Our dysfunctional relationship with information warfare starts with leadership

Can we stop focusing only on the symptoms?

As sure as the sun will rise tomorrow, you can expect an article or a conference speaker declaring the US is losing the information war against its adversaries. While painfully true, regardless of how you define information warfare, the blame and wistful nostalgia often accompanying the laments are likely to be untethered from reality. This poor framing tends to focus on symptoms rather than on the root causes. The common result is a misdiagnosis of the underlying problems followed by recommendations that are more likely to repeat and amplify defects than to correct them.

The most recent article in this genre that misses the forest from the trees, to switch metaphors, is “The US needs a better strategic narrative or it will cede influence to China” (FT.com, 18 February 2024) by Mike Studeman, “recently retired as a US Rear Admiral in naval information warfare and was the former Commander of the Office of Naval Intelligence.” I have some comments. I should make clear that Studeman’s piece is better than average because he expands the aperture to include too often ignored symptoms of the US’s defective view of information warfare.

If you don’t want to read further, the bottom line is we’re in this position by choice. Leadership from the White House on down, for about seven, not three decades, have made decision after decision to marginalize, deprioritize, limit, degrade, and segregate the informational element from the making and execution of policy. This segregation is so entrenched that information is viewed as something distinct from policy, with resulting calls like “putting the I back into DIME,” as if the so-called D(iplomacy), M(ilitary), and E(conomic) elements of power didn’t rely wholly on information.¹ Segregating information amounts to shifting responsibility of the informational element of policy to another office, agency, or department, or complaining that it should be the responsibility of some non-existent organization, all of which is intended to conveniently absolve the original actor of responsibility.

Segregating information amounts to shifting the responsibility of the informational element of policy to another office, agency, or department, or complaining that it should be the responsibility of some non-existent organization, all of which is intended to conveniently absolve the original actor of responsibility.

Let me start with some background for new readers. I spent nearly the last twenty years in and around this topic as an academic, including earning a Master in Public Diplomacy, a blogger, a contracted expert to various Defense Department activities, and convening conferences on this topic (including this and this). I also worked with various State Department offices and supported Members and staff in Congress, including helping cause and write legislation related to this subject (including the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012) and helping cause and launch a Caucus on Strategic Communication and Public Diplomacy in the House. I served as the executive director of a government commission dual-hatted to conduct oversight and advocacy regarding public diplomacy with access across executive branch departments and agencies and Congress, and held a Senate-confirmed Presidential appointment leadership position (to which Senators approached and recruited me for as a subject matter expert) of a relevant federal agency. These roles allowed me to participate in high-side, low-side, and public conversations across the executive and legislative branches, and with domestic and foreign media, and governments in allied nations and less-than-allied nations at all levels, and in-person in places like Kabul, Doha, Vilnius, Brussels, Jakarta, Moscow, and Beijing. I was sanctioned by Russia in 2022. At present, I’m writing my PhD dissertation on how the US responded to Russian political warfare in the early cold war of 1945 to the early 1960s. That’s not to say I know more than the next person; it’s just that this is not new ground for me.

Definitions

Terms matter. Sometimes. Maybe not here. Studeman’s “strategic narrative,” besides also meaning tactical, focuses the mind on telling a story as if there is a magic combination of words and pictures. Studeman probably didn’t use the more common “information warfare” as it has a specific, and often tactical, meaning at his prior workplace. The term I prefer is political warfare, which focuses on the intent while leaving open the means. Begrudgingly, I’ll use information warfare for convenience as it is the more common term despite it focusing on a munition. We can argue this is a quibble over labels, but terms like “strategic narrative” reflect a deep dysfunction in conceptualizing and integrating the informational element of policy with policy.²

Symptoms

As I noted above, I like Studeman’s article because of his attention to symptoms that reveal leadership priorities over years and decades. Each bullet point below could easily be expanded into a chapter or dedicated research paper, of which I’m sure several exist for each.

• “We have placed less emphasis on training…”

• “[We are unable] to engage in information warfare at the speed and scale required…”

• “We have created barriers to releasing information…”

• “Our default mode for dissemination is more reactive than proactive.”

