Earlier this week John Brown posted a blog questioning those of us who have expressed concern about slow movement on filling the position of Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs at the State Department. Maybe this go-slow approach is not such a bad thing, he says.

I have great respect for John and his opinions, but in this case I find his position wanting.  If I understand it correctly, his position in a nutshell is this: Bush era PD was so misguided and so ruined our international reputation that it would be unwise to quickly press forward with some kind of big new initiative at this time.  Thus, getting a new Under Secretary in place may not be such an urgent matter.

John is right that we should be careful about aligning messaging efforts with our power to influence.  Credibility is key factor in ability to persuade, and the Pew surveys show our credibility at a low ebb as of the end of 2008.  This is one reason I found a lot to like (more than John found, I surmise) in Jim Glassman’s approach of de-emphasizing the marketing/branding/PR efforts of his predecessors and emphasizing support to other, more credible, non-USG messengers.

But that general agreement aside, there are three reasons I disagree with John’s position.  First of all: That was then, this is now.  As we argued in a widely-read white paper, part of the problem in the recent past was that the strategic communication system (the one encompassing the USG and its foreign audiences) became locked in a pattern where virtually anything we said was interpreted negatively.  What we needed in that situation was a game-changer to shock the system out of its inertia.

I believe the election of President Obama was that game-changer, and based on John’s post I assume he agrees.  The question is whether the disruption will last long enough that we can afford the go-slow approach to new PD initiatives he advocates.  One of the chief features of complex systems is their unpredictability.  The stimulus package wrangling has shown us how rapidly windows of opportunity can begin to close.  So my bias is to strike while we think the iron is hot, or at least to not deliberately sit around allowing it to cool.

Second, there are reasons other than rushing into new message campaigns to have an Under Secretary in place.  For years critics (including those on the Defense Sciences Board) have bemoaned the uncertain division of labor and lack of coordination between State and Defense on strategic communication (including public diplomacy).  Now we have a sympathetic Secretary of Defense, who has given his employees plugs and sent them in search of sockets at State.  Yet there are none to be found because three weeks into the Obama administration there is still no electrician to install them.  Matt Armstrong worries (rightly, in my view) that unless this happens soon the socket-seekers will go home and the Pentagon will become the defacto coordinating entity for U.S. global engagement.

A final shortcoming of John’s position is that it assumes that the only important audiences are the external ones. But there are a lot of people–observers named in John’s post and people like them, career employees at State, interested parties in the private sector, and so on–who agree that PD is critical and think is has been poorly executed in the past.  We are all looking for signs that things are going to change and that PD is going to get the priority it deserves.  Unfortunately, all the signs are pointing in the opposite direction.  So even putting the programmatic and organizational matters aside, there is an important issue of symbolic leadership here.

To sum up, John is right to be cautious about hastily deploying new messaging campaigns.  But I would balance that caution against opportunity costs.  There is risk in taking too casual a pace and allowing the disruption caused by the election of Obama to fade.  There is a lot of urgent managerial-organizational work to be done, regardless of campaigns that might or might not be launched.   And there are also important internal audiences that have been expecting change.  Not only are they not seeing change, they’re not seeing anything.

These are the reasons I believe we can’t afford to go slow in getting a good Under Secretary in place.  On the contrary, it should be a high priority at this time.

Update February 13 9:30 MST

Here is a response from John Brown (who had trouble posting it as a comment):

Steve, Thank you for your thoughtful piece. All your points are well taken — but I find that more “new PD initiatives” are not necessarily the answer to dealing with our urgent overseas problems. Nor do we need an Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs who will “hype” our PD programs a la Karen Hughes or James Glassman in order to demonstrate to the White House or domestic audiences that “we’re doing something about those that hate us.” Rather, as I try to suggest in my piece, what is most important is for the new administration to have a public diplomacy perspective when framing policy. In other words, it should take  foreign public opinion seriously – which the previous administration essentially failed to do, despite its “new PD initiatives.”

