Military Information Operations Gone Awry?

With apologies to my comrades over at Crooks and Liars, I'm not ready to declare LTG Bill Caldwell as a villain in the latest Rolling Stone article by Michael Hasting. In short, LTC Michael Holmes, a guy who was in Afghanistan to do information operations, says he was told to use his skills against US congressional representatives visiting the command. 

Congressional delegations – known in military jargon as CODELs – are no strangers to spin. U.S. lawmakers routinely take trips to the frontlines in Iraq and Afghanistan, where they receive carefully orchestrated briefings and visit local markets before posing for souvenir photos in helmets and flak jackets. Informally, the trips are a way for generals to lobby congressmen and provide first-hand updates on the war. But what Caldwell was looking for was more than the usual background briefings on senators. According to Holmes, the general wanted the IO team to provide a "deeper analysis of pressure points we could use to leverage the delegation for more funds." The general’s chief of staff also asked Holmes how Caldwell could secretly manipulate the U.S. lawmakers without their knowledge. "How do we get these guys to give us more people?" he demanded. "What do I have to plant inside their heads?"

The short of this pretty simple. Military leaders have to put up with visiting congressional delegations all the time. To prepare for these guests, such as they are, the staffers are expected to have a short one-pager describing each visitor, identifying their background, committee assignments, positions on particular issues. These congressional visitors are not stupid. They know the deal. It's almost a formality, the dog and pony show that follows. Nancy Snow explains it well.

Why is my skin not crawling here? It's not a problem of a runaway general, as Rolling Stone chooses to call Lt. General William Caldwell. It's our problem. The way we do business today is one big influence bazaar. Corporate marketing, public relations, and spin are the smooth sugar coating for the bitter little pills of truth we must swallow.

We're in the longest war in U.S. history. It will be ten years in October. Remember all that public support for hunting the Taliban and Al Qaeda just weeks after 9/11? It's all gone, and yet the warriors are still there. Each man and woman serving in Afghanistan costs us $1 million to support annually. Afghanistan alone has cost about 134 American Revolutions. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have cost American taxpayers over $1 trillion and the theater brass are rallying for billions more. To paraphrase Gordon Gekko, the point is ladies and gentlemen that war, for lack of a better word, is business-as-usual. Since our founding, the United States has been engaged in war about 20 percent of the time or one in every five years.

If you're a member of Congress and don't have an established position on the two wars in the Middle East, then you're flagrantly stupid (and maybe there are those few, but I doubt it). You don't need a visit to Afghanistan to affirm ones' view of this war. The congress-members aren't going to change their mind on something like the lack of progress over a ten-year period and no end-date or sustainable strategy (if they haven't yet to date). They've already taken their positions. Now they - the politicians and the military leaders - just have to do their kabuki dance for the American public.

Caldwell and his staff didn't do anything wrong, and there's nothing there to castigate. People don't understand the differences between information operations, psychological warfare, public affairs, and propaganda. There is a difference, although the military's own leaders are confused about it sometimes. All Holmes did was protest his being told to do "duties other than assigned." It's not a court case.

UPDATE: Gulliver agrees, but says:

"But really, it can't be this way. Our military leaders can't be viceroys, and they can't have carte blanche to skirt law and regulation in order to get the job done. This should be a reminder that constant vigilance is required to keep the proper balance in civil-military relations, and for civilian senior leaders to stay informed and engaged as best they can to ensure that happens."

I will disagree here. Congress, the State Dept, and OSD have allowed the three- and four-stars in overseas command positions to become viceroys. It's a defacto situation, so they're doing the job that's been handed to them. Prof Walt notes, "of course it's spin." It's not helpful to note that the system's broke when no one's attempting to fix it.

Comments

[Ray]

Well, it isn't yet a record- not like the British 100 years war against the French, or even the 20 years Civil War; but they're over- when will this one be over? Any bets?

[Patrick Coyle]

Ray:

Don't forget the Korean Police Action which is technically still on-going. Actually since there are still people dying it isn't so technically is it. That one is about 60 years old.

[Ray]

Patrick- yes; just goes to show, as the old cliche states, that it's easier to start a war than to end one.

[Gulliver]

I'm not sure your characterization of my position is accurate. I don't actually agree with most of what you wrote in this post, and I wasn't clear if my own post made it appear that I do. Your thinking on this seems to be very much in line with Galrahn's (of Information Dissemination); his flip essay about this article so annoyed me as to have inspired my own on the subject.

