the position held by the Obama administration.
Masha Gessen, The New York Review, March
6, 2017
● Virtually every action, message, and
decision of a military force shapes the opinions of an indigenous population .
. . . Themes of U.S. goodwill mean little if its actions convey otherwise.
Consequently, a unified message in both word and deed is fundamental to
success.
Todd Helmus, Christopher Paul, and Russell
W. Glenn, RAND Corporation, 2017
● NATO officials interviewed recognized
Russia’s ability to use strategic communication tools to internally destabilize
some of its neighbors, as well as NATO’s lack of tools to address this issue.
In general, they believed that NATO headquarters and other Alliance
institutions would be ineffective or unable to respond because of their limited
capabilities in the area of strategic communication. This is believed to give
Russia a significant advantage .... While improved strategic communications is
clearly a priority, it does not seem to have gotten off the ground.
Stephanie Pezard, Andrew Radin, Thomas S.
Szayna, and F. Stephen Larrabee, RAND Corporation, 2017
9. SOFT POWER
● The dangerous imbalance between the
attention and resources that Trump is willing to devote to “hard” and “soft
power” threatens not only to undermine U.S. leadership, but also to leave
Americans more vulnerable to a wider spectrum of threats.
James Gibney, Bloomberg, April 19, 2017
10. WAR OF IDEAS
●
In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the United States was guided by the
fundamental belief that it was at war with "a transnational terrorist
movement fueled by a radical ideology of hatred, oppression, and murder."
This mindset was articulated in the 2006 National Strategy for Combating
Terrorism, which notes that the "war on terror" is a different kind
of war. It is a battle of arms and a battle of ideas .... The paradigm for
combating terrorism includes all aspects of U.S. national power and influence:
military, diplomatic, financial, and so forth.
Accordingly, the Bush administration's second term was marked by an
interagency push to counter the terrorist threat.
Rand Beers, Samantha Ravich and Matthew
Levitt, The Washington Institute, April 7, 2017
● I continue to be frustrated by
commentators who label the Russian activity to influence the election as a
cyberattack. It was, in fact, information warfare, and it was conducted in the
same way the Russians conducted information warfare well before everyone was on
the internet and connected on social media.
Maj. Gen. Brett T. Williams (ret.),
C4ISRNet, April 25, 2017
● There are many who still argue that
unless death or destruction results, a cyber incident should not be considered
an attack or an act of war. What they are missing is that cyber space has given
nation states, or transnational groups, or single threat actors, the capability
to effectively use information as a devastating weapon.
Gail Harris, limacharilienews.com, April
25, 2017
● “Active measures”
were subversive techniques and policies aimed at influencing people and events
in foreign countries to suit Russia’s objectives. Claims of internet-driven
hacking and misinformation campaigns by Russia against the U.S. fit well within
this Cold War approach.
Paul Ratner, bigthink.com, April 9, 2017
●
In the United States, even radical and abhorrent ideas are constitutionally
protected, as is watching jihadist videos. The problem is that in an era of
mass social media and digital communication, ideological radicalization and
then mobilization to violence (the "flash to bang" ratio) is faster
than ever.
Matthew Levitt, The Hill, April 7, 2017
13. RADICALIZATION
● The Islamic State’s calls for attacks
are increasingly resonating with radical-leaning teens and pre-teens in Europe.
The Manichean appeal of the group’s ideology certainly plays a part in this
appeal. Yet such has been the Islamic State’s success, the driving force behind
its recruitment clearly goes beyond this. The group has taken advantage of how
simple it is today to produce relatively slick digital output
Robin
Simcox, CTC Sentinel, February 22, 2017
●
Among the most recent evolutions of jihadi terrorist tactics in the West has
been the rise of the virtual entrepreneur. The increased use of social media,
often paired with applications that offer the option of encrypted messaging,
has enabled members of groups like the Islamic State to make direct and lasting
contact with radicalized Americans. In some cases, these individuals direct
terror plots, and in others, they provide encouragement and motivation for
attacks.
Alexander
Meleagrou-Hitchens and Seamus Hughes, CTC Sentinel, March 9, 2017
14. NARRATIVE
● Though it’s
comforting to believe the truth will always out, the reality of politics can be
quite different. An audience’s attention belongs to the best storytellers and
those who are most active and capable of fighting for the opportunity to tell
the world a narrative to believe in.
Truth may be the weight of history but it is never consistently the
force that shapes it.
Lenin
Hernandez, Take Five, April 18, 2017
●
The more difficult task will be developing a national narrative, broadly backed
by elites across the ideological spectrum, about “who we are”—one built around
opposition to authoritarianism and illiberalism.
Jeff
D. Colgan and Robert O. Keohane, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2017
● Mr. Gorbachev was
wagering that truthful and unfettered expression — a press able to criticize
and investigate, history books without redacted names, and honest, accountable
government — just might save the creaking edifice of Communist rule.