PS – If there is one term I hope the new team in Washington will abandon (together with the “war on terror,” “the war of ideas” and “homeland”) is “new initiative.” Ever heard of an “old initiative”?

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In an earlier post I commented on what seemed to be a rather unambitious Public Diplomacy agenda outlined by Secretary Hillary Clinton in her confirmation hearings.  At the time I noted that the new administration was just getting started and there was no point getting alarmed.  Since then there have been other worrying signs that Public Diplomacy might not get very high priority under new leadership at the State Department.

As Matt pointed out yesterday, after a name was floated about a week ago for potential Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, nothing further has been heard on this issue.   Press reports described the candidate, Judith McHale, as a “longtime friend” of Clinton “and Democratic mega-donor.”  Add to this the arguments of some observers that she lacks relevant experience, and perhaps an appearance of patronage has taken some air out of her trial balloon.  In any case, nobody is talking, giving the appearance of a lack of urgency when it comes to filling this all-important position.

Meanwhile in another signal of potential low status for the PD function, Carolyn O’Hara at Foreign Policy reported last week that the PD offices may be getting moved off of the 6th floor.  Uh oh.  Unfilled positions are one thing, but an office downgrade–now that’s serious.  O’Hara concurs.  “Hardly a good message to send about the importance of public diplomacy under a new administration.”

Is this too much hand-wringing about a triviality?  Ask management guru Jeffrey Pfeffer, who wrote in his book Managing with Power:

Central physical locations provide power because of proximity.  Out-of-the-way locations both leave people out of the flow of events and symbolize how peripheral their work is considered by the organization.

In the same book he quotes none other than Henry Kissinger on the power of propinquity in the inner workings of government.

All of this is not lost on a “government employee with good contacts” quoted in O’Hara’s article:

Most comments I’ve heard thus far about reaction in the building aren’t quite suitable for print. But I think it can be summed up with a supremely cynical “oh, so THAT’s how they’re going to treat us.”

I continue to hope that these signs are misleading and that we can expect a robust effort to renew PD in the new State Department.  But I must admit, my optimism is getting harder to maintain by the day.

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Yesterday Walter Pincus at WaPo published an article entitled Clinton’s Goals Detailed that contains the first news I’ve seen about how the Obama administration intends to fix U.S. public diplomacy.  The second paragraph says:

In the battle of ideas, she said, the United States would go on the offensive implementing President-elect Barack Obama’s pledges to open “America Houses” in cities across the Arab world. These facilities, fashioned after a Cold War-era program, would have Internet libraries, English lessons and stories about Muslims in America. An initiative labeled “America’s Voice Corps” would recruit young Americans with language and public diplomacy skills to speak with and listen to people in the area. Completing the package would be a Global Education Fund to provide $2 billion for primary education around the world. But, she said, there would not be a return of the independent U.S. Information Agency.

The “Cold War-era program” referred to in the article is the USIA American Reading Rooms.  I am unable to find any hard data on the effectiveness of these centers.  Maybe a USIA refugee among the readers of this post can share some via a comment.  In any case, as Johnson & Dale said in a Heritage Backgounder in 2003, in the late 90s the effort was gutted:

Many binational cultural centers with accessible downtown store-front libraries either were abandoned or became “information resource centers” stuck in spare rooms of fortress-like embassies.

In a footnote they explain that this happened because of a mix of declining need (owing to the end of the Cold War) availability of the same information on the Internet, and the deteriorating security situation at the existing libraries. The need situation has certainly changed, but the Internet is more of a resource than it ever was, and the security situation is such that it’s hard to imagine street-corner reading rooms in Damascus, Cairo, and Riyadh. Are these reading rooms to be anything more than an Internet terminal and classroom in the basement of an embassy?

As for the “Voice Corps,” we here at CSC are in favor of listening.  But for that strategy to work, the listeners must channel information back into policy circuits where it could make a difference.  Otherwise we risk maintaining the listen-do gap that has characterized the last eight years.