• “[T]he National Security Council exerts excessively tight discipline on…messaging”

• “[T]he White House fails to connect the dots for the American public…”

Each statement above is the result of decisions made and decisions avoided at all levels, from the President to Cabinet Secretaries to service chiefs (in the case of the Pentagon) to undersecretaries and assistant secretaries, and continuing on down. The buck stops nowhere when it comes to information, except, that is, with the mythological USIA. Studeman opened his article by declaring, “Over the past 30 years, America’s information instrument has been neglected.” To be clear, this is a problem that extends back well over three decades. The symptoms he calls out are each an example of insecurity. Not doing something is the safer course. CYA is the basic operating principle because it’s allowed to be. An errant munition is easily explained if the boom is literal, but a figurative boom of an errant information munition causes people to preemptively run for cover. It’s explosion versus implosion.

Studeman is right to decry the training aspect, but this could refer to either the training of individuals in the informational side or of educating leadership – and oversight – on the utility, role, value, means, risks, and necessary resources for integrating information into policy and operations. The two are not the same, though they are related. On the more traditional training side, as a Navyman, is Studeman considering the Military Information Support Operations or Psychological Operations units?³ These troops exist but they have traditionally been marginalized, similar to public diplomacy personnel at the State Department, and may be shrinking and becoming more marginalized as the Army increases its focus on “traditional” war. A recent headline seems relevant here: “US may cut info-warfare assets as China, Russia expand influence ops.” This is a decision by leadership.

A deeper conversation on this topic would include questioning the utility of separating the MISO/PSYOP troops between active and reserve components if the informational element is truly to be integrated at the strategic level and not merely constrained to tactical operations. And what of Civil Affairs, Foreign Area Officers, or the integrators under the Information Operations title? Such a deeper analysis would inquire into the comparative functional relationships between a combatant commander at different levels with their Public Affairs Officer, their JAG (the lawyer), and their PSYOPer. Each has a different primary interest, with (to generalize for the sake of the argument) one focusing on ways to achieve the commander’s objective, which may not necessitate obliterating a target, while the others consider acceptable parameters based on how the action will play at home or what is permissible under the law of armed conflict. We can see leadership training and accountability at work here.

It would also inquire into the status of broadly defined information warfare as commonly understood at the military’s “schoolhouses,” including the Army War College, Navy War College, National Defense University, and the Defense Information School, to name a few. This reminds me of a statement from 1965 that seems relevant and applicable today:

American defense plans during the past decade have carefully and expensively prepared to fight the only kind of war we are least likely to face. And we have not in any major sense prepared to fight the kind of war both Russia and China surely intend to press…

Regarding the Defense Information School, or DINFOS, is it less common now that a uniform PAO exits the room when a PSYOPer enters to avoid the taint by proximity? That had been going away a long time ago, but I heard it was returning. Is there still a culture of “I inform, I do not influence” within the military public affairs community?⁴ Studeman’s critique would certainly speak to that. This reminds me of an incident in Afghanistan a good number of years ago where a Taliban bomb killed women and children. As the ISAF PAO prepared the press release that it wasn’t NATO, the Taliban beat them to the punch and blamed NATO. The PAO, who I strongly suspect was an American (but I didn’t confirm this detail at the time), set aside their press statement without releasing it, saying the matter was now out of their hands because the PAO “doesn’t do counter-propaganda.”

On the civilian side, if senior leadership were seriously interested in the informational element, there would have been different hiring criteria for the Under Secretary of State of Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, the office would not have been left vacant for nearly half of the past quarter-century it existed as a functional replacement to the USIA Director, and there would have been a push to hire, train, equip, and empower the State Department’s information officers. But this Under Secretary office continues to be irrelevant and the department’s front-line professionals continue to be marginalized.

Interested readers might enjoy an excellent analysis from May 2021 by Uliana Artamonova, then a junior research fellow at Russia’s IMEMO: “Faceless Leadership of American Public Diplomacy: HR Crisis in the Post-Bipolar Era” (the linked PDF is stored on mountainrunner.us). Artamonova shared her article with me in March 2022. From her abstract:

Comparison demonstrates a considerable change of patterns: since 1999 persons in charge of American public diplomacy have been changing more often and the position itself stayed vacant longer then it did in 20th century. There have been many acting nominees during the past decade whereas in the time of USIA there has been none. In addition, [this] article studies [the] characteristics of directors of USIA and of Under Secretaries of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. Analysis of education, professional background, personal relationship with the president (or lack of thereof) demonstrated that standards for candidates for the position of Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs are significantly lower than the ones that were applied to candidates for the directorship of the USIA.

