We Need Better Communication Control In This War

Ralph Peters is a former military intelligence officer who is now a columnist on military affairs with the New York Post. He has a piece today that is worth reading because it outlines one of the primary hardships we have in the War on Terror: communication and the media. This is something I've been thinking of and talking about for quite a while. Here is the relevant portion:

The advent of military aircraft changed warfare, expanding the battlefield into a third dimension while dramatically deepening the area that could be attacked. Air power alone was rarely decisive (despite the claims of its advocates), but control of the skies became vital.

What's the postmodern equivalent of air power, the new revolutionary development? It's the proliferation of the 24/7 media in all its formats. And the terrorists realize it. They learned to trump air power and all the detritus of the last revolution by refusing to mass together and by submerging themselves in urban seas. Then they went one better by grasping the power of irresistible weapons that came free of charge: the media.

Yes, the media were able to influence a war's outcome back in the Vietnam days. But the Cronkite-era media were the equivalent of World War I biplanes. Today's media are a sky full of B-52s, cruise missiles and stealth fighters - with unlimited ordnance.

The terrorists know they can't beat our forces on the battlefield. Their purpose in engaging our troops is to generate a body count, graphic images and alarmist headlines. They've created a new paradigm of warfare that's cheap, effective and defiantly hard to defeat.

Meanwhile, our own military isn't even allowed to slip stories to the bribe-driven Arab press. And the global media credit every perfunctory claim by the terrorists that the target we just hit was another wedding party.

Communication is important. One of the best weapons we had in the Cold War was Radio Free Europe, which broadcast into the Communist held areas of Eastern Europe. Ayatollah Khomeini smuggled cassette tapes of his speeches into Iran to gain and inspire supporters in Iran before the revolution in 1979. We need to do the same in the War on Terror. Not just radio, but also the internet. Terrorist are already doing it. They effectively use chat rooms and websites to spread anti-western religious speeches and tracts, training manuals, suicide videos and videos of attacks, and so on.

The field of people we can reach is large. Iran is repeatedly taking down satellite dishes to prevent people from watching western TV, but the dishes keep going back up. We can easily use radio and TV stations to reach audiences in such repressive areas, and smuggle in CDs and cassettes, video tapes and DVDs. Though there can be severe restrictions and access to the internet, audio and video files and documents can easily be spread through the region through this medium. New websites can easily be set up as existing ones are blocked by repressive governments. We also need to make sure we are supporting dissidents and other people who are speaking out against their government. Not too long ago, an Egyptian blogger was sentenced to 6 years in jail because he wrote something about the Egyptian government that they didn't like. Practically overnight, the blogging community in Egypt shut itself down because they feared the same thing happening to them.

But we also have to deal with the 24/7 news media, and the effects is has on the US population. This is the biggest problem that the US government has to figure out in order to prosecute wars. Freedom of the press is a wonderful thing, and it serves to keep government and officials honest. However, the question is, who is the media accountable to? Who decides what is news? Look through your newspaper, and a huge majority of the articles you see will be from the AP. Editors have to decide what stories will appear on the front page of the paper, or on the half-hour news broadcast that night.

We hear so often about how the news needs to be objective. Several of the major news organizations will not use US Military press releases or videos in their news reports. However, they will use press releases and videos from terrorists. CNN won't use footage of a US fighter going after a group of terrorists, but they will use footage of terrorist snipers killing US troops in Iraq. Is this objective? This is not to say that the NY Times or CNN or NBC are mouthpieces of Al-Qaeda, but it certainly seems that they question facts they get from the US more than they do the "facts" they get from terrorist groups and apologists.

Every time the news shows the damage from a car bomb or reports how many US troops have been killed, the enemy gets a boost. It doesn't matter how many good things our troops do, if all the public sees in the news are car bombs and how many US troops were killed, the public will loose support. When the public looses support, the enemy wins. In any country, but particularly in a democracy (okay, representative government) like ours, if you don't have support of the public, you don't have anything. It becomes very hard to do what needs to be done.


On a simliar note, here is a piece by Kevin Farris on Gen. Barry McCaffrey's analysis of what is happening in Iraq and what the future will and can hold.

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