If the USIA is not to be reconstituted, then how will the problems cited by the various calls to do so (for example, here, here and here) be addressed?  There is general agreement that the (Bill) Clinton-era dismantling of the USIA has not served us well, leaving our public diplomacy efforts with low priority and poor coordination.  After multiple Bush administration false-starts on fixing the coordination problems (2002 Office of Global Communications, 2002 Strategic Communication Policy Coordinating Committee, 2004 Interagency Strategic Communication Fusion Team) I would like to hear about some out-of-the-box organizational changes designed to address them, and more about if and how the PD function is going to be bumped in priority.

Granted this is one brief report at the very start of the Obama administration, and we don’t have the details behind these plans.  Nonetheless, I (and, I suspect, many readers of this blog) had hoped to see a more robust reform package for public diplomacy coming out of the gate.

UPDATE January 22, 8:50 MST

A couple of update items on this post. A reader sent me a link to a recent article: Long, S. R. J. (2008).  Winning hearts and minds: U.S. psychological warfare operations in Singapore, 1055-1961.  Diplomatic History, 32(5), 899-930.  It has extensive information on one library effort:

The USIS-Singapore Library opened in downtown Singapore in 1950, two years after the Smith-Mundt Act authorized the expansion of U.S. library services overseas. Singapore’s first free public library attracted huge crowds.  Within six months of its opening, it had 124,536 visitors, with 39,791 publications loaned out to locals.93 Stocking some 7,500 books and
numerous pamphlets on American history, literary classics, and scientific papers, the library was popular with pedagogues, students, and opinion makers, and remained so into the Eisenhower years.

The article contains a lot more than that about the library, so interested readers may want to get a copy.

Also Patricia at Whirled View did a post exposing some embellishments of Clinton’s statement by Pincus in the WaPo article.  He added some details about her announced programs that weren’t actually presented in her statement to Congress.  Where did those come from, Walter?  Clinton also said: “If confirmed, I look forward to a full assessment of public diplomacy at the State Department,” so thankfully she is thinking in terms of more than just libraries and listening corps, and will apparently get around to the organizational problems mentioned above in due time.

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As was reported last week, on August 6 Abbu Bakar Bashir announced his resignation as Amir of the Islamist organization Majelis Mujahid Indonesia or Indonesian Council of Jihad Fighters (MMI). His announcement, only days before the organization’s general convention, came as something of a surprise. It may lead some to believe that there is serious dissension with in the ranks of Indonesian Muslim radicals, and that the movement is in decline.

Such conclusions would be incorrect and are little more than wishful thinking. Bashir’s resignation stemmed from a disagreement about the theological nature of leadership not about the goals or methods of its struggle. He resigned his position as Amir of MMI because he feels that the organization is not Islamic enough. While the title Amir (or Emir) has been in use for centuries it is basically secular. MMI elects its Amir, who is responsible to the organization’s executive board. Bashir believes that he should be the “Imam” and that he is responsible only to God.

With his resignation, Bashir has not so much “stepped down” as he has “moved on” and freed himself of perceived restrictions on his freedom of action imposed by the organization.  He remains a highly charismatic figure. He has hinted that he will form a new organization and that he will continue to work with his former comrades in MII for the establishment of Shari’ah as the basis of the Indonesian State.

Bashir utterly rejects all democratic possesses. But ironically there are rumors that he will run for president in 2009 to force a showdown on the question of Indonesia’s future. This would present the country with an unambiguous choice between a religiously pluralistic democratic state and a Sunni Muslim theocracy as models of governance. Such a contest would also be a betrayal of Bashir’s oft stated anti-democratic convictions.

MMI is an umbrella organization, not a political party or social movement. It is a loose coalition of groups united only by the goal of establishing Shari’ah as the basis of local, regional and national governance. While Bashir was the group’s best known—and certainly most articulate—spokesman his departure does not mean that radical Islam has been weakened significantly.

