On Communications and “Strategery”
“It is time for us to take a harder look at “strategic communication. Frankly, I don’t care for the term.”
– Adm. Mike Mullen, Joint Chiefs Chairman
“Actions speak louder than words,” my 97-year-old mother is fond of saying. Adm. Mike Mullen seems to have embraced the wisdom of that aphorism, in his “From the Chairman” essay in the current issue of Joint Forces Quarterly.
“The problem isn’t that we are bad at communicating or being outdone by men in caves,” the Chairman writes, “No, our biggest problem isn’t caves; it’s credibility. Our messages lack credibility because we haven’t invested enough in building trust and relationships, and we haven’t always delivered on promises.”
Now Adm. Mullen is talking about matching words with deeds when it comes to fulfilling America’s military and moral policy commitments abroad, he’s not specifically talking about dealing with the news media at home.
But the call for clarity and credibility has a particular resonance with the Pentagon press corps which discovered this week, thanks to reporting from Stars and Stripes, that a government contractor was rating reporters on how friendly or accurate their reporting was, and in some cases using that information to try to influence their stories, or deny them access.
The independent newspaper quotes Maj. Patrick Seiber, spokesman for the Army’s 101st Airborne Division, as saying in at least two instances he rejected embed requests based partly on what he read in the profiles prepared by the Rendon Group.
In the wake of those revelations the military has cancelled a $1.5 million contract with the Washington, D.C. public relations firm, saying the controversy was becoming a distraction.
“In one case we had a writer who had taken a story out of context and really done some irresponsible reporting,” Seiber told Stars and Stripes. “When I looked at that on the [profile], I decided if that guy is going to take that much effort to handle and correct I wasn’t going to put a unit at risk with an amateur journalist.”
Adm. Mullen seems to be advising spending less effort trying to influence reporters, and putting more emphasis on doing a good job. He doesn’t have much use for “strat comm” which he says has a “certain arrogance” behind it. “We’ve come to believe that messages are something we can launch downrange like a rocket, something we can fire for effect.”
“To put it simply, we need to worry a lot less about how to communicate our actions and much more about what our actions communicate.”
Or as I’m fond of saying, “If you want better coverage, run a better war.”
Footnote: Here’s an interesting take comparing Mullen’s take on “strat comm” with Richard Holbrook’s.
Strategic Communications and the Graveyard of Empires –Huffington Post
Tags: Embeds, Media, Mullen, Rendon, Stars and Stripes