[J.]

G-man, you wrote a wall of text on the issue, very informative, that basically said "no harm, no foul." And then at the very end, you said "But..." Can we at least say, you are unconvinced that Holmes/Hastings made a legitimate case of wrongdoing?

Apologies if I summarized you too quickly, but I don't think you are as opposed to what Caldwell did as you protest here. My point is, this is business as usual. You may not like it, but "it is what it is." You can call for a change to more simple lines of communication and authority between Congress, State, and Defense, but it's not going to happen anytime soon.

[tammy swofford]

J-

It is a well-stated argument in defense of your position, but I have climbed onto the other side of the fence on this one. On microcosmic level, it presents the military as a deep state. We must never allow for such a political hue. On just a basic level though, little sophistry is required at this point regarding budgetary needs to sustain military operations in two regions. The needs are critical.

But if indeed deliberate psych manipulation was the goal, I find it personally distasteful and unprofessional.

The concept of deep state dates back to the Ottoman Empire, if memory serves me right....

Tammy Swofford

[Gulliver]

G-man, you wrote a wall of text on the issue, very informative, that basically said "no harm, no foul." And then at the very end, you said "But..." Can we at least say, you are unconvinced that Holmes/Hastings made a legitimate case of wrongdoing?

Again, I wouldn't say that the gist of my post was "no harm, no foul" -- the title alone should make that clear. What I meant to convey is that if the allegations in the article were truthful (and it's not certain that they were; in fact, a lot of what's come out since last week suggests they were not), LTG Caldwell's behavior may not have constituted lawbreaking but was almost certainly an inappropriate use of the resources at his disposal.

"It is what it is," for me, isn't a defense. Again: I'll concede that there's no bright line here, but I think the most important issue in this entire imbroglio is what I identified as #4 in my post: we're all pretending like it's perfectly legit for the CG of a training command to wage an influence campaign with the national political leadership. It's probably more important that we examine that assumption than that we make sure we're only using STRATCOM personnel (and not IO personnel) to wage that campaign.

[FDChief]

Having read your piece and Gulliver's, Jason, ISTM that, at the very least, ISTM that the CG of CSTC-A/NTM-A was hoping to do a little empire-building of his own. For all that the good folks at ISAF seem to be trying to pop smoke on Hastings, this seems like a very arcane issue to try and fabricate a story out of whole cloth. So I suspect that at some point LTG Caldwell did direct elements in his command to work on producing talking points to sell the congresscritters.

But this counds more like a GO who has a little too much ambition (or an exaggerated sense of high drama and the importance of his mission) and a thin grasp of the boundaries in the political-military relationship rather than some sort of systematic manipulation of the USG by the Army, ISAF, or CSTC-A/NTM-A.

Seems more like a sort of individual-letter-of-reprimand situation to me.

[FDChief]

"ISTM that the..."

Gotta proofread these comments better...

[FDChief]

Actually, Joshua Foust over at Registan makes a good point about the issue behind the issue: "What worries me is what this says about how the war is being managed, and the mention of think tankers. Regular readers here know I rail against the “ISAF adventure tours” across Afghanistan—whatever think tank they work for, there is a considered effort to support the “research trips” of pro-war think tankers looking to push the agenda of the military. To me, it is an absolutely poisonous dynamic of the intellectual discussion of the war, with an ideological foundation for controlling access to the war." (http://www.registan.net/index.php/2011/02/24/the-caldwell-kerfluffle/)

I can remember something like this from my early days in service, when the anger at the "Dolchstoss" in Vietnam were still strong. There was a very powerful sense in the Army of the late Seventies that what had gone wrong was that the country, especially the press and the government, had betrayed the Army.

I can understand how the guys felt; they'd given themselves, and their friends, and their Army, and felt that they had been thrown away. But the problem I saw then, and I see in this, was confusing the imediate mission with the greater national goals. For a CG to be so wrapped around his mission that its success becomes worth possibly crossing the line from pushing his case within channels to directly lobbying congresscritters? That can't be good, and hopefully it's just a one-off and not a more widespread attitude.

These damn things are cabinet wars. Cabinet wars are, by definition, limited in terms of resources and goals. The Army has got to deal with that and not take a big ol' morale hit when the time comes to stuff the poncho hootch back in the ruck and ENDEX.