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ABSTRACT
While many militaries have tried to capitalize on the potential of information operations in internal war, few have succeeded. I argue that military information campaigns fall short of expectations for two reasons. First, the theory of influence militaries generally embrace – communications as a non-lethal weapons system – is largely invalid. While treating information as a weapons system makes it easier to integrate it into the existing military planning system, this overstates the independent effects of communications on behavior and understates the importance of interactive effects of what commercial marketing theory refers to as the “marketing mix” – product, price, promotion, and placement. It would be more appropriate to treat military information operations as a form of marketing: a composite effort to induce a specific behavior in a target audience by applying a combination of material and ideational instruments. The marketing model suggests that the efficacy of information operations will depend not simply on the message and its delivery (promotion) but on the behavior the sender seeks to induce (the product), the costs of that behavior (the price), and the opportunities available for such behavior (the placement).
Acknowledgements
This article had its origins in a conference paper delivered at the American Political Science Association meeting in Toronto in September 2009. I would like to thanks the members of that panel – Jane Cramer, Jennifer Dixon, Kelly Greenhill, and David Mendeloff – for their thoughtful feedback. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Scott Douglas, Timothy Hoyt, Karl Jackson, Brad Lee, Jon Lindsay, and Joshua Rovner for their insightful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts. The section on surrenders in Malaya and Vietnam builds on an October 2005 joint presentation by Austin Long and myself to the MIT Working Group on Insurgency and Irregular Warfare on amnesty programs in Malaya, Vietnam, and Iraq: “Show Me the Money! Selective Amnesty and Reward Programs in Counterinsurgency.”
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 T.E. Lawrence, “The Evolution of a Revolt,” Army Quarterly and Defence Journal (October 1920), p. 11, http://carl.army.mil/download/csipubs/lawrence.pdf.
2 Julian Paget, Counter-Insurgency Campaigning (London: Faber & Faber 1967), p. 179.
3 Colonel H.R. McMaster in G.J. David and T.R. McKeldin (eds), Ideas as Weapons: Influence and Perception in Modern Warfare (Washington: Potomac Books 2009), xi–xii.
4 Frank Kitson, Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency, and Peacekeeping (Dehradun: Natraj 1992), 77–81, 188–89; Charles Lacheroy, “Guerre révolutionnaire et Arme psychologique,” Ministre de la Defense Nationale, Service d’Action Psychologique et d’Information, 2 July 1957, Service Historique de l’Armée de Terre (SHAT 12T65), 4–6, 11–14.
5 The pattern of late-war enthusiasm for information operations emerges from a number of historical and contemporary cases. In Malaya, Hugh Greene took the first steps to elevate psychological operations in late 1951, three years after the outbreak of the insurgency. In French Indochina, military enthusiasm for propaganda and psychological warfare began to mount under General de Lattre in 1951 and reached its peak between 1952 and 1954; in Algeria, heavy French emphasis on psychological operations began in 1957 with General Salan’s assumption of command. In Algeria in 1957, David Galula observed an emerging division within the French army between “warriors” who saw the conflict as a matter of applying violence to the enemy and the “psychologists” who saw the path to victory in the non-violent control and manipulation of local populations (David Galula, Pacification in Algeria, 1956–1958 [Santa Monica CA: RAND 1963], 65.). In short, high levels of military interest in psychological operations lagged the outbreak of insurgency by two to four years; this is broadly similar to the peak in US interest in information operations in Iraq in the 2006–07 period (Kumar Ramakrishna, Emergency Propaganda: The Winning of Malayan Hearts and Minds, 1948–1958 [Richmond: Curzon Press 2002]; Paul Villatoux and Catherine Villatoux, La République et son armée face au “péril subversive:” Guerre et action psychologiques, 1945–1960 [Paris: Les Indes Savantes 2005]; Raoul Salan, Mémoires: Fin d’un empire, L’Algérie française [Paris: Presses de la Cite 1972], 60; Peter Mansoor, The Surge: My Journey with General Petraeus and the Remaking of the Iraq War [New Haven: Yale University Press 2013], 108–09; David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One [New York: Oxford University Press 2009], 299–300).
6 Arguably, organisational incapacity is a third explanation for military underperformance in wartime information operations. When militaries develop an interest in information operations, it is often too late to build or acquire the expertise and organisational structure to implement an effective communications/marketing strategy. A valid theory of influence and an understanding of the specific dynamics of influence in internal war are necessary but not sufficient conditions for successful influence campaigns.
