by Clint Watts
Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) was a quagmire that worsened each year, and the larger mission of counterterrorism in Afghanistan and around the world, Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), ground on, such that by 2005, 2006, and 2007, a new counterinsurgency approach pushing “whole-of-government” solutions—a combination of actions pursued by many agencies with shared objectives—became the mantra for winning intractable wars and bringing U.S. troops home. The United States sought to win “hearts and minds” on the battlefield and online, and “strategic communications” became the catchall term for how the U.S. State Department and the Department of Defense would come together to influence the world’s populations susceptible to jihadi recruitment. Buckets of money—no, let me clarify that: truckloads of money—were spent across the entire spectrum of influence campaigns, doled out to military combatant commands and the State Department through convoluted campaign funds.
America recognized that it was in a new and different information war but didn’t know entirely what to do or who should do it. The military’s PSYOP troops, designed for traditional media, weren’t well equipped for digital domains. Their officers were retrained from more traditional military specialties like infantry or artillery. The State Department, throughout its diplomatic history, had more know-how, but few resources. The intelligence community had experience from the Cold War, but it didn’t have the authority to meddle in cyberspace. All feared violating laws forbidding the U.S. government from influencing U.S. populations—an increasingly impossible task when engaging social media audiences not defined by international borders. The agencies needed to integrate and synchronize to be successful, and by 2006 the Bush administration knew a central point must lead influence efforts.
The United States’ push for more “soft power,” the kind Secretary of Defense Gates spoke of, began in earnest in 2006 with the launch of the Counterterrorism Communication Center (CTCC) to coordinate the morass of contradictory messaging coming from the United States Departments of State and Defense. This began a string of mutations every few years as U.S. agencies, vying for funding, wrestled for control over messaging and messages. The Global Strategic Engagement Center (GSEC) replaced the CTCC in 2008, and the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communication (CSCC) then replaced the GSEC in 2011. Each manifestation signaled the failure of the previous version to achieve meaningful gains or survive bureaucratic infighting. The CSCC incarnation arrived just as terrorists were aggressively moving to social media. Underfunded and overmanaged, the CSCC battled its overlords on the National Security Council and its funders in Congress as much as it fought al-Qaeda overseas. By 2012 and 2013, some good successes had come from its Arabic-language YouTube videos, which drew in foreign audiences. These CSCC placements showed promise for two reasons: some of the government’s best and brightest created them, and the messages didn’t just try to champion democracy, but directly and intelligently refuted terrorists’ messages. Because the CSCC communicated in a foreign language most Americans didn’t understand, they were relatively free to experiment without fear.
Then came al-Shabaab. As @HSMPress and Kenya’s Major Chirchir battled on Twitter, Somali American men from Minneapolis streamed into Somalia. The mission to counter al-Shabaab in the English language on Twitter went to the CSCC, signaling the slow demise of the center. The CSCC resisted tweeting in English. As one of its savvy officials confided, “The moment we do it [tweet in English], the eye of Sauron will gaze upon us,” an allusion to the fiery eye in The Lord of the Rings that turned to look when its master’s name was invoked. The officials’ foresight proved correct.
Tweeting in English under the @ThinkAgain_DOS Twitter handle attracted the attention of the entire State Department and the entire Washington media circus, which doomed the CSCC. Those inside government questioned every tweet. The media ridiculed CSCC responses. Terrorists and their sympathizers, unencumbered by approval processes and bosses, jabbed back at the State Department’s account in the open. A persona named Abu Ottoman tweeted back to @ThinkAgain_DOS, “Your boss is going to fire you soon if these tweets don’t improve.”4 Even the terrorists knew that the CSCC experiment wouldn’t last long. State Department analysts manning official accounts couldn’t win, boxed in as they were by bureaucrats, not allowed to think nimbly or respond quickly, heckled by the media and terrorists. @ThinkAgain_DOS and the CSCC dissolved like its predecessors, absorbed into another organizational restructuring and acronym: the Global Engagement Center (GEC).
In 2016, the GEC sought to reboot America’s counterpropaganda with new blood and a new approach. Under its new leader, former Navy SEAL Michael Lumpkin, the GEC wanted outsiders from “Silicon Valley and Madison Avenue who can help us work through our approach and the information battle space.”5 The idea wasn’t new per se. The information operations groups of the military and the public diplomacy wonks of the interagency had flirted with technologists before. Again, challenges quickly emerged on both sides in trying to blend these communities. Silicon Valley approaches focused largely on big-data analytics and convincing people to buy things, whereas the U.S. government sought to quell the rhetoric of extremist bad apples and sell them a new idea. The government wanted terrorists to change their behavior in a positive way, which was a far deeper challenge than moving products from retailers to social media users. Even if the GEC could recruit whiz kids from the coasts into the dungeons of government bureaucracy, they’d be limited by their lack of security clearances, less effective tools, and tight oversight.