Nor does Bashir’s popularity depend on his affiliation with MMI. It is rooted in a lifetime of devotion to radical Islamic causes, social networks among students and alumnae of the Islamic school (Pesantren al Mukmin Ngruki) he has led since 1972.  It also stems from his links to other Islamist organizations including the terrorist group Jammah Islamiyah and the vigilante organization Front Pembela Islam (Front for the Defense of Islam, FPI), and his ability to manipulate the Indonesian media.

Bashir was born in Jombang in East Java in 1938. This city is among Indonesia’s theological centers, as is best known as the home of the country’s most liberal Islamic movement Nadhlatul Ulama and former president Abdurahmman Wahid, who strongly opposes Bashir and everything he believes in. Bashir is an Indonesian of Hadrami (Yemini) descent. While Indonesian Arabs are no more or less inclined towards radical Ideologies than others, they are widely revered because they are commonly believed to be descendants of the Prophet Muhammad.  His Hadrami connections have also enabled him to move easily between Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore where there are also significant Arab populations.

Bashir is the spiritual leader of Jamaah Islamiyah, the group responsible for the 2002 Bali Bombings in which 202 people, most of them western tourists, were killed. He has consistently stated that the bombers were not terrorists, but Mujahidin, and that the CIA hijacked the operation and used it to plant a “micro-nuclear device” responsible for the death and destruction. This and other conspiracy theories involving US and Israeli intelligence services circulate widely in Indonesia and elsewhere in the Muslim world.

Bashir is also the leader of the Surakarta branch of FPI. FPI is a paramilitary organization that carries out violent attacks on bars, nightclubs, pool halls, mystical and marshal arts groups deemed to be “anti-Islamic.” Its’ most recent operation was an attack on an inter-faith rally supporting tolerance and religious freedom sponsored by mainstream Muslim and Christian groups at Indonesia’s Nation Monument in Jakarta on June first.

So Bashir’s departure from MMI does not diminish his power because it is based almost entirely on personal rather than institutional loyalties. He will continue to attract national and international attention and is entirely capable of inspiring, if not organizing acts of violence. Yet it is extremely unlikely that he or anyone resembling him will come to power at the national level. A decade of elections following the Indonesian democratic transition has shown that Bashir and other radical Islamists can organize rallies and gangs of thugs like FPI, but this does not translate into broad electoral appeal. Democracy can be messy, but remains the best safeguard against Bashir and others like him.

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As reported yesterday by Sharon Weinberger at Danger Room, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has resurfaced on the lecture circuit, calling for the (re-?) creation of (something kinda-sorta like) the old USIA (but not really):

We need someone in the United States government, some entity, not like the old USIA . . . I think this agency, a new agency has to be something that would take advantage of the wonderful opportunities that exist today. There are multiple channels for information . . . The Internet is there, pods blogs are there, talk radio is there, e-mails are there. There are all kinds of opportunities.

she quotes Rumsfeld as saying.

As her update notes, the post set off a small flurry of commentary in the public-diplomasphere. Most posters joined Weinberger in lamenting the return of the former SecDef (whose name translates as “kaboom field,” a source of unending hilarity for my friends in Germany) to the Public Conversation. Spencer Ackerman is circumspect:

Rumsfeld manage[d] to be the first secretary of defense in history not just to botch two wars, but to botch two wars simultaneously. For that, no one should ever listen to this man ever again. Whatever he says is discredited by the sheer fact that he’s the one saying it. He should be legally obligated to end of all his sentences with, “…but, on the other hand, I’m a total jackass.”

Matt Armstrong over at Mountainrunner was the contrarian. He criticized Weinberger for equating the idea with its messenger. While his by-now heavily redacted post has backtracked on the critical tone toward Weinberger, he is sticking to his guns:

[Rumsfeld] says it wrong and has credibility issues, which is Sharon’s keypoint. My keypoint is don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater just because he touched it.