7 Ramakrishna, Emergency Propaganda, 12–15; Huba Waas de Czege, “Unifying Physical and Psychological Impact During Operations,” Military Review (March–April 2009), 13–14.
8 Daniel Lerner, Psychological Warfare against Nazi Germany: The Sykewar Campaign, D-Day to VE Day (Cambridge MA: MIT Press 1971), 5–6. Lerner’s definition is itself a refinement of Harold Lasswell’s earlier definition: “Propaganda refers solely to the control of opinion by significant symbols, or, to speak more concretely and less accurately, by stories, rumors, reports, pictures and other forms of social communication. Propaganda is concerned with the management of opinions and attitudes by the direct manipulation of social suggestion rather than by altering other conditions in the environment or in the organism” (Harold D. Lasswell, Propaganda Technique in WWI [Cambridge MA: MIT Press 1927], 9)
9 Harold D. Lasswell, “The Garrison State,” American Journal of Sociology 46 (1941), 455–68.
10 US Army Field Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency (2006), 5-29–5-31; UK Army Field Manual 1-10 (AFM 1-10), Countering Insurgency (2009), 6-8–6-13, 7-A-3.
11 Frank Hoffman, “Maneuvering against the Mind,” in G.J. David and T.R. McKeldin (eds), Ideas as Weapons: Influence and Perception in Modern Warfare (Washington: Potomac Books 2009), 106–08; Erin McDaniel and Julio Perez, “How to Visualize and Shape the Information Operations Environment,” Field Artillery (November–December 2006), 26–33; Frank Lewidge, Losing Small Wars: British Military Failure in Iraq and Afghanistan (New Haven: Yale University Press 2011), 212–13; T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph (London: Doubleday, Doran 1934), 195.
12 Peter Chiarelli and Patrick Michaelis, “Winning the Peace: The Requirement for Full Spectrum Operations,” Military Review (July–August 2005), 14–15; Thomas Metz, Mark Garrett, James Hutton, and Timothy Bush, “Massing Effects in the Information Domain: A Case Study in Aggressive Information Operations,” Military Review (May–June 2006), 5–6.
13 For the French military of the 1950s and 1960s, Serge Chaokotin’s book, The Rape of the Masses: The Psychology of Totalitarian Political Propaganda (New York: Haskell House 1971), was the most important influence on the advocates of psychological warfare. Chaoktin argued that crowds responded in Pavlovian fashion to the introduction of potent symbols. In a recent set of articles on American information operations, General Waas de Czege cited Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Back Bay Books 2000) as a model for inducing and predicting rapid changes in social behaviour. What the two works share is an emphasis on the patterns and mechanisms of transmission over the content of the ideas and the preferences of the individuals in question. Military amateurs in information operations are attracted to such ideas because they suggest that skilful delivery is more important than message content, product, or consumer preferences. Military audiences seldom seek to validate the popular theories they embrace; adoption has less to do with the empirical validity or academic opinion of a theory than with the results promised.
14 I owe this important insight on the costs of integration to my colleague, Jon Lindsay.
15 US Army Field Manual 3-09.12, Tactics, Techniques and Procedures for Field Artillery Target Acquisition (2002), Chapter 1.
16 Michael Flynn, Rich Juergens, and Thomas Cantrell, “Employing ISR: SOF Best Practices,” Joint Forces Quarterly 50 (2008), 57.
17 US Joint Publication 3-60, Joint Targeting (2007), II-12.
18 US Army Field Manual 3-24.2, Tactics in Counterinsurgency (2009), 4-25–4-30; David Propes, “Targeting 101: Emerging Targeting Doctrine,” Fires (March–April 2009), 15–17.
19 Ralph Baker, “The Decisive Weapon: A Brigade Combat Team Commander’s Perspective,” Military Review (May–June 2006), 20; Hoffman, “Maneuvering against the Mind,” 108; British Army Field Manual 1-10, Countering Insurgency, 6-B-1-1; Lewidge, Losing Small Wars, 212.
20 McDaniel and Perez, “How to Visualize and Shape the Information Environment,” 26–33; Chris W. Wendland, “Brigade Combat Team Fire Support Coordination in Operation Iraqi Freedom: Targeting by Logical Lines of Operation,” Field Artillery Journal (March/April 2007), 42–45; Christopher D. Compton, “The Task Force Fire Support Officer in a Model for Full Spectrum Planning,” Field Artillery Journal (January/February 2006), 28–35.
21 Militaries can use various elements of their intelligence organisations to collect data on population behaviour and motivation. Communications intercepts, captured documents, local agents, and prisoner interrogations have all proven useful sources of data in past historical cases.