I recommend Artamonova’s paper to anyone truly interested in this subject. The gaps in appointments, resulting in “acting nominees” as she calls them, reflect the discounting of this position by the President, his National Security Advisor, and the Secretary of State, to name a few. Positioned to be the nation’s Chief International Information Officer and successor to the Director of USIA, seemingly everyone in and outside of government ignores this office when talking about the nation’s information warfare requirements as the result of years of leadership shortfalls.

Shifting to Studeman’s “connect the dots” at home, this may speak to the need for education and awareness, but I don’t think so. I have many experiences revealing the lack of knowledge, understanding, and awareness of what is needed and why among policymakers and legislators. This demands more education and awareness building. In effect, there needs to be an engagement campaign to discuss the need to resource and empower engagement campaigns. One example is the previously mentioned, and short-lived, House Caucus on Strategic Communication and Public Diplomacy I helped cause and bring about. The knowledge deficit is great, however. As a Governor on the then-named Broadcasting Board of Governors, now the US Agency for Global Media, I was astounded by how many Members of Congress on our oversight committees expressed some level of surprise that we existed and an equal amount of ignorance as to what we did and why. This was as much a result of incurious (and sometimes arrogant) Members and staff as much as an agency bent on hiding under the radar thinking it was in their best interest.

Studeman wrote, “Our information teams tend to be small and scattered across government.” He may have meant this as evidence of dysfunction since he followed it up with some USIA mythology. Whether taken as a stand-alone statement or in conjunction with the reference to USIA, it reveals the wrong-headed view that information is someone else’s problem when it is everyone’s. There should be numerous teams scattered across the government who should be working together in concept and practice rather than like isolated islands without pressure to integrate and no accountability for failing to do so. USIA, however, despite its name, was not the integrator, director, or owner of such outposts as is often imagined.

(Ir)relevancy of History

Truth be told, it is fine to leave USIA out of these discussions. We can look at history for lessons, but that history has to be accurate. Studeman wrote,

We no longer have a central US Information Agency (USIA), as we did to counter Russian propaganda during the cold war. Its closest equivalents are the state department’s Global Engagement Center and the US Agency for Global Media, with only a fraction of the former USIA’s capacity.

Yes, USIA had “information” in its name, but countering Russian propaganda was not a key mission of the agency. It did, but not in the way people think it did and want today. It’s misleading to suggest USIA had the role demanded by arguments like Studeman’s or Robert Gates or most others complaining about the loss of USIA. For the quick proof, I usually mention the Active Measures Working Group established in 1981 as an interagency collective established to counter Russian disinformation because “attempts to counter Soviet disinformation had virtually disappeared” by the mid-1970s.

Further, USIA represents the fracturing of an integrated model, as Chris Paul and I wrote in our July 2022 article, “False myths about USIA blind us to our problems… and to possible solutions.” Studeman, like so many others tethered to a mythologized USIA, isn’t aware USIA had only a fraction of its predecessor’s capacity, authority, integration, and leadership responsibilities in the State Department, the National Security Council, and across other government agencies, including the Defense Department and foreign aid and redevelopment programs. There’s also confusion about the difference between an operational agency and a coordinating body, like a National Security Council-like entity, which, some imagine USIA was when it wasn’t.

The false mythology around USIA can be seen in describing GEC and USAGM as the “closest equivalents” of USIA. GEC is not a remnant of USIA. It is a modern creation to address departmental dysfunction and lack of function. The legislative authorization to replace the authorization by executive order was, in my view, an unconscious, half-effort to recreate USIA.

While the US Agency for Global Media is a remnant of USIA, it’s not clear to me that USAGM has “a fraction” of the capacity of when the broadcast operations were under USIA.⁵

The real remnants, which are ignored for reasons discussed earlier, is the now abolished (see a theme here?) Bureau of International Information Programs and the public affairs sections and libraries (“information resource centers”) at embassies and consulates abroad. IIP was broken up into parts to remake the State Department’s Bureau of Public Affairs into the aspirational Bureau of Global Public Affairs, the success of which is to be questioned, not the least of which by the mere existence of Studeman’s arguments.

