by Bill Gertz
The lights would go out on USIA on October 1, 1999, ending the semi-independence that had provided it with sufficient credibility in producing broadcasts, written publications, and other media that did not come off as self-serving propaganda. “By keeping a relative distance from the State Department’s diplomats, though housed in State’s embassies abroad, [USIA] put across a view of the United States that was closer to what foreigners who visited here recognized as the real thing,” RAND Corporation analyst Robert E. Hunter wrote on the day the agency went out of existence. “It thus got a hearing for U.S. policy and actions that many a diplomat, tied to the prevailing party line, could not achieve.”
USIA’s broadcast arms were transferred to a new entity called the Broadcasting Board of Governors and its radio outlets—the flagship Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and several others. Since then the radio’s capabilities have bordered on completely ineffective, mired by poor leadership and a lack of direction. According to some officials within the staff, the radio networks were penetrated by foreign intelligence service personnel and sympathizers of the foreign governments the radios were seeking to influence. In 2014, VOA scrapped several significant broadcast operations into China by ending all shortwave radio broadcasting. The move resulted in limiting the reach of VOA broadcasts to millions of Chinese and others in Asia who do not have Internet access and rely on shortwave radio for reliable news and information. The cuts were made at the same time Chinese and Russian state-run propaganda outlets were given unprecedented access to U.S. markets, including China Central Television, which is the Beijing government’s official television broadcast outlet. CCTV can be found on most American cable service providers, yet few American cable outlets can be freely viewed in China. The state-run Russian propaganda television outlet Russia Today, or RT, also broadcasts widely in the United States and Europe, with no opposition from governments or demands that Western free media outlets be allowed greater broadcast access as reciprocity for their presence.
In January 2016, the Broadcasting Board of Governors recognized that it was losing the information war to countries like Russia and China and did not have enough money to do its job properly. “There’s no question we’re badly underfunded and don’t have enough money to compete with our adversaries,” Jeff Shell, chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, told the Washington Times. With an annual radio budget of around $730 million, Shell said, the U.S. radios are funded with a small fraction of what America’s adversaries are spending on propaganda and broadcasts, including modern and far-reaching satellite television operations like RT, CCTV, and Qatar-based Al Jazeera. “If we have limited taxpayer funds, we should be much more focused on influencing people than rough audience numbers,” Shell said. “We have to make both regional and technological choices. We’d love to be on FM and on TV and all over the world, but we’ve decided in some countries that it’s more important to reach young people in the digital realm.” According to Shell, the major challenges come from Russia’s new nationalistic media, China’s challenge through cyber technology, and violent Islamic extremists using online outlets to spread propaganda. Official U.S. broadcasting, Shell says, seeks to influence people to feel better about America. “Nobody disagrees that we need to be fighting the information war and that winning hearts and minds is very important in this world where we have lots of different challenges to this country,” he said.
Yet the U.S. government’s most senior official in charge of public diplomacy revealed in 2014 that the United States is not waging a war of ideas in the battle against Islamic terrorists. Rick Stengel, a former Time magazine reporter and the Obama administration’s undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, revealed the lack of an information warfare capability during a speech when he stated the administration would not wage a war of ideas against the Islamic State. “I would say that there is no battle of ideas with ISIL,” he said, using another name for the Islamic State. “ISIL is bereft of ideas, they’re bankrupt of ideas. It’s not an organization that is animated by ideas. It’s a criminal, savage, barbaric organization—I feel like we won that battle already.” The statement is one of the clearest examples of the surrender by the Obama administration in the war of ideas, and why America’s enemies continue to advance with deadly consequences.
The State Department’s effort to combat Islamic ideology has been a failure since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Since the administration of George W. Bush and the 9/11 attacks, I became convinced that the ideology of Islamism must be confronted, that this was the key to defeating a deadly enemy. Unless the ideology was attacked and defeated there could be no victory and the United States was doomed to endless war. In response, I developed a policy proposal that was presented in briefings at the State Department and Pentagon for two senior officials. It was a concrete plan of action for countering the deadly ideology of al Qaeda. The first meeting on the plan was held with Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, who was told one solution to counteracting Islamic terrorism would be to develop a network of interreligious, faith-based, nongovernmental organizations that could advocate publicly for nonviolent and noncoercive means to practice religion and promote the concept of toleration among all faiths. The strategic goal would be to work with Muslims in reforming the tenets of Islam so that groups like al Qaeda (and today, the Islamic State) could be theologically declared un-Islamic. While difficult, the prospect of triggering a nonviolent reformation of Islam is not impossible.
Under my plan, a network of academic and nongovernmental organization centers would be set up, staffed, and funded around the world to study and develop critiques and counterproposals to the destructive tenets of radical Islam. Feith lamented that while he liked the plan, resistance was likely from Congress, where he had been unable to get support for Pentagon funding of programs to counter radical madrassas in Pakistan that were—and remain—a major ideological breeding ground for Islamic extremists. A second briefing was held at the State Department for Karen Hughes, the Bush administration’s undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. Hughes listened politely to the ideological warfare counterterrorism proposal but did nothing to implement it.
