Remember the ill-fated Office of Strategic Influence? I like Der Derian’s summation of its short history:
The Infowar was on, by the Pentagon against the media – and upon disclosure of the existence of OSI, by the media against the Pentagon. The choice of title stacked the deck against the Pentagon. ‘Orwellian’ competed with ‘Kafkaeseque’ as the media’s metaphor du jour.
The Pentagon, says Danger Room, is calling for a new Office of Strategic Deception (although the report linked from 2008 has been out for a while). I can’t decide whether this is brilliant or stupid. Don’t get me wrong, the office is entirely necessary. It’s the name. Half of me says ‘brilliant!’, refreshing disarming honesty about form and function. Anybody want to argue that deception is not integral to war? The other half reckons that good propagandists don’t go by that name. And the outpourings of the Office of ‘Surprise!’ are not too likely to surprise. It’s all highly complex. I suggest, however, that the proportion of expenditure/prominence given to marketers in the fast-moving consumer goods sector is probably not a nad baseline from which to reckon how armed forces ought to be considering the importance of influence.
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Don’t put too much into this “Danger Room” allegation.
The report makes no such statement.
The report is primarily one that describes the need for an ability to detect deception and to prepare against known and unknown surprises. There is buried in the report a recommendation that a “tiger team” be established to investigate what would be necessary to set up an office that would investigate courses of action, offensive and defensive, in areas affecting surprise and deception.
There is no effort to establish an office called “Office of Strategic Deception.” That is an invention of Wired.
There are, however, great advances in the area of dealing with the media and how best to engage them, and number one is not to lie. The media take great pride in exposing lies and don’t generally, mostly, care a wit about national security, especially when something as important as a Pulitzer is at stake. And Cyber is the new battlefield, with the Pentagon receiving daily several hundred thousand to a million attacks against its network, and many of those attacks are from media (shocker!).
Makes one wonder. . .
Forgot to include an excerpt that describes what the Tiger team would do. Here it is (pg 83/84):
“To augment this effort, the USD (I) should stand up a short-
duration tiger team within this center to work out the modalities to:
*elevate counterintelligence to a joint operational component
within DOD with the standing mission of degrading foreign
intelligence capabilities
*enable a robust counterintelligence planning function focused
on foreign intelligence threats
*study analytic insights to support warning analysis and to
inform security programs
Nothing to take your breath away, actually.
Cheers.
Speaking of breath, I will not hold mine in anticipation of this coming to pass. This is another of my home-grown assessments of the way the current “asymmetry” works against the US in the wars in which we are engaged. As our ever-principled media and other “watchdogs” of any nefarious activity of the US have done so successfully since 2001, any effort to “manage” information by the US government (military at least–the civilian side seems to lately be getting a lot of passes in this regard in the fashion (pun intended) of the metaphorical emperor with no clothes) is met with outrage, real or feigned.