At the risk of occupying the wishy-washy middle, I’d say there is something to agree with on both sides of this debate.

Ad hominems against Rumsfeld aside, Weinberger and the others are right to be suspicious of his concept. He decries the dismantling of the USIA, saying that we “lost a valued tool to help tell the story of a nation that was carved from the wilderness and conceived in freedom.” What we lack today, says Rumsfeld, is a “personnel organization” that can “deploy” people who can competently message for America.

But the problem is not that we are failing to insert our talking points into the Internet tubes and “pods” often enough. The problem is our meta-message: “Do as we say, not as we do.” We have people in our existing strategic communication establishment who have figured this out. For instance Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy Michael Doran defines strategic communication as “syncing our messaging with our actions, so our actions reinforce our words.” Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mullen says this too, and adds that we need to talk less and listen more. Three cheers for them!

Rumsfeld offers us a bureaucratic fix for what is really a conceptual problem. Creating the Homeland Security Department (a plan he presumably helped hatch) has mostly compounded the management gridlock it was supposed to solve. In the same way, creating a War-of-Ideas Department without a fundamental change in communication strategy will only amplify our shortcomings, helping us say the same wrong things, only louder.

Rumsfeld is also off the mark in his assessment of what we lost with the USIA. We didn’t lose a “tool,” we lost an approach. I have talked to many refugees from the USIA, and their common lament is the demise of a field driven approach to strategic communication. In the good ol’ days, USIA diplomats on the ground–who had knowledge of and contact with local people and circumstances–decided how strategic messages would be delivered. After the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998, these functions were absorbed into the State Department. Local finesse was supplanted with centrally devised and tightly controlled talking points delivered via an Echo Chamber.

This is where I think Matt Armstrong is right to say “not so fast.” A new organization could present an opportunity to go back to the future, especially if it could be done while there are people still around who remember how things used to be done. Such an effort would of course have to be updated to account for the new communication realities of this millenium. But if we were to combine the old-fashioned field-driven approach with a new commitment to listening and alignment of words with actions, then practice this using the old and new media, we might once again have reason to be optimistic about our prospects in the “war of ideas.”

UPDATE (1/25):   Today I received a private communication from Sharon Weinberger noting a correction she made on her original post on this subject.  She had quoted Rumsfeld as referring to “pods” as part of what is available on the Internet.  She said “someone with a high-quality recording sent me an excerpt, noting word he used was actually ‘blogs.’”  I have, in turn, made the appropriate corrections in this post.

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Over the weekend, the Washington Post reported that the HELP Commission, appointed by President Bush, would propose sweeping changes in the structure of the State Department, presumably to be undertaken by the next administration.

Quoting the chair of the HELP Commission, Mary Bush, WaPo said

the idea of a “super-State” is “bold, very innovative, provocative,” but she emphasized that it is one of many recommendations designed to bring rationality and structure to a system that is no longer working. Over two years, the commission heard from 75 experts, and “no one walked in and supported the status quo,” Bush said. “They all said this has to be fixed.”

In some senses, the proposal is indeed bold, innovative, and provocative. The report, available in its entirety here, is broad in scope. Its main focus is foreign assistance programs. Thus it calls for aligning foreign assistance programs with broader policy objectives and improving management oversight of assistance agencies. While a minority of the commissioners thought this should take the form of a separate Department of Development, the majority favor a reorganization that would create a

a next-generation Department of State with four sub-Cabinet agencies that report to the Secretary. They would focus on (1) trade and long-term development; (2) humanitarian crises and postconflict states; (3) political and security affairs; and (4) public diplomacy. (p. 15)

But in another sense, the proposal seems less like a bold and innovative step and more like another in a long string of reports calling for change in the way the United States handles its interactions with foreigners. In 2005 the GAO recommended that a similar reorganization be undertaken by the White House:

This report recommends that the Director of the Office of Global Communications fully implement the role envisioned for the office in the President’s executive order, including facilitating the development of a national communications strategy to help guide and coordinate the diverse public diplomacy efforts of the State Department, USAID, BBG, and DOD.