22 For a more detailed discussion of the information-processing dynamics of counterinsurgency, see Colin Jackson, “Defeat in Victory: Organizational Learning Dysfunction in Counterinsurgency,” PhD dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2008, 70–77. More recently Major General Michael Flynn has made similar observations about the military’s excessive emphasis on targeting enemy organizations (Michael Flynn, Matt Pottinger, and Paul Batchelor, “Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan,” Center for a New American Security, January 2010.
23 Millward Brown, “Communication’s role in building brand equity,” http://www.millwardbrown.com/Sites/MillwardBrown/Media/Pdfs/en/KnowledgePoints/B26B38C0.pdf.
24 E. Jerome McCarthy, Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach (Homewood IL: Irwin 1960).
25 David Court, Dave Elzinga, Susie Mulder, and Ole Jorgen Vetvik, “The Consumer Decision Journey,” McKinsey Quarterly 3 (2009), 1–11; McKinsey, “Unlock your financial brand: create value by focusing on ‘high-impact attributes’,” Marketing Practice, April 2001, http://www.mckinsey.com/practices/marketing/ourknowledge/pdf/Solutions_UnlockYourFinancialBrand.pdf; Thomas E. Barry, “The Development of the Hierarchy of Effects: An Historical Perspective,” Current Issues and Research in Advertising 9/2 (1987), 251–95.
26 Millward Brown, “Communication’s role in building brand equity,” 2.
27 Millward Brown, “What are the main influences on purchase decisions,” Knowledge Point, February 2008, http://www.millwardbrown.com/Sites/MillwardBrown/Media/Pdfs/en/KnowledgePoints/D4EFADF4.pdf.
28 Huba Waas de Czege, “Keeping Friends and Gaining Allies: The Indivisible Challenge of Military Public Relations,” Military Review (May–June 2009), 58.
29 Waas de Czege and other military authors have argued that the differences between the commercial marketing environment and the military one are so vast that the commercial analogy is not a useful guide to action in the latter domain. This argument is overdrawn. While it is true that the environments differ in important respects, the problems of behavioural influence and the strategic challenges of managing the affects of multiple instruments are similar.
30 Stathis Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2006), 104–06.
31 As Roger Petersen has noted (Resistance and Rebellion: Lessons from Eastern Europe [New York: Cambridge University Press 2001]), individual choices in civil wars are made in a social context. Individuals weigh not only their own preferences but the decisions of those around them. To use the marketing analogy, early adopters (or what Petersen refers to as “zero threshold actors”) may bear the greatest potential costs in resistance behaviour and at the same time play a role in triggering subsequent choices by more reticent actors in the community.
32 James D. Fearon, “Rationalist Explanations for War,” International Organization 39 (Summer 1995), 379–414; James D. Fearon, “Ethnic war as a commitment problem,” August 1995, http://www.stanford.edu/~jfearon/papers/ethcprob.pdf.
33 In many cases, the state authorities go to great lengths to reduce the cost of such behaviours by concealing the identities of collaborators. Security recruits may be employed outside of their local neighbourhoods, or may use ski masks to conceal their identities. Similarly, the state may set up anonymous tip lines to reduce the perceived cost of passing information to the authorities. I am grateful to my colleague Scott Douglas for highlighting the significance of these concealment strategies.
34 David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (St Petersburg: Hailer Press 2005), 14–15.
35 Douglas Pike, PAVN: People’s Army of Vietnam (Novato CA: Presidio Press 1986), 233–52.
36 Thomas L. Ahern, Jr, CIA and Rural Pacification in South Vietnam (Washington: Center for the Study of Intelligence 2001), 129.
37 These groups play roughly the same role as market researchers engaged in qualitative projects such as focus groups.
38 Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence, 92–96.
39 David Hackett Fischer, Washington’s Crossing (New York: Oxford University Press 2004)) 346–62; Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962 (New York: Penguin Books 1987), 340; Charles Ailleret, Général du Contingent en Algérie, 1960–1962 (Paris: Bernard Grasset 1998), 48.
40 Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence, 116–17.
41 Henry Assael, Consumer Behavior and Marketing Action (Cincinnati: South-Western College 1998), 344; James Lenskold, Marketing ROI: The Path to Campaign, Customer, and Corporate Profitability (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003), 10–17.
42 Petersen, Resistance and Rebellion, 8–10.
43 Roger Trinquier, La guerre moderne (Paris: Economica 2008), 49–50.
44 Ramakrishna, Emergency Propaganda, 81, 115.
45 Kumar Ramakrishna, “‘Bribing the Reds to Give up:’ Rewards Policy in the Malayan Emergency,” War in History 9/3 (2002), 337.