The GEC expanded its mission in late 2016. The Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, introduced by Senators Rob Portman and Chris Murphy, increased the GEC’s scope and funding, but as of this writing, the Trump administration’s State Department has yet to move against Russian social media influence in a deliberate way. The GEC sits in idle a year after the presidential election, seemingly uncertain about how to move forward.
The organizational challenges hampering the government weren’t limited to who was in charge; there was also the question of who would do the work. Whereas the military’s original PSYOP troops owned, rented, and operated their own printing presses and radio operations, no government entity maintained the technology and tools necessary to engage in social media. Even if a government agency possessed the tools, no human resources in the U.S. government hosted the talent to create engaging social media content at the volume needed. That’s where defense contracting comes in.
Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s lighter-footprint approach to the invasion and occupation of Iraq depended on the nimble employment of contracted services. Contracted services for everything but frontline troops sought to scale America’s battlefield mobilization and sustain war without increasing the size of the military or building out highly specialized units that wouldn’t be needed during peacetime. The costs were projected to be cheaper over the long run, and the approach provided flexibility to the government. Public diplomacy, information warfare, psychological warfare—all highly specialized disciplines—seemed perfect for employing defense contracting on a temporary basis. The government, through contracts, could rent highly trained specialists and buy specialized tools. That all makes sense on paper, if one doesn’t really understand how defense contracting works.
Defense contracting during the global war on terror and even today occasionally works, but when it comes to influence operations, it’s largely been a disaster. Defense or intelligence community funding has been directed less toward getting the right talent or technology and more toward sustaining the flow of funds to prime vendors, largely staffed by former military and intelligence officers. The system sustains itself by imposing two barriers to competitors: contract vehicles and security clearances. Contract vehicles, in concept, seek to validate a vendor for selling to the government. They are said to establish predetermined prices for products and services, streamlining government purchases. In reality, it’s a deliberate bureaucratic maneuver that requires a vendor to go
through costly applications and approvals just to offer services to the government. The hurdles for simply selling to the government get so high that small vendors, those with specialized talent and innovative tools, can’t compete with the big contractors that dominate the market, those business behemoths that can afford to feed the government’s bureaucracy.
Security clearances are another barrier for influence operations talent acquisition. The dawn of counterterrorism created legislation and funding that required personnel to maintain security clearances to qualify for funding, suggesting the need to keep secrets. Defense contractors loved the mandate of security clearances, because they narrowed the pool of talent to their own employees and favored their large companies, which could bear the costs of background checks and maintaining security protocols. For the military and the intelligence community, security clearance mandates in contracts served two purposes. They ensured that outside contractors would be vetted and screened, most always returning contractors looking like them and talking like them. And mandating security clearances for defense contracting meant more jobs for retiring military officers and intelligence professionals. They could retire from government service and, based only on their security clearance, be nearly guaranteed a job. The result is that the defense contracting system creates a mirror image of the government, and few fresh ideas or talented social media analysts can penetrate the system to support the government.
The government organizational amoeba and the contracting system that supports American counterinfluence from afar costs billions of dollars to run and sustain, and it’s still not as effective at mobilizing audiences as its adversaries’ low-budget operations. The Islamic State’s media battalion, at its height, numbered a few dozen people in Syria and Iraq, with some voluntary surrogates stationed around the world. They produced posts nearly nonstop and hosted new, engaging, high-quality social media videos several times a week. Their talent was mostly self-taught: volunteers with a knack for graphic design and video editing. Russia’s Internet Research Agency produced and presumably still runs around-the-clock social media influence campaigns in multiple countries. The few former employees who’ve spoken of their time working there suggest that there are roughly two hundred people operating for the Russians globally. The height of the U.S. election may have seen only ninety people influencing the U.S. audience on social media. Their operations span three floors, dividing and compartmentalizing bloggers, social media operators, and meme makers. The Russians meddling with Americans, Europeans, Ukrainians, Turks, and Syrians are computer whizzes and journalists, young contractors hired by the hour for a specific purpose, interchangeable widgets in a simple yet effective media machine.
By contrast, the U.S. government easily employs thousands of people, either inside government agencies or via outside contractors, to counter terrorist influence operations. Many plans are made, few are executed, and what little content has been developed and deployed by the U.S. government bureaucracy has failed to make a dent in terrorists’ efforts. Many American counterinfluence personnel have limited knowledge of social media or have never even used it, either too old to know it or unable to access it from inside government firewalls. Even when military or State Department groups doing counternarratives acquire good people, which they do (the smartest person I know in the influence profession works inside the government), they receive tremendous oversight and little autonomy.