Gal Beckerman, The New York Times, April
10, 2017
● “My firm belief as
a Turk is that democracy and human rights in Turkey can only be established by
facing history and acknowledging historic wrongdoings,” [Taner Akcam] said.
Tim Arango, The New York Times, April 22,
2017
●
Radio Atlantico del Sur (RAdS) was the psychological operations radio station
broadcast by the Ministry of Defence to Argentine troops during the latter part
of the Falklands Islands Conflict. This is a draft OD(SA) interim assessment
suggesting possibilities for the radio station, it dates from around 12 May
1982.
Psywar.org, July 25, 2016
17. MEDIA SAVVY, EDUCATION,
JUDGMENT
● With respect, Christians must be
cautious of baring our own moral hypocrisy when handling fake news or media
bias. What I mean by that is Christians have a responsibility to do our due
diligence before sharing catchy headlines we see on social media without
knowing where a report came from or, in some cases, without reading what a
piece says. Discernment is key.
Chelsen Vicari, Juicy Ecumenism, April 13,
2017
18. IDEAS OF AMERICA
● Singapore crushes us on test scores, but
that's because tests measure the wrong things. It's not measuring the ability
to identify problems and find unique solutions. These are completely missed by
standardized testing. When we use this testing we forget the most important
facets: critical thinking and creativity.
Kelly Cole, Washington Examiner, April 20,
2017
● At a moment when the international order
is under severe strain, power is fragmenting and great-power rivalry has
returned, the values and purpose at the core of the American idea matter more
than ever. Against this backdrop, acting in defense of a critical international
norm in Syria is reassuring; going mute on human rights issues in dealing with
authoritarian leaders is not.
William J. Burns, The Washington Post,
April 19, 2017
● The United States has been the modern
world’s most influential country and has promoted democracy passively by
serving as a model and actively through its diplomatic efforts, aid, and even
military and covert action practices. **** The withdrawal of American support
for democracy could compound the various anti-democratic trends we have
described and lead to the fall of Huntington’s “third wave.”
Joshua Muravchik and Jeffrey Gedmin, The
Washington Post, April 19, 2017
● What on earth is happening to us? It
wasn’t that long ago that there was a sense of duty that went along with being
a good American citizen . . . . But what we as Americans have always shared
together – a love of freedom, democratic institutions, a common purpose – has
degenerated into partisan and ideological totalitarianism. It is my way or the
highway. Otherwise nice people say they would not a shed a tear if Mr. Trump
were assassinated, nor would their counterparts on the other side have wept if
Mr. Obama had been killed in office.
John Zogby, Forbes, April 18, 2017
● The greatest threat to the liberal
international order comes not from Russia, China, or jihadist terror but from
the self-induced deconstruction of Western culture.
Andrew A. Michta, The American Interest,
April 12, 2017
● That will require American schools to
teach a lot more history and civics, including the basic Enlightenment
principles of the nation. The bloody and successful civil rights movement of
the recent past was predicated on everyone knowing those principles. Even the
Black Panthers quoted them.
E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Democracy Journal,
Spring 2017
Countries and Regions
19. RUSSIA
● First spread contradictions ***
and then spread conspiracies
EU East Stratcom Task Force,
Disinformation Review, April 20, 2017
● The latest whataboutist
claim on the far left is that what Putin did in 2016 is no worse than what
American consultants did in 1996. That’s nonsense.
Casey Michel, Daily Beast, April 17, 2017
● After every terror attack, the reaction
is sadly the same. Pro-Kremlin outlets all over Europe start spreading
conspiracy theories accusing various European governments, or the EU, or the US
of false flag operations. In the upside-down world of disinformation-oriented
pseudo-media, it is always someone in the West who is responsible for every
tragedy of this kind – except when they claim, perversely, that the tragedy
never happened and was in fact only staged by evil western governments trying
to manipulate their populations.
EU East Stratcom Task Force,
Disinformation Review, April 16, 2017
●
RT is generously funded by the Russian state (around 300 million USD annually)
and its ambitions are high: It wants to “question more”, as one of its slogans
says, and become a global leader among those who feel in opposition to “the
main stream”. As the Russian authorities’ most expensive international prestige
project, it uses sensationalist clickbait in a way which is not very different
from its sister organisation, Sputnik.
EU
East Stratcom Task Force, Disinformation Review, April 13, 2017
●
... most commentators has discussed the future [of Russia] in terms of a
competition symbolically represented as between the television which portrays a
rosy picture of life in Russia and the refrigerator which shows Russians
precisely what their life has become.
But even though the refrigerator has been gaining on television in
recent months, a more important competitor to the state’s TV-centric message
system may have emerged in the shape of the Internet, especially among the
young,
Paul Goble, Window on Eurasia—New Series, April 10, 2017
●
... however skillful Putin's manipulation of public opinion ... Russia's leader
came to understand that his rule needed at least the facsimile of a big idea ....