This in turn echoes a 2004 Defense Sciences Board report which also called for more coordination, to be provided by a Deputy National Security Adviser and new structures within the NSC:

The Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communication should chair a Strategic Communication Committee. Its members should have the equivalent of under secretary rank and be designated by the Secretaries of State, Defense and Homeland Security; the Attorney General; the Chief of Staff to the President; the Director of the Office of Management and Budget; the White House Communications Director; the Director of Central Intelligence; the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the Director of the Agency for International Development; and the Chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors. Unlike previous coordinating mechanisms with nominal authority, this Strategic Communication Committee should have authority to assign responsibilities and plan the work of departments and agencies in the areas of public diplomacy, public affairs, and military information operations; concur in strategic communication personnel choices; shape strategic communication budget priorities; and provide program and project direction to a new Center for Strategic Communication.

Earlier this year the State Department released its own U.S. National Strategy for Public Diplomacy and Communication. It is focused on items 3 and 4 of the HELP Commission’s list, but its recommendations have a familiar ring. Without recognizing any particular deficiency, it sees the need for more interagency coordination “at a minimum” between the White House Office of Global Communication, the White House Press Secretary, the NSC Senior Communication Director, State Department Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs staff, and the Defense Department Public Affairs staff. This group would decide how to respond to a given exigency, then

Following the response decision, a conference call will be conducted with public affairs and communication representatives from relevant agencies to refine and coordinate unified messaging. The resulting message from the Counterterrorism Communications Center and appropriate official statements will be relayed to Cabinet secretaries, ambassadors and the military chain of command through the Rapid Response Unit at the State Department (p. 8 )

Shortly after the release of this document the GAO again criticized the coordination of agencies involved in foreign affairs, this time in terms of assessing effectiveness: “Agencies conducting research do not have systematic processes in place to assess whether they are meeting their users’ needs, and efforts to coordinate and share collected information are limited” (p. 3)

An outside observer cannot help but get the impression that these are earnest efforts by different groups to reach the same conclusions over and over again. To their credit, they are recognizing that everything we do with respect to foreign audiences has communication value. This latest report is to be commended for rolling foreign assistance into that mix.

But otherwise it is part of a peculiar pattern I have observed in many different venues having to do with terrorism, strategic communication, and international relations: Everyone seems to have a good grip on what the problems are and some ideas about how we might solve them. But no one seems to have a clue about how we actually move toward integrated solutions.

Most often the impulse is to add more layers of management coordination, but organizational theory would question whether the best response to a complex environment is to add control mechanisms. Perhaps the most innovative suggestion of the HELP Commission report is that we think about a more radical redesign of the State Department.

But at the same time it runs up against the same old conundrum: How do we accomplish that? I propose that we form a commission whose task is to determine what prevents the government from moving toward solutions to problems that are repeatedly acknowledged in reports by its commissions, boards, and agencies.

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The Harford County Public School District in Maryland has decided to take a more proactive role in preparing their students for the real world.  This fall Joppatowne High School in Maryland debuted their Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness (HSEP) program with an initial enrollment of 75 students, many of them high school sophomores. 

The Harford County School District website describes the program:

The mission of the Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness Magnet Program is to provide [students] access to career pathways in homeland security studies to offer them a better education and more choices to allow them to provide services back to the community, the State and the Nation.

As the September/October 2007 issue of Mother Jones explains, the HSEP magnet program, which is funded by numerous state and federal agencies as well as several defense firms, hopes to teach kids the “new reality” and place them in jobs in the $24 billion-a-year Homeland Security Industry.  HESP was originally conceptualized in 2003, to meet the needs of the Homeland Security Industry for adequately trained personnel.  It was a way to respond to the burgeoning job market in the Northeast Maryland region, which is the hub of the nation’s defense industry, in close proximity to the Army’s Aberdeen Proving Grounds as well as defense contractors such as Northrop Grumman.  Students can choose from several career pathways including Information and Communication Technology, Criminal Justice and Law Enforcement, or Homeland Security Sciences.  Additionally, according to David Volrath, the Executive Director for Secondary Education for Harford County, “we do want to encourage higher education.  We also want to be realistic.  Some of these defense contractors will have huge security needs, and the jobs won’t require four years of college.” 

