Information Operations: What Went Wrong?

Major Joseph Cox has just published a monograph called "Information Operations in Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom -- What Went Wrong?" (available here - PDF file;  update - link fixed, and here's an alternative route via Secrecy News) for the School of Advanced Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth.   While it's a fairly damning indictment of Information Operations, especially in Iraq, Cox is less concerned with pointing fingers than with learning lessons (and, of course, with calling for more funding:   "Currently, the Army is short almost forty percent of the required IO officers.")  The general tone is captured by this excerpt:  "The IO structure to support operations in Iraq for the remainder of the time the CPA was in charge remained totally inadequate for the task.  The CPA could not compete against the Iraqi rumor mill, partisan Iraqi media outlets, or even foreign satellite broadcasts such as al Jazeera."   

Cox is concerned about how the perceived need to massage American domestic public opinion contaminated the Information Operations military operation.    At one point he writes:  "In Operation Iraqi Freedom, the effort to inform Iraqis and the world of progress in Iraq consumed a large percentage of the IO staff's time and efforts."  Later, he warns against "the transformation of IO to a Public Relations (give the good news) mindset, especially in Iraq."   Later, he notes that information collection was hampered by a "tendency... to dismiss reporting that was repeatedly negative because it was based on the bias of an anti-US organization."  And he's quite critical of the Lincoln Group fiasco:  "Given the large number of public relations firms, it was surprising that the Department of Defense selected the Lincoln Group, an organization with NO public relations experience to spearhead an effort to publicize the good news events occuring in Iraq."   

While Cox never directly comes out and says so, he at least implies that the Bush administration and CPA's decision to prioritize domestic politics over the realities on the ground in Iraq - egged on by the incessant grumbling about the media's supposedly overly negative reporting - seems to have actively compromised Information Operations in theater. 

One of the big problems for Information Operations in Iraq was the absence of any nation-wide media during the period after the war:   "because Saddam used the radio and TV broadcasts to command his troops in the field and to continue to spread propaganda, USCENTCOM directed attacks on the radio and TV transmitters.  The side effect of these attacks was the destruction of the only nationwide radio and TV transmitters.  Because none of the assets in the JPOTF's inventory was capable of reaching the entire country, there was no way to broadcast instructions to the Iraqi people."  Without getting into another debate about the legitimacy and/or legality of targeting media during wartime, let me just ask:  who could possibly have foreseen that a nation-wide media transmitter might have been useful in the post-Saddam period?

Up to this point, the report has been interesting to the specialist such as myself, but not exactly full of juicy tidbits.   But here's where things suddenly get interesting.  Cox writes:  "A lack of media outlets in the divisions' areas limited the divisions' ability to reach their populace quickly and efficiently.  The divisions set out to create media in the areas of responsibility.  Their PSYOP units used PSYOP operational funds ... [and] by the end of 2003, every Division had created a number of newspapers, radios and TV stations."   Say what?!?  Later, he writes:  "As individual Iraqi media outlets became functional, primarily with PSYOP support, tactical PSYOP units would use those fledgling outlets to support their product dissemination." 

Is there any way to read this other than that some significant portion of the Iraqi media which emerged after Saddam's fall was in fact a fully funded and operational Psychological Operations campaign?   If that's the case, then this would seem to quite a revelation.  Which newspapers, radios and TV stations were actually PSYOP operations, one might want to know, and which exactly which PSYOP "products" were disseminated through them?  While I'd imagine that most enterprising journalists are either in Lebanon or on vacation, this still might be worth somebody following up on.

UPDATE:  in case it isn't clear what's at stake here, there are two issues. 

First, if you recall the Lincoln Group fiasco, the problem there wasn't that "good news" articles were being placed in the Iraqi press, or even that they were paying for play - it was that the origin of those articles was concealed to make it look like they came from Iraqis rather than from Americans.  That's a big no no.   If the PSYOPS newspapers, radio and television stations were not clearly identified as American military outlets, and were presented as genuine Iraqi outlets, then it would be the Lincoln Group fiasco on a much larger scale... and carried out by the military itself and not by an amateurish, unqualified contractor.  That's a big "if", and it is not clear from the report.

