by Steven R. Corman
A new “strategic framework” for U.S. Public Diplomacy has at long last been released. Oddly, it is a slide show rather than a paper, but perhaps that’s because it is to be the basis for a briefing today. My colleague Phil Seib has already expressed disappointment in the new proposal:
It is so lacking [...]

by Kristin Fleischer
In his book Fighting the War of Ideas like Real War: Messages to Defeat the Terrorists, J. Michael Waller argues that the United States already has a “secret weapon worse than death,” and it is cheap, readily available and easy to deploy. That weapon is ridicule.
Although the suggestion that ridicule and satire [...]

by Jeff Halverson
In the war of ideas for the “hearts and minds” of the Muslim world, cultural diplomacy can go a long way. The US government may not be very popular abroad, but our cultural products certainly are. Many Muslims hate our policies, but they still love our movies, listen to our pop music, and [...]

by Steven R. Corman
Yesterday the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) released a report on civilian casualties in Afghanistan over the last year.  It concluded that “2009 proved to be the deadliest year yet for civilians since the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001.”  The surprise is what it says about the causes [...]

by Scott W. Ruston
Recent headlines revealed that video feeds from the Predator, the US unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) used for surveillance and targeting in both Iraq and Afghanistan, have been intercepted by insurgents in Iraq.  Early follow up analysis focuses on whether the intercept of Predator video feeds qualifies as a “hack” or whether that [...]

by Bud Goodall
In Thursday’s Nobel acceptance speech, President Obama delivered the powerful narrative I had hoped to hear in his previous West Point address on Afghanistan.  I was critical of the West Point address due to: “the absence of a compelling narrative that links who we are, as a people, to what we are trying to [...]

by Steven R. Corman
A debate has once again re-ignited over the relative meaning of Public Diplomacy and Strategic Communication, sparked this time by a keynote by Bruce Gregory at GWU on October 5.  It was rejoined by Amb. William Rugh in an email exchange with Bruce, both of whose comments were posted and re-rejoined by [...]

by Bud Goodall
One of the important challenges of President Obama’s administration is to sell the continuation of our “overseas contingency operation” (or perhaps FATAVE) in Afghanistan to an increasingly disenchanted audience at home and abroad. But there is a worrisome absence of a good narrative–a coherent collection of stories–about why we are there and what [...]

The Consortium for Strategic Communication has just released a new white paper entitled Out of Their Heads and Into Their Conversation: Countering Extremist Ideology by Angela Trethewey, Steven R. Corman and Bud Goodall. The complete paper can be downloaded at http://comops.org/article/123.pdf
Executive Summary
Ideology is often ignored or deemed irrelevant to strategic communication because it is [...]

by Scott W. Ruston
Admiral Michael Mullen’s recent essay in Joint Forces Quarterly criticizing “strategic communication” lambastes the US government for its failures of strategic communication and the growth of a bloated bureaucracy fueling an agency-funded, contractor-filled cottage industry.  We have previously flagged Admiral Mullen as someone who “gets it,”  and it is welcome news that [...]