The terrorists and the Russians conduct their operations openly, without barriers to the internet or constraints on their actions, and thus those Westerners best positioned to analyze them and fight them have not been trapped behind the gates of intelligence compounds or buried behind the walls of the Pentagon. They spend their days on social media, analyzing terrorist videos or Russian propaganda. Many of them seek to fight terrorists or protect democracy from Russian interference, but they’ll never even get in the door. They don’t have clearances or would never get one, having smoked marijuana too many times or failed to acquire an unnecessary prerequisite degree in an unrelated topic. Even if they do get in the door, they won’t last long. Their well-crafted social media campaigns would never clear the bureaucratic obstacles for launch or pass the scrutiny of gatekeepers and stakeholders.
I can counter terrorists or Russia from home better than I could from inside government, and so could most of the great civil servants America has working on counternarratives. I’m not smarter than any of the government folks doing counterinfluence or many of the contractors spread around D.C.’s Beltway. I just have more flexibility, can practice, and am free to fail at my house without scrutiny. There’s no barrier to entry for me as a citizen. I can make a thousand mistakes; I can learn from others and plod away without a manager telling me to stop or change something to make a politician happy.
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In the end, the most effective way to counter terrorist influence has been to simply kill terrorists. Despite all the calls for American countermessaging, when terror groups wane, their influence evaporates. As the Islamic State’s remnants now run scurrying from Iraq and Syria, the appeal of their social media has declined and the desire for newcomers to join has subsided a bit. Going forward, though, the United States’ and really the West’s dilemma will be how to fight authoritarian regimes like Russia on the social media battlefield. The response to foreign meddling in America will be far more challenging, intricate, and demanding.
Some solutions appear easy. The FBI, when conducting its investigations into hacks, should anticipate how what was stolen might be used for the purposes of influence. Anticipating rather than reacting to kompromat can help inoculate the victim from negative influence. The Department of Homeland Security should provide public responses to falsehoods and smears launched by foreign adversaries regarding U.S. domestic issues. The State Department should do the same in response to falsehoods related to U.S. foreign policy. The Department of Defense and the intelligence community must rapidly create systems for tracking Russian social media disinformation to anticipate and ultimately counter the Kremlin’s march. Finally, the West collectively must decide how to respond to Putin’s manipulation. Employing the Kremlin’s own approach against the Russian population by meddling with Russia’s election is not the answer. Doing unto Russia what Russia did to America would only erode American values and undermine our credibility. Countering Russia requires a defense of our country and the promotion of our beliefs, and this is where America currently lacks the will and ability to defend itself: leadership.
Ultimately, America’s problem in counterinfluence is that we don’t know what to say, because we don’t know what we believe in. In war and peace, for more than two centuries, America’s elected leaders have unified the country and its strategy against adversaries by uniting Americans toward common goals. During the Cold War, the United States promoted democracy and democratic values. But today the United States doesn’t appear to know what it wants. Quite simply, if America doesn’t have its feet on the ground, then it can’t punch back at those challenging us. Leaders in both political and civil society must clarify what America believes in.
The United States might also consider why its image advanced globally in previous eras, but not today. America didn’t project its values around the world through catchy promotional advertisements and public affairs messaging. The United States accelerated past all other countries by being great, not telling everyone how great it was. Art, music, science, free markets, natural disaster relief—the United States did things no other country would, and accomplished things no other country imagined or even could. U.S. policy for influence operations might ultimately be to do nothing at all, except figure out what we stand for, what we believe in, and what we will again fight for. The answers to those questions will ultimately be the nation’s counterinfluence message. The strategy will reveal itself. When Americans are the best versions of themselves, influence happens naturally. Sadly, the United States and many parts of the West have pulled back from the world s
tage in recent years, and until we have a better message, social media propaganda machines will have their way with American minds. And it won’t be the Russians who come to dismantle our collective psyche; it will be Americans willfully doing it to one another, in pursuit of their own personal gain.
9
From Preference Bubbles to Social Inception: The Future of Influence
As a kid growing up in Missouri, I’d occasionally encounter ham radio operators—communication enthusiasts, one might say—shooting signals into the stratosphere simply to see if it was possible to communicate with someone on the other side of the world. Humans love connection, and the internet opened a door to a world of connections that ham radio operators could never have imagined. Regardless of geography, people who thought alike and had the same interests, pursuits, dreams, and goals could converse, create, and confide.
Internet evangelists saw the world in a positive way as we entered the new millennium in 2000. The World Wide Web broke the boundaries of the local and opened up a global community. The personal computer, now connected to the internet and search engines like Netscape and Google, brought any interest, fact, or item to the fingertips of those connected to the web. Physical boundaries no longer mattered, and those passionate about chess, cancer research, or the television show Friends could find like-minded enthusiasts around the world wanting to share their thoughts and experiences. Those previously under oppressive regimes, denied access to information and the outside world, could leverage the web’s anonymity to build connections and share their experiences and hope for a better world, either at home or elsewhere.