The second issue is that anyone who has followed the Iraq issue over the last few years knows how central the post-Saddam flourishing of a free press - usually presented in terms of the hundreds of newspapers which began publishing after Saddam's fall - was to the Bush administration's defense of the war.  Here are just the first few examples which came up high on a google search of the White House website:

"And for the first time in many years, a free press is at work in Iraq.  Across that country today, more than 150 newspapers are publishing regularly." -- Bush radio address, August 9, 2003

"More than 150 Iraqi newspapers are now in circulation, printing what they choose, not what they're ordered." - Bush at Whitehall Palace, November 19, 2003

"Hundreds of Iraqi newspapers are now in circulation, with no Baathist enforcers telling them what to print." - Cheney, World Economic Forum, January 24, 2004.

I could go on, ad infinitum:  "hundreds of Iraqi newspapers" was a major talking point for the United States at the highest levels. If it turns out that some significant portion of those hundreds of newspapers were actually American PSYOPS funded outlets designed to carry American PSYOPS products, it would shed rather a new light on this talking point. 

Again, everything turns on whether those PSYOPS-created, funded, and employed media outlets were identified as American military outlets or as real Iraqi newspapers, radio stations, and television stations.   If the former, then the question reverts to one of effectiveness - Cox's main concern in his report:  why were the information operations so ineffective?   If it's the latter, then an altogether different set of questions needs to be posed.   It shouldn't be that hard to find out which it is.

Comments

[steve laudig]

Am having difficulties with the link to Cox's article. I end up here "http://www.w3.org/Protocols/"

[aardvark]

not sure why - it works for me. do you have trouble with pdf files?

[b]

Link does not work for me either. It has a douple "http://" but even when I remove that I go to W3.org and don´t get the pfd

[Kevin Drum]

The URL is wrong. The "http" is in there twice.

[KCinDC]

b, when you remove the "http:// " at the beginning you still have to add the missing colon in the "http//" that follows. What you're ending up doing is a Google search for "http", which is why you end up at that W3C page. Here's the correct link.

[oscar]

The Cox paper was originally disclosed yesterday by Secrecy News. You can link directly to it there.

[the aardvark]

link fixed, thanks - and I added the Secrecy News link too

[Amy H]

Is this really such a surprise? I thought it would be obvious that an occupying power would try to do this...and earlier reporting (such as when the LAT broke the story last Dec. about the USG paying Iraqi news outlets to run pro-US pieces) hinted at it, I recall. What's interesting is that you have an Army major (?) basically saying so publicly while the war is still going on. AND what an utter failure/PR disaster these efforts turned out to be...

[the aardvark]

Yes, but remember what the Lincoln Group project scandal was all about: they did not clearly label the "good news" stories they were paying to plant in the Iraqi press as coming from CENTCOM - which violated (at the least) the basic rules of the game. This would be far worse, IF it is the case that these newspapers, radio and TV stations were not clearly labeled as US military outlets. The key question to ask here is whether Major Cox is describing media outlets which clearly bore an American military label, or were they presented as authentic Iraqi media. If it's the former, no problem - other than their ineffectiveness. If it's the latter, that would seem to be a very, very big problem. But the report just doesn't make that clear - hence my posing this as a question rather than as any kind of definitive expose.

[Jamal]

There's plenty of Iraq vets back in the country now and I'm sure many who were involved in the units behind these alleged operations. If somebody can figure out how to contact a bunch of them and present them with this publicly available report, seems that asking them to corroborate or deny would be the first most direct thing to do.

[Green Zone Cafe]

I can corroborate it - CERP and DFI money was used to support Iraqi newspapers and local broadcasters. There was seed and sustainment money paid.

[Rex Brynen]

Another take on the Iraq information operations issue:

http://www.cagle.com/news/IraqNews/images/thompson.jpg