Strategic communication in asymmetric conflict

Abstract

This article examines the war of ideas under conditions of asymmetric conflict, focusing on how advantages are achieved through the pioneering use of techniques not available to the other side, and how weaknesses are turned into strengths. Deploying an analysis based on competitive entry into markets for loyalties, the article categorizes the ways groups excluded from national debates can break through and substantially change the distribution of allegiances in a target audience. Four cases are considered: (1) a weak player struggles to enter a marketplace in which entry is strongly regulated; (2) a strong external player seeks to enter or alter a weakly regulated marketplace; (3) a strong state uses asymmetric techniques against another strong state; and (4) weak players struggle to enter a weakly regulated marketplace.

Keywords::

• soft power
• soft war
• asymmetric information warfare
• international broadcasting
• Iran

Notes

^1. For issues of coverage and their consequences, see “Media Coverage in Asymmetric Conflict,” a special issue of Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict, edited by Ifat Maoz & Menahem Blondheim (2010).

^2. For insight into the general concept, see FM 3-24, U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Manual. A thorough explanation is contained in Clark McCauley & Sophia Moskalenko (2010).

^3. See: “21st Century Statecraft” (2013); Drezner (2001). The ambiguous results of this ongoing effort have been captured by critics. For instance, see Morozov (2010).

^4. Consider Putnam's well-known two-level game theory, where strategic communicators look to both “home” and “target” markets even as they engage with the asymmetry within the target market citation.

^5. My focus is on transborder contexts – where the entity trying to penetrate the market is outside its boundaries, but that condition is not essential for understanding (and questioning) this taxonomy.

^6. Gandhi's Satayghara is also relevant as an embodiment of turning weakness into strength, of using unorthodox techniques effectively to alter large-scale popular allegiances. Take an account of Gandhi's participation in the famous Dandi March, a protest against a salt policy of the colonial power. He saw the march not only as a non-violent weapon of struggle against injustice, but “also as a medium of dialogue and communication with the people along the route of the march.” The march became a series of events, of moments to alter consciousness. See: Dandavate (2005).The effectiveness of Gandhi's philosophy and methodology – in a context where disadvantageous weakness was turned to strength – altered the textbook of strategic communication. This was the trajectory of the civil rights revolution in the US and decades beyond in the color revolutions in Ukraine, Lebanon and Georgia. What for Gandhi had been innovation, experimentation and, to some extent spontaneous endorsement of a particular philosophy, became more programmed, financed, virtually industrialized at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. Nonviolence, demonstration, crowd accretion, developing support – all this began to have a playbook, a circle of philanthropy and NGO support (and certainly in many cases support from states).

^7. For a discussion of IRFA and examples of US concern, see http://www.state.gov/j/drl/irf/

^8. An extensive discussion of the technical and policy aspects of circumvention appears in a series of reports published by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. See a listing at: “Circumvention Publications”.

^9. The figure – sometimes as large as $50 million – has been in circulation at least in the 2007–2012 period, with US strategic interests articulated in explicit and implicit forms. See, for instance: “Groups ask US for funds to break China ‘firewall’” (2010); Diehl (2010); Gaouette & Greeley (2011).

^10.“VOICE Act”. There are ironies in this condemnation of techniques given that they may be used by democracies as well; see: Morozov (2011).

^11. A selection of Taliban night letters targeting teachers and schools are available at: “Lessons in Terror”. Also see Foxley (2010).

^12. The US recently retired the term PSYOPs in favor of MISO (“Military Information Support Operations”), defining it as “Planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign government's organizations, groups, and individuals in a manner favorable to the originator's objectives.” See: Joint Chiefs of Staff (2013).

^13. Foxley (2007). A later report by Foxley suggested that his earlier recommendations and conclusions stood (see Foxley, 2010).

^14. For a more extended treatment of this Radio in a Box experiment, see Price & Jacobson (2011).

^15. One could say that Article 19 is ambiguous on what constitutes a threat to the public order. A government might consider that cascading discussion and mass demonstration that seeks to bring about a change in power is by definition a threat to public order.