The main State Department entity initially charged with using information operations to counter foreign Islamic terrorism was the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications. The center began operating in 2010 and was formalized under a presidential order signed by Obama in September 2011. The order was remarkable for the fact that no mention in the document was made of the word Islam, or of Islamic—the source of the terrorists’ ideology. Instead, the directive called for “developing expertise on implementing highly focused social media campaigns.” Launched under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the center failed to counter al Qaeda’s strategic propaganda, which early on consisted of poor-quality videos and faxed manifestos. The center would become the butt of jokes that its mission was to become an American Twitter troll to out-tweet the Islamists, who quickly were able to master highly effective and religious-based propaganda and social media campaigns to recruit terrorists and propagandize Muslims.
The Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications focused on operating as a social media troll, and its poor management and operations would produce one of the worst outcomes for overall U.S. government counter-ideology programs. By the end of 2015, a panel of nongovernment experts concluded that the center’s efforts were so ineffective and poorly executed that the U.S. government should not be engaged in counterpropaganda programs at all. The panel, made up of Silicon Valley tech experts, believed that the task of countering Muslim extremists was too difficult for the U.S. government because the propaganda efforts lacked credibility, and that therefore, rather than try to conduct credible information warfare operations, the government simply should not engage in counter-ideology programs. It was another major setback for American information warfare efforts against terrorism.
Without American leade
rship, the government decided instead to farm out its counter-ideology effort to foreign Muslim nations, including those that promote Islamist ideologies. It was a damning indictment and a complete abdication of American leadership for the single most important element in the entire enterprise—military, diplomatic, intelligence—targeting Islamist terrorism. Without defeating the Islamist ideology of the Islamic State and other terrorist groups, there will be no way to ultimately win what has shaped up to be a very ineffective “war” against the extremists.
The panel of experts’ report was kept secret to avoid making the president and his national security team look bad, including Clinton, who was in charge of the department when the failed center was first created. A U.S. official familiar with the report told the Washington Post the experts “had serious questions about whether the U.S. government should be involved in overt messaging at all.” The problem was highlighted in testimony to Congress by Department of Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson, who suggested that the U.S. government had given up in the war of ideas because government-produced anti-jihad messaging, “just given the nature of it, would not be very credible.” He did not explain why the government lacked credibility. But the comment was a clear indication the Obama administration was not prepared to even attempt building a credible countermessaging group like the Cold War–era Active Measures Working Group. The director of the center, Rashad Hussain, a Muslim American, was transferred to a position at the Justice Department. Hussain had previously been appointed by Obama to be a special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference.
Following the critical report, the center rebranded itself in early 2016 as a new Global Engagement Center, also located at the State Department but continuing the policy of farming out counter-ideology efforts to Muslim states. The new center was headed by former Navy SEAL Michael Lumpkin, who was transferred from the Pentagon, where he had been assistant defense secretary for special operations and low-intensity conflict. Lumpkin sought to improve the program by bringing in specialists in information technology, along with officials from the intelligence community, Pentagon, and State Department. “It’s an effects-based organization,” Lumpkin told me, referring to the Global Engagement Center. “This isn’t your traditional diplomatic endeavor, where I’m trying to negotiate a treaty with violent extremist groups. At its core, what we’re trying to do is prevent individuals from turning to violence. Whether it’s traveling to the physical battlefield or committing individual acts of terror around the world, we’re trying to change the behavior of a specific audience. So, what we had to do is build an effects-based structure that is agile and can yield the results that we’re looking for.”
The battle space for the center is social media, Twitter and Facebook being the largest and a major component of Islamic State propaganda. The Global Engagement Center does about 90 percent of its thematic campaigns in Arabic and only a small portion in English. The Islamic State similarly promotes only about 3 percent of its content in English, the rest in Arabic. For Syria, satellite television is another major vehicle for the center’s work. The goal is to expose the true nature of the Islamic State, perhaps the most violent terrorist group to emerge in at least a century. That is carried out through thematic campaigns of targeted emails and social media postings, as well as videos. From a data analytics perspective, the Global Engagement Center, as the Chinese have done, is developing ways of technically skewing search engine results so that Islamic State–origin or sympathetic content appears on page 35 of the search results. The search engine optimization would be an effective counter since most people end their search after a single page or the first few pages of results and rarely go beyond ten pages. Another tactic by the center is using so-called lawfare tools, such as seeking enforcement of terms of service agreements software companies impose on their customers, and identifying Islamic State recruiters and propagandists who violate social media and other terms and use it as leverage against them.
