The Propaganda War we are losing

A lot will be said here and on other mili-blogs about how the US is winning the war on the ground, how much good we've done for freedom and the people in Iraq and in Afghanstain, while not ignoring the advances the enemy has made as well, but you won't hear any of us bragging about how the US is winning the information war because we aren't.

While they are slowly getting better, the Armed forces are not net saavy, Web 2.0 is not in their vocabulary. That is in part why this an other mili-blogs exist. They were born of that frustration....and of course the frustration that the major Multi-media outlets do not cover anything except the latest US body count.

In a long but worth the read article called The U.S. Counter-propganda Failure in Iraq by by Andrew Garfield at the Middle East Quarterly he touches on how this is working for the enemy and how it isn't working for the coalition. Here are some excerpts but I highly recommend the entire read. I hope US and Coalition commanders are reading it.

In Iraq, while the coalition fumbles its information operations, the insurgents and militia groups are adept at releasing timely messages to undermine support for the Iraqi government and bolster their own perceived potency. They are quick to exploit coalition failures and excesses; they respond rapidly to defend their own actions, often by shifting blame to the authorities; and they hijack coalition successes to argue that change only occurs as a result of their violence. The slow speed of the U.S. military's clearance process—typically it takes three to five days to approve even a simple information operations product such as a leaflet or billboard—creates an information vacuum that Iraqis fill with conspiracy theories and gossip often reflecting the exaggerations or outright lies of insurgents and extremists.

When insurgents, terrorists, and militiamen do attack, they use multimedia to amplify their actions and convey sophisticated messages to multiple audiences. Their strategy is broad; they employ low technology strategies to permeate their themes down to the grassroots and exploit mosques both to convey their point to the faithful and to suggest religious legitimacy. Extremist graffiti provides a constant reminder of their presence. In Baghdad and Fallujah, for example, slogans scrawled on walls and houses extol the virtues of various groups and leaders and condemn the Iraqi government and/or coalition while, in Kirkuk, militiamen scrawl slogans extolling Shi‘i leader Muqtada al-Sadr on building walls in contested neighborhoods.

The insurgents, terrorists, and militiamen are also proficient in high technology messaging. They use SMS text messaging and Iraq's telephone system to intimidate Iraqis and even coalition members. They produce CDs and DVDs, which they distribute widely within communities that U.S. forces and the Iraqi government also seek to influence. To show their prowess, the insurgents often distribute sophisticated videos of an attack on coalition troops within hours of the operation. The Sunni insurgents even have their own television station, Al-Zawraa, which while banned by the Iraqi government, still broadcasts from Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan,[4] even as coalition pressure has forced it to switch satellite hosts several times.[5]

Perhaps the insurgents' and militias' most important tool, though, is the Internet. It provides not only a mass audience but also enables a quick response to Iraqi government and coalition arguments. Both the Islamic Front for Iraqi Resistance and Ansar al-Sunna, two of the largest and most deadly Sunni insurgent or terrorist groups, for example, maintain websites, which reappear in new forms almost as rapidly as the coalition or Iraqi government can shut them down. The videos these websites carry cascade across the Internet and appear quickly on mainstream websites such as LiveVideo.com and YouTube.com.

Here, U.S. authorities handicap themselves. U.S. military lawyers fear "blowback" to U.S. domestic audiences, which they interpret as a violation of the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, which prohibited domestic distribution of propaganda meant for foreign audiences.[7] As a result, U.S. commanders forbid coalition authorities to openly engage on the Internet. This decision has ceded this key tool to the Iraqi insurgents. The insurgents now provide, over the Internet, self-starter kits to transform any disaffected Muslim youth, be he in Ramadi, Rabat or Rochester, into an effective propagandist. Such mass mobilization allows the insurgents to overwhelm at minimal cost the expensive, pedestrian, and ineffective strategic advertising campaigns of the coalition. For example, production of a DVD highlighting insurgent attacks on U.S. troops may cost less than US$100 to make using equipment that costs less than $1,000. Maintaining an Internet bulletin board with postings picked up by Al-Jazeera television and then, perhaps, CNN, may cost as little as $1,500 and certainly no more than $10,000. In contrast, the value of the U.S. military's information contracts exceeds $250,000,000 per year, with only a fraction of the effectiveness of their adversaries.[8]

Coalition information operations are a shadow of their opponents. While the coalition has spent a hundred million dollars on advertising in Iraq,[9] the strategy of re-awarding huge contracts to advertising firms who spend tens of millions of dollars on nationally-broadcast radio and television commercials but who cannot demonstrate effective audience penetration is questionable. Local Iraqi firms have designed the most effective commercials at a relatively low cost. For example, one commercial showing the impact of an improvised explosive device on an Iraqi family cost only $15,000 to make. However, most coalition advertisements, perhaps one hundred times more costly, lack resonance and relevance among ordinary Iraqis, even as they saturate the airwaves.

The failure to coordinate the information campaign has undercut the coalition's mission. There is an interagency process meant to coordinate the coalition's information campaign but, in reality, this becomes a forum for information sharing rather than a mechanism for command and control.

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