Information as a "Non-Lethal Weapon System"

"I hate newspapermen. They come into camp and pick up camp rumors and print them as fact. In regard them as spies, which in truth they are. If I killed them all there would be news from hell before breakfast."

William T. Sherman wrote that back in the Civil War. And from what I've studied in the past, that attitude was prevalent throughout the Military culture until this war. It has taken us a long time to realize that Sherman was working hard and not smart, and that it makes a lot of sense to make the effort to get our message out in conjunction with the rest of our operations.

The second day of our two day seminar from the Leadership Development and Education for Sustained Peace focused on two interesting topics, one was the media, and the other was about "human terrain" and Influencing Operations.

The media presenter was a guy named Dodge Billingsley. He does a lot of freelance work, was embedded with the marines a time or two, and has recently been working in Georgia and Chechnya, and he was the first guy on the scene in the Shah i Khot valley in Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan, and he helped us understand that your message is a weapon system, and in a counterinsurgency, it can be used to influence the "key terrain," which is the people. Mao said it best: Control the people, control the country. al Qada does a great job of this... Every attack they do has a camera guy there, and the footage is on the web in a matter of minutes.

The second guy was Andrew Garfield, a former British Army 'Armour' and Intelligence officer who spent a lot of time in Northern Ireland. His presentation focused on the point that every action has intended and unintended consequences. He also had a lot of French Army jokes, which are always entertaining.

Both of these guys had messages we had heard before, but it was good to hear it in another perspective. I equated it to parents coaching: I can give my daughter some advice on technique or conditioning, but somehow the same advice sounds more authoritative and therefore better if I pay somebody to coach her and the coach tells her the exact same thing. Overall, good stuff.

The team is coming together. This week will be the last week of mostly individual skills, and now we will begin to get into more collective training. We hit the range later in the week for some bullet launching (for when negotiation, kind words and chi tea fail), and we also draw our set of vehicles so we can start to do more training on our own.

Nice to see the Razorbacks eek out a win last night. The next month is going to be ugly.

Sorry for no pictures lately-- not much to photograph of late. This week should be better.

Hope you are well.

Ron