Data analytics also are being used to target audiences that the center believes are vulnerable to the Islamic State’s messages. The center then develops countermessages honed through focus group testing that provide key influence language that is likely to resonate with specific groups. The center has few metrics that provide feedback on whether the programs are working. However, intelligence agencies reported a sharp decline in IS’s foreign fighter recruitment numbers. Another, more ominous sign of the center’s effectiveness is death threats issued against the center and its people by the Islamic State. The Global Engagement Center set itself the goal of focusing on countering the Islamic State messaging and propaganda through an innovative and agile organization better focused on a more modern information warfare threat posed by IS.
The center also is trying to tap into Silicon Valley and other nongovernment partners and has set as another goal the creation of a network to defeat a network. It is organized into a content office that produces information for use in campaigns targeting various foreign audiences. Another office works on analytics, using big data to identify those involved in influencing foreign audiences and then working to influence them. A third section is called the network engagement office, which orchestrates various U.S. government agencies in the messaging campaigns. The budget has been increased from $5.6 million in 2015 to $15.8 million in 2016 and is slated to reach between $19 million and $21 million in 2017, far short of the $2 billion once allocated to USIA. Located within the main State Department building not far from the iconic Lincoln Memorial in Washington, the center has set as a major target the blocking of Islamic State recruitment efforts. The overall goal is to starve terrorist organizations of recruits and use military operations to finish off the rest. Strategic messaging will try to break the brand of the Islamic State by revealing its true nature and its use of brutal executions and mass-murder videos of its captured opponents. It has no plans to engage in Twitter warfare with the hard-core Islamic terrorists. For the hard core, the only recourse is to take them out militarily.
But, as done with its predecessor, the politically correct constraints imposed on the center that prevent it from engaging in debates on the nature of Islam signal that the program is destined to fail. The center is bound by the Obama administration’s prohibition against addressing Islam and instead has farmed out the responsibility for countering Islamic radicalization to foreign states. It is based on the false notion that the Constitution’s establishment clause prohibiting state religion applies to all government counterterrorism efforts.
The U.S. government’s loss of information warfare capabilities resulted in the failure to wage ideological warfare against the al Qaeda terrorist organization. Systematically killing off al Qaeda senior leaders in drone strikes was a key factor contributing to the creation of the ultraviolent al Qaeda offshoot known as the Islamic State, a group that has usurped al Qaeda’s role as the leading Islamic terrorist organization and is expanding the nature of the threat from an underground group waging low-level warfare to an aspirational nation-state controlling territory and people. After the Islamic State took over large portions of Iraq and Syria in 2015, Obama announced a new strategy for countering the group, a strategy that again was doomed from the start by its failure to understand the nature of Islamist ideology. This is a direct result of the liberal left political agenda, which prevents successful information warfare against a host of enemies.
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I. For a fuller understanding of this problem, see my book The Failure Factory (New York: Crown Forum, 2008).
II. See Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
4
CHINA
The Panda That Eats, Shoots, and Leaves
As cyber technology continues to develop, cyber warfare has quietly begun.
—HUANG HANWEN, LU TONGSHAN, ZHAO YANBIN, AND LIU ZHENGQUAN, “AEROSPACE ELECTRONIC WARFARE,” DECEMBER 1, 2012
The year is 2028. It is August and the weather is hot. People’s Liberation Army (PLA) colonel Sun Kangzhou and three highly trained special operations commandos from the Chengdu military region in southern China are sitting in two vehicles outside a Walmart Supercenter in rural Pennsylvania about 115 miles northeast of Pittsburgh. Dressed in jeans, T-shirts, and work boots, the men appear to be just like any construction workers. In fact, Colonel Sun and his men are members of the elite Falcon special forces team. One of the vehicles is a heavy-duty pickup truck with a trailer carrying a large backhoe. The other is a nondescript blue sedan. The commandos’ target today is not a military base but something much more strategic.
It has been two weeks since the deadly military confrontation between a Chinese guided-missile destroyer and a U.S. Navy P-8 maritime patrol aircraft thousands of miles away in the South China Sea. The 500-foot-long Luyang II missile warship Yinchuan made a fatal error by firing one of its HHQ-9 long-range surface-to-air missiles at the P-8 as it flew some seventy-seven miles away. The militarized Boeing 737 had been conducting a routine electronic reconnaissance mission over the sea, something the Chinese communist government in Beijing routinely denounces as a gross violation of sovereignty. The Chinese missile was tracked by the P-8’s sensors after a radar alarm signal went off, warning of the incoming attack. The advance sensor warning allowed the P-8 pilot to maneuver the jet out of range of the missile. The crew watched it fall into the sea. Fearing a second missile launch, the pilot ordered the crew to fire back. The aircraft bay doors opened and an antiship cruise missile, appropriately named SLAM-ER, for Standoff Land Attack Missile-Expanded Response, took off. Minutes later, the missile struck the ship, sinking the vessel and killing most of the crew.