DoD Manages to Stay Asleep

Terrorism is a form of political warfare. If you like, it's politics with explosives. Basically a small percentage of people can rule a larger population just through the applied use of terror. For those of you who say "This isn't really a war, there's no country and our losses are minuscule" I suggest your definition of war is inadequate.

And it's the definition of war that's causing us a hekcuva hard time, in my opinion. We have all of these ideas involving troops, amphibious landings, bombing campaigns, a draft, rationing, etc -- that just don't fit the reality of low-level warfare.

In my original article, I made an extended metaphor between this new definition of warfare and commerce. To me, we are selling a product that is called freedom, or more precisely, a cosmopolitan society with private property and freedom of religion and speech. Like any other business selling a product, we need to identify separate markets, assess the need, plan the campaign, execute and follow-up. The only difference is that, just like the definition of war has expanded, we should expand the definition of commerce to include violence.

The beauty of this is that in the west we have mastered the ability to measure and persuade people. Nowhere else is there Madison Avenue, or Hollywood. Or Wharton. By using the strengths of these institutions, we can plan and execute a very nuanced campaign, over multiple fronts, using multiple strategies.

So I did the best I could to explain my little idea. I even got some press, appearing on the Winds of Change blog and corresponding with a former general. Overall, however, I was just some schmuck monday-morning quarterbacking -- it didn't really make much of a difference.

So I was happy to see the article "Pentagon tries to learn from Madison Avenue" in MSNBC and the Washington Post last week. Seems like somebody over at DoD spent $400K to create "Enlisting Madison Avenue: The Marketing Approach to Earning Popular Support in Theaters of Operation." which was written by clinical psychologist Todd C. Helmus.

The Post lists a few of the little nuggets Helmus managed to turn up:

Helmus and his co-authors concluded that the "force" brand, which the United States peddled for the first few years of the occupation, was doomed from the start and lost ground to enemies' competing brands. While not abandoning the more aggressive elements of warfare, the report suggested, a more attractive brand for the Iraqi people might have been "We will help you." That is what President Bush's new Iraq strategy is striving for as it focuses on establishing a protective U.S. troop presence in Baghdad neighborhoods, training Iraq's security forces, and encouraging the central and local governments to take the lead in making things better.

Many of the study's conclusions may seem as obvious as they are hard to implement amid combat operations and terrorist attacks, and Helmus acknowledged that it could be too late for extensive rebranding of the U.S. effort in Iraq. But Duane Schattle, whose urban operations office at the Joint Forces Command ordered the study, said that "cities are the battlegrounds of the future" and what has happened in Baghdad provides lessons for the future. "This isn't just about going in and blowing things up," Schattle said. "This is about working in a very complex environment."

In an urban insurgency, for example, civilians can help identify enemy infiltrators and otherwise assist U.S. forces. They are less likely to help, the study says, when they become "collateral damage" in U.S. attacks, have their doors broken down or are shot at checkpoints because they do not speak English. Cultural connections -- seeking out the local head man when entering a neighborhood, looking someone in the eye when offering a friendly wave -- are key.

The most successful companies, the Rand study notes, are those that study their clientele and shape their workplace and product in ways that incorporate their brand into every interaction with consumers.

Wal-Mart's desired identity as a friendly shop where working-class customers can feel comfortable and find good value, for example, would be undercut if telephone operators and sales personnel had rude attitudes, or if the stores offered too much high-end merchandise. For the U.S. military and U.S. officials, understanding the target customer culture is equally critical.

So let's see, instead of looking at commerce in general -- how are opportunities identified, met, and monetized -- the study just looked at Madison Avenue. (Sounds like a sick reminder of the old joke. The sales manager of a dogfood company was talking about how much money was being spent in marketing and sales, and was cajoling his sales team to sell more dogfood. "But the dogs don't like the dogfood" one salesman murmured)

Instead of looking at transactional sales, where I give you something and you give me something, the study looked at branding. The brand of the United States is not doing so well. Gee, can we have a receipt for that $400K, please?

So I'll put this plainly. We are not selling the brand of the USA to the world. That's a stupid undertaking. We are selling the product of freedom to the world. That product has many brands, many companies, many markets, and many configurations. To sit somewhere in a think tank and try to generalize what our brand is doing or not doing is to miss the point entirely. It would be like trying to sell cars by having a government commission or academic panel determine what the best car would be. It completely misses the point of market differentiation, sales channels, key features, etc.

This is my problem with most DoD programs. If you ask the wrong question, you get the wrong answer. Too many times, good people on both sides of the desk are like a bunch of blind idiots stumbling around in a room full of sharp objects. It's amazing the process works at all.

DoD. Please. Use our national strengths. Go to the Silicon Valley. Find out how 3 or 4 guys in a garage somewhere are changing minds and attitudes of people half-way around the world. Learn. Try to emulate. We can only afford so many stealth bombers, but we can afford lots of little 3 or 4 person garage companies. If we could only learn how to harness them.

I did my part. I tried to help. I'm still not sure as to the limits and usefulness of the ideas I put forth. I can say, however, that the latest study not only did NOT address my ideas, it gave the appearance of doing so. So now, the next time some lamebrain at DoD hears about Transactional Warfare, he'll think "Gee. Didn't we already study that?"

No sir. You did not.