Propaganda versus Open Source Intelligence

The LA Times and Knight Ridder have done stories this past week on how the Defense Department has been paying Iraqi newspapers to run US propaganda.

At first I was surprised to see that there were conservatives who were defending the use of propaganda since it seems a bit hypocritical to publicly advocate for democracy while privately paying for propaganda.

Some of the arguments are compelling within the context of a traditional war. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find some even more compelling arguments for using information as a non-violent alternative to military force made by Robert David Steele. Steele has been advocating for Open Source Intelligence for the last 17 years, and I quoted his statements to counter some pro-propaganda arguments in this blog post.

There is a compelling argument for propaganda during war, but Bob Steele makes an even more compelling counter argument for modern information operations (IO) which is the following:

"Modern IO is not about the old messages of PSYOP, but rather about empowering billions of people with both information tools and access to truthful information. It is about education, not manipulation. It is about sharing, not secrecy. It is about human understanding to create wealth and stabilize societies, not about the threat of violence and the delivery of precision munitions. IO substitutes information for violence."

Education would be to accurately represent the merits and disadvantages of BOTH sides of any argument.

You don't get this with Propaganda. You only highlight the benefits of your idea and the disadvantages of the other idea while suppressing the disadvantages of your idea and the advantages of the other ideas.

And so it is an issue of proportionality and emphasis that makes propaganda deceptive and manipulative.

So while you may be able to gain some short-term advantage with propaganda as a communications strategy, in the long-run it's a losing battle in winning the hearts and minds of the people as well as empowering them with the critical thinking skills necessary to be able to govern themselves as a viable democracy.

There's also a lack of transparency that eventually makes your strategic message less credible as soon as people realize that they are being propagandized and not educated.

In war, you could make an argument that the benefits of that short-term time period are critical to the mission. And that may be true.

But as soon as you reach a critical mass of Iraqi citizens who realize that they're not getting a full picture of reality, then the messenger really starts to loose credibility.

In an online draft of his book called "INFORMATION OPERATIONS: All Information, All Languages, All the Time" Bob Steele advocates that Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) should be the backbone to any type of Information Operations (IO) -- and that Strategic Communications has to be based upon this "ground truth."

"IO content can be thought of in two parts: Strategic Communication (the message) and OSINT (the reality). The first cannot be effective without the second. It is not possible to craft the right message, nor to deliver that message to the right person at the right time in the right context, without first understanding “ground truth” at a sub-state level of granularity (tribes, villages, neighborhoods). OSINT is the horse seeing the path, Strategic Communication is the cart carrying the message. One before the other."

The problem with propaganda is that is prioritizes strategic communication above and beyond the ground reality.