Principles

We can explore the relationship between the school and the public and private national defense organizations that gave rise to it through Anthony Giddens theory of structuration, as outlined in his book The Constitution of Society (1984).  Giddens explains that rules and resources guide social action in the creation of societal structures and systems.  “In reproducing structural properties,” Giddens states, “agents also reproduce the conditions that make such action possible” (p.26). 

An example Giddens provides is that of consumerism. An individual reaffirms the social “structure” of consumerism through participation in day-to-day actions like grocery shopping and buying gas.  These actions are done both consciously and unconsciously, and they have both intended and unintended consequences.  Aside from people’s intentions, such activities produce the chance to act again in similar ways. So, buying a particular product will encourage stores to continue to stock it, which will allow people to continue buying it.

The reproduction of structures through social action works to uphold a particular perspective or ideology, and these perspectives do not always stay contained within their original institutions. In what Giddens calls a “duality” of structure, one social system, and the ideology that supports it, can be reproduced in another, creating a replication.  This replication in turn justifies or validates the perspective of the original structure.

Analysis

The HSEP magnet program is a prime example of such replication. In a closer examination of the school’s mission and goals, the reproduction of dominant structures becomes more evident.  As Volrath noted, while the school encourages higher education, its emphasis is on present homeland security and current counterterrorism practices.  The school’s website does have links to area colleges; however, they are institutions that also have programs closely allied with the Department of Homeland Security.  But the clearest indicator of the embrace can be found in an explicit link from the school’s webpage to the Department of Homeland Security website.  The display is more than just a tacit endorsement of the agency and its activities.  The school is aligned with a specific course of counter-terrorism that directly reflects the agencies and corporations who support it.  In reproducing this structure a specific narrative of fighting terrorists is also replicated, this time with high school age students, to the exclusion of other narratives and strategies regarding terrorism.

It should be noted that a close relationship between the nation’s educational system and military interests is not necessarily new.  Despite former President Eisenhower’s famous warning about the military-industrial complex, all levels of education have had programs specifically aligned with military interests on their campuses for years.  As recent reports from the New York Sun and the Washington Times illustrate, ROTC programs have repeatedly clashed with school administrators over the appropriateness of a military presence and influence on school campuses. 

But, unlike ROTC programs, which replicate military structures that are arguably effective, Joppatowne High School’s relationship with the defense industry will replicate current structures and perspectives that have not served us well.  The larger issue here is what we should be teaching students about terrorism.  It remains to be seen what types of jobs HESP students will be able to attain upon graduation, especially if they choose to forgo college.  Right now the choices seem to be military service, building weapons for makers like Northrup Grumman, staffing airport screening operations, or working for private defense contractors.  Creating a program to fill such personnel shortages replicates the current structure of the defense industry while doing nothing to address the many faults of that current structure.

Desperately needed in counter-terrorism are people who understand other cultures, other languages, and the implications their actions have on the overall mission we are trying to accomplish. Will HESP produce them? Despite Volrath’s hope that the program may start teaching “Arabic or some other nontraditional, Third World-type language,” the current curriculum seems to offer few of the critical-thinking and communication skills that a new generation of counter-terrorists will need.

The HSEP program is a reaction to a growing job market, and it is not necessarily a bad thing that we prepare for the growing demand in Homeland Security Industries. But producing enough warm bodies to fill job vacancies is not enough. Educating students to embrace the current defense industry will only reproduce our shortcomings in the war on terror. We will teach a new generation exactly how to continue losing it.

Further Reading

Giddens, A. (1984). The Constitution of Society. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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