Continuing the dialog on General Petraeus and his PAO...

I'm hearing very positive things from within Navy channels in the Green Zone since GEN P. showed up in theater about the turnaround in prospects - this from folks who wanted to invite me over for a ringside seat on the meltdown just a few months back. These were professionals observing another service something from the outside, who had no skin in the ground forces game and they were pretty despondent about what they were seeing. Something has changed, and for the better. The only questions I have is whether it has changed sufficiently for the better, and whether it has changed in time. The burden of proof is on us for the former, and the clock is not on our side for the latter. I don't know that empowering PAO's, however great an idea it might have been a year or more ago is going to do much for us now: Everyone has been saying that they were seeing 'light at the end of the tunnel' for so long that the people no longer believe us when we say we're going to get the job done. It's not that they think we're lying, I think they believe that we're deceived. Without saying that it is so, isn't it intriguing to contrast the way that senior non-fighting deadwood was swiftly swept away in they system shock which followed our entry into WWII to the time it might have taken for a similar sweep-up to occur in a war whose timeline we ourselves chose? It appears to me - and as a naval officer, what follows is clearly unschooled conjecture - that we just couldn't understand why the patient application of sequential a** kickings wasn't having the desired effect. We weren't living with the Iraqi people, we were running sorties on them, kicking their doors in, roughing up their menfolk (in front of the ladies), killing quite a few of them, and getting killed right back. After all the night's drama was complete we'd head back to camp for a debrief, hot shower and some rack time. Repeat. We really weren't listening to the population we've been trying to stabilize. In poll after poll, they told us their chief concern was security - we thought we could kill our way to security, when what it looks like what it's really going to take is bedding down in the ville, being out there when the lights go down. Which was hard to do with the forces we had. So here we are, surging with Petraeus and crossing our fingers. My 2c, spread over a $10 table.

All good points, Lex - but the war ain't over, and the PAO's don't seem to get it. From a different perspective - the Kansas Guard put me on their press mailing list, consequently I happily publish their stuff as a public service. The Missouri Guard ain't havin' none of that internet-bloggy thing. My Google page rank is higher than either of theirs - which means the Kansas Guard is getting more exposure for their stories, as they go on my front page, rather than buried deep in the bowels of the bird-poop collector's public web pages. CENTCOM does it best - which isn't the same thing as saying CENTCOM does it well, but they are adapting and learning, as are we. Big Service PAOs don't really seem to understand the InfoOps nature of this stuff. Which is another reason we're losing the IO war.

I don't know Gen. P. - so I won't comment on him personally. I do know some in the Army say that, "He is an intellectual, not a warfighter." But, in this kind of war, we need an intellectual more than a warfighter - and Gen. P. has a good track record in this respect – and I like what I have read from and about the man. As for the PAO - well, I believe in the "Big Man" theory of history at both the micro and macro levels. Sometimes you have the wrong person in the wrong job at the wrong time. One thing to keep in mind though, PI (Public Information) is a related, but not same, field as INFO OPS (Information Operations) and PSYOPS (Psychological Operations). Important to not confuse the three. There can be a significant problem though when the three do not work together. Being that in some organizations the INFO OPS and PSYOPS shops are run out of J3 and PI is run out of CG or J1; it is no shock that there may be a disconnect. In that case, the problem is with your Chief of Staff. It is his job to make sure those knuckleheads all sing on the same key. Don't blame the 4-star for that. That disconnect is all ineffective Staff Work. IMAO. One last thing. To echo a little bit of Lex's post - my spies and a bit of first hand tell me that things are unquestionably heading in the right direction in Iraq. If we can hold firm our Political/Strategic Center of Gravity, Support in Washington DC and the American People, through this summer - there will be no question that we are heading towards our end state. I worry though, as do others, that the major undermining of our Pol/Strat CoG that we see right now - if it succeeds - will prevent that summer milestone. If the funding pull wins this spring - well - the PAO issue is moot.

How much of the PAO problem is that it's a dead end, career wise? Who's made their flag for being effective in such a role? How many, if any, have had their career go into neutral for being good at this? Like other's I like Mike Yon. But, man, having a rouge cannon reporter in your business can give you ulcers. May be a nose to spite face situation, but if Yon's irritating(and breaking rules, like with the Kurilla incident) it may not be all the PA guys fault. Odd thing. For months CNN has had talking head after talking head come on and say "As goes Baghdad so goes the rest of the country." Now that there's a crackdown in Baghdad they send me an email saying the violence is shifting to outliers and that this portends a death spiral for the country.(With nobody countering it from officialdom as yet) And nobody covered the Pres. speech out at the NTC today in total, if at all. We suck at communications. I hate to say it, but we do.

Ry, More to it than that. Talk to the PIO and he crew at CENTCOM when you get a chance. They try to push all sorts of stuff out - but if the Big Media types decide to ignore it and won't report on it on their own - what can you do?