46 Hugh Carelton Greene as quoted in Ramakrishna, Emergency Propaganda, 83.
47 Ramakrishna, Emergency Propaganda, 84.
48 Ramakrishna, “‘Bribing the Reds to Give up’,” 337.
49 Hugh Carleton Greene as quoted in ibid., 338.
50 Ramakrishna, “‘Bribing the Reds to Give up’,” 339.
51 C.C. Chin and Karl Hack (eds), Dialogues with Chin Peng: New Light on the Malysian Communist Party (Singapore: Singapore University Press 2004), 14–15; Ramakrishna, Emergency Propaganda, 100–02.
52 Robert Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency: The Lessons of Malaya and Vietnam (New York: Praeger, 1966), 92.
53 Chin Peng, My Side of History (Singapore: Media Masters 2003), 273–74; Robert Komer, The Malayan Emergency in Retrospect: The Organization of a Successful Counterinsurgency Effort (Santa Monica CA: RAND 1972), 72–75; Ramakrishna, “‘Bribing the Reds to Give up’,” 340. The US dollar equivalent sums were calculated using the contemporary exchange rates and then inflated using consumer price index: http://www.measuringworth.org/datasets/exchangeglobal/result.php.
54 Ramakrishna, Emergency Propaganda, 106–07.
55 Ibid., 111, 115.
56 Ramakrishna, “‘Bribing the Reds to Give up’,” 342. For the methodology used in converting Malaysian dollars to equivalent US dollar sums, see footnote 53.
57 Richard Stubbs, Hearts and Minds in Guerilla Warfare: The Malayan Emergency, 1948–1960 (Singapore: Eastern Universities Press 2004), 187.
58 Ramakrishna, Emergency Propaganda, 215.
59 Peng, My Side of History, 398–403.
60 Lucian W. Pye, Guerrilla Communism in Malaya (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press 1956); Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency.
61 Lucian Pye, Some Observations on the Chieu Hoi Program (Santa Monica CA: RAND 1966); J.C. Donnell, G.J. Pauker, and J.J. Zasloff, Viet Cong Motivation and Morale in 1964: A Preliminary Report (Santa Monica CA: RAND 1965); L. Goure, A.J. Russo, and D. Scott, Some Findings of the Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Study: June–December 1965 (Santa Monica CA: RAND 1966).
62 J.A. Koch, The Chieu Hoi Program in South Vietnam, 1963–1971 (Santa Monica CA: RAND 1973), 108.
63 Ibid., 23.
64 Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency, 92.
65 Pye, Some Observations on the Chieu Hoi Program, 8; Koch, The Chieu Hoi Program in South Vietnam, 38–39.
66 The French war in Algeria stands as a prime example of the aggregate failure of influence operations in civil war. In spite of massive and prolonged investments in psychological operations, the French struggled to prompt widespread changes in individual and collective behaviour (Villatoux and Villatoux, La République et son armée face au “péril subversive”; Peter Paret, French Revolutionary Warfare from Indochina to Algeria: The Analysis of a Political and Military Doctrine [London: Pall Mall Press 1964], 53–66; Mouloud Feraoun, Journal, 1955–1962: Reflections on the French–Algerian War, trans. Mary Ellen Wolf [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 2000], 184–85, 201–03, 251, 265–66, 275–76; Khaled Nezzar, Algérie: Journal de Guerre (1954–1962) [Paris: Editions Publisud 2004], 49–51, 58–59, 216–19; Dalila Ait-El Djoudi, La guerre d’Algerie vue par l’ALN, 1954–1962: L’Armée française sous le regard des combattants algeriéns [Paris: Éditions Autrement 2007], 134–40, 197–99, 209–12; Camille Lacoste-Dujardin, Opération Oiseau Bleu: Des Kabyles, des Ethnologues, et la Guerre d’Algérie [Paris: Éditions de la Découverte 1997]; Charles Schweisguth, Journal de Kabylie [Paris: Éditions Privat 2006], 26, 63, 88, 115–19, 139–40).
67 is drawn from J.A. Koch’s RAND study, The Chieu Hoi Program in South Vietnam, 23.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Colin F. Jackson
Colin F. Jackson is an Associate Professor of Strategy at the U.S. Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island. In 2011, Lieutenant Colonel Jackson served in uniform as the Executive Officer for Policy Planning in the ISAF Headquarters, Kabul, Afghanistan.