By Edward T. Palazzolo and Dawn Gilpin (With analysis support from Nick Brody, Jesse Herrera, Krista McNaughton, and Jordan Wolff) This is the third post in a series about the one-year anniversary of the State Department’s Dipnote blog. In Part 1 we focused on reviewing DipNote management and processes. In Part 2 we looked at [...]

by Monika Maslikowski The Global War on Terror has been accurately described by some as a global counterinsurgency against the groups and individuals that promote the ideology of violent Islamic extremism. Unlike traditional counterinsurgency campaigns, however, there is no single host-nation (HN) in this fight; the enemy is disparate, networked, transnational, and bound together by [...]

by Mark Woodward* On May 3, 2008 Cyclone Nargis struck the Irrawaddy delta in Southern Burma with devastating force. Nargis was a killer. The Burma government did not warn people in the region that the storm was coming or how severe it would be, though they clearly knew. According to some reports wind speeds of [...]

by Ed Palazzolo Senior Hezbollah leader, Imad Mughniyeh, was killed Tuesday, 12 February 2008, by a car bomb in Damascus. Mughniyeh has been on the FBI’s Most Wanted list for over 20 years. Mughniyeh was an intelligence leader for Hezbollah’s secretive military branch, he was believed to be responsible for taking Western hostages in Lebanon, [...]

by Steven R. Corman Yesterday the pay-per-view service Inside Defense released a story about a memo sent on December 14 from Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen to Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England. The Admiral is (rightly) concerned about the military’s approach to strategic communication. Sounding themes from recent CSC white [...]

The pragmatic complexity model would suggest that the US should reopen the military You Tube channel and let freedom ring.

YouTube videos suggest the military’s growing recognition that approaches based on message transmission are increasingly ineffective and indicate a willingness to engage in pragmatic complexity, experimenting in new media with more complex messages and an openness to dialog about those messages.

Recent efforts to introduce strategic communication into the training of officers and enlisted personnel is a laudable goal but, tragically, turning the design over to Madison Avenue will likely only make the training ineffectual—or worse.