Eurasianism has proved to be a most useful ideology, a tool for Kremlin
authoritarianism and a channel for mischief-making with the Western hard right.
Andrew Stuttaford, The Weekly Standard,
November 14, 2016
20. UKRAINE
● Russia has also employed a wide array of
so-called hybrid tactics in eastern Ukraine. Sophisticated uses of propaganda
and cyber attacks have joined the use of irregular militias on the battlefield.
In December 2016, a cyber attack against Ukraine’s electrical grid took down a
fifth of the capital’s power consumption at that time of night.
Luke Coffey and Daniel Kochis, The
Heritage Foundation, April 11, 2017
21. FRANCE
●
Almost one in four of the internet links shared by French users of social media
in the run-up to elections were related to fake news, much of which favoured
anti-EU candidates and showed traces of Russian influence, according to a new
study.
Andrew
Rettman, euobserver, April 9, 2017
● Remember all those
Congressional hearings about Russian propaganda, disinformation, fake
news? Not so much now, eh? That is because Russia has shifted its main
effort towards France
Joel
Harding, To Inform is To Influence, April 20, 2017
22. CHINA
South
China Morning Post, April 20, 2017
● . .
.Chinese social media outlets — including microblogging site Weibo and social
messaging app WeChat — are frequently abuzz with the tabloid’s stories. In fact,
the social media feeds of millions of Chinese netizens are filled not only with
translations of the Daily Mail’s stories, but also with a torrent of
misinformation from the West’s now-ubiquitous fake news and conspiracy theory
websites.
Fang Kecheng, Sixth Tone, April 16, 2017
23. NORTH KOREA
● [Jieun Paek] urges greater measures to undermine the
regime’s legitimacy at home by smuggling in information about it and the world
(as some activists are already doing).
Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times, April 20, 2017
24. SYRIA
● Despite statements from the Organisation for the Prohibition of
Chemical Weapons (OPCW) on the incontrovertible laboratory results proving the
use of sarin in the Khan Sheikhun area of southern Idlib in Syria, pro-Kremlin
outlets kept to last week's practice of muddying the waters with disinformation
about the issue.
EU East Stratcom Task Force, Disinformation Review, April 27, 2017
● Over the past few weeks,
we’ve seen a huge spike in the number of online stories which question the
bravery of the White Helmets [rescue workers], or suggest that the recent
chemical attacks were suspicious, or make some other claim that seeks to
confuse you about the war in Syria.
We’ve written this short list
to help you understand why this is happening. 1) Russian trolls *** 2) Heroes
are a problem for Assad *** 3) War crimes are bad for business *** 4) Pro-Assad
bloggers *** 5) Because they can *** The massive growth of social media has
opened up a new front in modern warfare.
The Syria Campaign,
medium.com, April 19, 2017
● As Syrian president Bashar
al-Assad called videos of last week’s chemical attack a “fabrication,” a piece
of propaganda promoted by a Russian cyber operation and bearing the hashtag
#SyriaHoax has gained traction in the United States, analysts tell ABC News.
Brian Ross Megan Christie
James Gordon Meek, ABC News, April 13, 2017
25. SAUDI ARABIA
● Riyadh must go beyond a
narrow definition of counterterrorism and examine its own role in fostering a
climate of extremism. Many counterterrorism issues—particularly the promotion
of extremism abroad via sectarianism and criticism of non-Muslims—touch on core
domestic political issues conducive to the regime’s legitimacy and very
survival. Reforms in these areas will come slowly, at best, and the United
States should expect regression should the regime face a serious challenge to
its reign.
Daniel L. Byman, Brookings,
April 17, 2017
Toolkit
26. EXCHANGES
● When Burn the Ballroom, a rock-band from North Virginia was
performing a public diplomacy tour around the Russian Far East in August 2016,
drummer (and high school football coach) Jack Ivins was thrilled to discover
that young people in this territory share his passion for American football. So
[he recently] returned to Russia and conducted a vigorous sports and music
diplomacy program in the three largest cities of the Russian Far East.... With
football coaching as his day job on this program, he spent his evening carrying
out rock diplomacy.
U.S. Embassy & Consulates in Russia, April 20, 2017
●
To undermine ISIS recruitment efforts, Muslims, overall, need to be treated
fairly. If Muslim minorities got the treatment they deserve, there would be no
need for violence and extremism. By creating anti-Muslim policies and by
alienating the religion, radical responses are created. By incorporating Muslims into society through
public office, cultural exchange programs, clubs, and sports teams, the sense
of undervalue decreases. People who once were angry with the way Muslims were
treated, felt alone, or felt segregated against, will have less of a need to
join a radical organization ....
Egor
Pelevkin, Take Five, April 19, 2017
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