As for the public affairs sections, they are the completely ignored yet very real legacy of USIA. The hard-working, under-resourced, under-staffed, often marginalized (especially within the department), and often improperly tasked public and cultural affairs staff, information resource center personnel, and others under the broad “public diplomacy” umbrella were USIA’s real strength and real value to US foreign policy. The modern narrative tends to focus on USIA’s ability to hurl electrons into foreign lands, to paraphrase Edward R. Murrow, but USIA getting its people into the “last three feet” to directly engage foreigners abroad was its real power. These offices, these people, these capabilities still exist. There is little respect for their potential, a fact reflected in the discounting of the value of the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs discussed earlier.

Honestly, though, this past can be irrelevant to discussions like this. Studeman didn’t need to invoke USIA and I wonder if an early draft didn’t include USIA. In my experience, it’s possible, even likely, that a reviewer or the editor insisted on inserting USIA based on what they think they know.

Say-Do Gap

In

Daniel W. Drezner

’s response to Studeman’s piece, he wrote he was old enough to “remember past efforts to improve U.S. public diplomacy” and that though “there was a lot of hair-pulling about whether the United States was doing a good job at information campaigns” it was “only in retrospect that commentators felt good about the U.S. performance.” I’m not sure what retrospective Drezner refers to, but it’s probably a mix of shifting the goalposts and focusing on the 1970s onward, a vastly different information and political environment than the present, which is more like the early cold war than the latter Cold War. On the public diplomacy side, I’m old enough to remember there was a lot of jabbering about the pixie dust of public diplomacy without any substance around leadership, resourcing, integration, or, really, anything else substantive. The “eroding appeal of the message itself,” as Drezner rightly pointed out, is about the failure to craft policies that match our words and values where the mutuality between policy and perceptions should have meant information programs complemented, clarified, and assisted but instead were used to put lipstick on a pig or change the subject.⁶

The Propaganda of Propaganda

A discussion about the irony of misinformation surrounding our efforts to counter misinformation must include at least a mention of the propaganda of propaganda. Significant limits on US information activities conducted abroad stem from full-throated attacks on USIA, Voice of America, and the then-wholly separate Radio Free Europe in the 1960s. This culminated in a 1972 amendment to the Smith-Mundt Act that set the course for the modern narrative it is a law designed to prevent the government from propagandizing Americans. Resulting misinformation led to falsified histories and unsupported statements the Act prevents Defense activities, and likely had a role in Studeman’s examples. This continues despite the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 explicitly stating this Title 22 law that calls out the State Department, USIA, BBG, and USAGM does not in some magical way apply to the Title 10 or Title 22 activities of the Defense Department. Such magical broader applications were selective at best, as is apparent in law review articles on this Act that employ absurdly broad strokes of language and demonstrate ignorance of the letter and construct of the law and US Code. (See my Fulbright’s “Knee-capping” of US Global Engagement, Part 2 for more on this.) The propaganda of propaganda hampers conceptualizing and discussing information warfare in Congress and throughout the executive branch.

Attempts to inform foreign or domestic audiences are quickly labeled as propaganda. Fear of the propaganda of propaganda is an easily identified failure of leadership. Through the delays, inaction, and rejected action that Studeman wrote about, leadership contorts themselves to pass the buck partly out of fear of the “five-dollar, five-syllable word” Eisenhower, as a candidate for president in 1952, said we need to stop fearing. To communicate is to influence and we need to communicate as part of our foreign policy and national security. I’m communicating here, by the definition of some, this note is propaganda, but is that a useful label?

A July 1945 State Department report explained the need for a postwar international information program this way: “Modern international relations lie between peoples, not merely governments… International information activities are integral to the conduct of foreign policy.” In 1947, the Secretary of State restated the need this way:

There was a time we could afford—or thought we could afford —to be unconcerned about what other people thought of us… That time is past… Our attitude and our actions—and rumors thereof—will be matters of concern everywhere.⁷

Maginot Line

Our insistence on focusing on the military means of dissuasion has long proven to be a Maginot Line that our adversaries are getting better at circumventing. Information warfare is written about today as something new because we’re ignorant. We weren’t better at it thirty or twenty-five years ago. It’s not new to our adversaries. For some of our adversaries, notably Russia, it is not just part of their Soviet history, but a part of the Tsarist history as well.⁸

Information warfare, or broader political warfare, is cheap and effective. Naturally, our adversaries pursue this asymmetric course of action to our detriment. They’d be dumb not to, especially since our ever-increasing reliance on military might to dissuade has an ever-rising threshold for employment. Our deterrence is based on fighting a war that we hope never comes and one that our adversaries aren’t waging directly against us. 