Ironically enough, as I'm typing this I’m busy watching the Fox News story on the number six site on all of You Tube: http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=MNFIRA Changing the military culture IS happening, it just isn’t happening as fast as it should, and PAOs (of which I am one) aren’t nearly the sole issue that some would like to think. One only has to look at Yon’s Rub#3 comments to see that even his supporters are raising an eyebrow at his recent shenanigans. An unprecendented amount of commenters made reference to the fact that bureaucracy is an undeniable fact of life in the military and that Yon should be taking what amounts to some good advice. IMO Yon hit the bottom when he writes: //snip// Speaking of comments on the website, check out this one, from a writer who teases ever so coyly about his “real” identity: Yon's too smart a writer to resort to using quotes as a "substitute" for "irony". And what's the point of rubbing the guy's nose in it publicly with the phrase "teases ever so coyly". Umm...maybe the guy is really just trying to help you out...Your commenters seem to think so. Yon then makes Zig’s point for him: //snip// When someone in a position to help reaches out and tries to open up a line of communication, perhaps you should reply directly rather than using the fact that they reached out to you as a point of irony in one of your articles, Which is of course, exactly what Yon is doing yet again. “Look at me, people are trying to help me…but I don’t want their help, I just want to make the story about me” He’s in danger of making himself the story, which is never a good thing. Good points from you all earlier: coordination stops at the Chief of Staff. PA and IO not the same, we need to do better at IO; I think the YouTube for MNF-I is the best project yet. I always laughed when Rumsfeld would say that PAOs just don't get it. Get what? The fact that you say in public that the battle of ideas needs to be where our effort is, but you resource the PA community only near the very bottom of the barrel. Heck, Army Public Affairs doesn't even have it's own stream of funding for it. It gets what it can scratch out of the Pentagon's budget for "Army Staff". Army PAOs typically have less rank at every command level than the chaplain. Anyone who has been around a staff in action knows the difficulty that creates when you're the low man. Put your keyboards down! Yes, I know that a good PAO can get himself heard and his ideas accepted, even sometimes from personal experience :), but I'm saying that it creates a situation where you're already fighting uphill when the boss is saying your fight is the center of gravity. Time to put money and resources where our mouth is. Staff the function correctly, fill out the organizations so they can be near 100% fill BEFORE we deploy, and for sure, fund it like you mean it. For some more ideas on "fighting the war of ideas like a real war" check out my last blog post...too long to repeat here. I’ll be at the Milbloggers conference if anyone wants to continue this over a beer. –Kosovodad (LTC Mike L)

When the MSM is in favor of failure, it makes it difficult to get the truth out. However, for those of you old enough to remember, the Reagan administration were masters at getting their talking points out to the people in spite of efforts to the contrary. I have often wondered why the Bush administration didn't go and find every member of the Reagan communications team still alive and offer them positions. I know Peggy Noonan is still kicking; I see her stuff on NRO and other places all the time... Winning the info war has to start with the White House. The war-fighting commands and the services can't engage affectively in the propaganda war without support from above.

"Progress" in general: Twenty-odd years ago (some were odder than others) we got our first computer in the office. For days we weren't allowed to look at it, for weeks we weren't allowed to touch it. Eventually we were trained on fundamentals of something called DOS, later programs like WordPerfect and Lotus. Within a very few years we were using this powerful tool exactly in the way we used to use paper and pencils. The computers got better and faster, but we were able to add security measures to counteract that. Every once in a while some young whippersnapper would point out that if we'd stop thinking of these things as fancy electric pencils we could actually use them to do things even better, smarter, and faster. Years passed, the old pen and pencil crowd finally faded away (still not yet completely), and tentative steps were taken in that direction. But ask yourself: how many times have you seen - to this day - a PowerPoint slide used to convey purely alphanumeric information, perhaps with some clip art added. Or, how many times have you seen - to this day - a PowerPoint slide emailed to you as an attachment to convey purely alphanumeric information that could have been simply contained in the body of the email... Ah yes, back to the chronology - next came a new thing called "email". Suddenly, communication from top down - once requiring message traffic that took some time and cost and the proper filling out of forms in triplicate - could be achieved at the push of a button. And a lower-level commander could get a message to all his troops "simultaneously" without calling them all together in one place. Thus taskers that weren't worth the effort previously could now be given with the mere push of a button. Due to this wonderful advance of automation, 'work'loads for everyone increased noticeably. Suddenly the leader who never left his desk was the guy who got things done, and he could provide the Excel spreadsheets (and if truly savy, graphs) to prove it. Enter the internet (aka "the information superhighway") about ten years ago. I predict that within a few short decades we'll come to grips with it, too. I further predict: Youtube style videos in which a presenter reads alphanumeric PowerPoint slides to us will soon be all the "high tech" rage. (I've already seen early examples).

Guys: I think we're missing the point. The issue isn't PAO's per se. It's that the PAOs need to get their Generals out and visible, saying the kinds of things the American public needs to hear. That requires, live, unscripted venues. Taking on a doubting reporter - challenging false/bad/uninformed assertions directly would also be helpful to troop and home morale.

Even though they should, big media types don't report the good things that are happening there. Why? Because they don't believe *anything* the administation tells them anymore (and, unfortunately, by extension the military). They feel deceived about all the events leading up to the invasion in 2003 and the seemingly shifting justifications for going to war once it started. Too, the administration has done an amazing job of labeling anyone and everyone who does not unequivocally and unhesitatingly share their beliefs 120% as either A) treasonous, B) limp wristed surrender monkeys, C) in league with the terrorists, or D) all of the above. It's firmly hardwired in this administration to not trust the MSM, and to only use it for their own purposes. It's been that way for 6 years. Now they need it to get the positive stories out of Iraq and they're surprised the MSM's not listening to them. What are they thinking?