Skilluminati Research

Defense Science Board Report on “Strategic Communication”

Posted Jul 07, 2007

Methodology

Strategic communication requires a sophisticated method that maps perceptions and influence networks, identifies policy priorities, formulates objectives, focuses on ?doable tasks," develops themes and messages, employs relevant channels, leverages new strategic and tactical dynamics, and monitors success. This approach will build on indepth knowledge of other cultures and factors that motivate human behavior. It will adapt techniques of skillful political campaigning, even as it avoids slogans, quick fixes, and mind sets of winners and losers. It will search out credible messengers and create message authority. It will seek to persuade within news cycles, weeks, and months.

Outsourcing PSYOPS

Finding new ways to harness strategic communication to the flexibility and creative imagination of the private sector will be central to successful strategic communication in the 21st century. The commercial sector has a dominant competitive edge in multi-media production, opinion and media surveys, information technologies, program evaluation, and measuring the influence of communications. Academic and research communities offer vast untapped resources for education, training, area and language expertise, planning and consultative services.

Someone in the Pentagon Knows NLP

Frames simplify and help to communicate complex events. But like the Cold War frame, the terrorism frame marginalizes other significant issues and problems: failing states, non-proliferation, HIV/AIDS pandemic, economic globalization, transnational threats other than terrorism, and global warming. Often the terrorism frame directs attention to tactics not strategy. The focus is more on capturing and killing terrorists than attitudinal, political, and economic forces that are the underlying source of threats and opportunities in national security.

Information Age Dynamics

We must also take the measure of new dynamics emerging from the information age. The speed with which information becomes available to the global audience, the convergence of means by which we can capture many different kinds of information (visual, audio, print, etc) in a single digital format, and the ability to get that information to a global audience all suggest some of the advantages and limitations of this information age. Often the first information to reach an audience (a global audience that is really a galaxy of niche audiences) frames how an event is perceived and discussed ? and thus can shape its ultimate impact as well. Always reacting to information is tantamount to losing.

For example, NATO strategists were stunned to discover that Slobodan Milosevic's most effective weapon in the air campaign against him was not, say, an air defense network, but rather the global television network. Digital convergence is only beginning to be understood by decision makers. The significance of a common news language of bit and byte simply cannot be overstated. A truly global network is reshaping politics, diplomacy, warfare ? all social interaction.

Just one example: the ability of a blogger in a conflict zone to capture a digital image of an atrocity, upload it, paste it on a webpage, and have it available to millions in minutes is a startling development.

Download the Defense Science Board report on Strategic Communication