There are lessons to be learned, but the fake history in these writings are ignorant of past shortcomings and, as a result, ignorant of the lessons to be learned. If they understood the history, the role of the President’s will – to act, to provide resources, to integrate with the making and execution of policy, and to hold accountable the many agency actors, even if there is one notional central agency – is paramount. We are in the position we are today because of decisions and non-decisions by leaders across government for decades.

I’ll close with one of my two favorite quotes on this topic. This is Senator Thomas J. Dodd speaking in February 1961:

We have lost and lost and lost in the cold war for one primary reason: we have been amateurs fighting against professionals. So long as we remain amateurs in the critical field of political warfare, the billions of dollars we annually spend on defense and foreign aid will provide us with a diminishing measure of protection.

This remains, unfortunately, true.

1. The DIME metaphor is a prime example of the broken vision of information in the US national security discussions. The DIME components are neither co-equal nor are they actually “elements of power.” DIME is a model of bureaucracy, D = State, I = USIA, M = Defense, and E is a catch-all for trade, economic, and aid policies from the WH, Treasury, USAID, etc. In this model, the M is usually another flavor of D, except it is from Defense, just as the D requires rhetorical gymnastics to bring non-diplomatic activities. A good example of how broken the DIME is, and the discussions that flow around it, is the perversion of adding -FIL, for Finance, Intelligence, and Law Enforcement. The resulting DIMEFIL/MIDLIFE construct is simply another bureaucratic model of participation. I’m glad you asked if there is a better model because there is. A better framework is PPCE, for Political, Psychologic, Combat, and Economic. Here, we don’t have the actionless and neutral information as a munition, but intent and action with Psychologic (yes, without the -al). Instead of Military, which absent troops in contact, exercises psychological and political influence, hence Combat. Political provides a broader tent than the very narrow Diplomatic. The source of this framework is the US Army War College, one hundred and seven years ago. The Army’s Military Intelligence Branch organized around this concept. There are things to learn from the past.

2. I’m not using Public Diplomacy because it has no meaning. Adopted as an umbrella term for the activities of an agency in 1965, it carries that heritage of being detached from intent or means while being anchored to the actor, usually, but not always. It’s worth stating that PD can rightly be seen as PW by the receiver. For example, identical PD programs in France and China on how Americans register to vote will likely get a “meh” in Paris and an angry “Don’t tell us how to vote” in Beijing, the latter I can confirm from my meeting with the number 2 man of China’s domestic propaganda agency. He was right: from the perspective of China, PD is PW because it creates tension between Beijing’s disinformation and alternative options of governance, freedom, and the like. See my discussion on the term in my chapter “Operationalizing Public Diplomacy” in Routledge Handbook of Public Diplomacy, 2020).

3. I don’t know if a disclaimer is necessary here, so I’ll say that I was inducted as an Honorary Member of the Psychological Operations Regiment at the JFK Special Warfare Center and School in 2016. Before that, I had the honor of presiding over an induction ceremony at the Regiment, including drinking from the boot.

4. When faced with this, and it used to be frequent for me, I would posit the scenario of a PAO at a large military installation in the US informing the local community that the main gate would be closed for repairs. The PAO would coordinate with local stakeholders and the media to provide and publicize alternate routes of transit for both base traffic and nearby traffic, which would be impacted as well, and would, if they are doing their job, communicate this information to the community. This seems like a natural step to maintain good relations with the community. It is also influencing Americans and affecting their behavior.

5. Perhaps Studeman’s reference to “30 years” ago was intended to start with the establishment in 1994 of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the predecessor to the USAGM. BBG was under USIA until it became independent when USIA was abolished in 1999. For your bar trivia, legislatively, the amendment to abolish USIA first entered the record in June 1997.

6. See, for example, The Age of Amorality by Hal Brands in Foreign Affairs, February 20, 2024.

7. Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, April 14, 1947, arguing for the need for the yet-to-be-reintroduced Mundt bill, known today as the Smith-Mundt Act.

8. See, for example, the Congressional testimony by Dr. Lev Dobriansky in 1964 I quoted here.