The Spectacle of War
Posted by Tim Stevens on 13 May 2008
Andrew Exum has an excellent article over at Arab Media & Society, The Spectacle of War: Insurgent video propaganda and Western response [also as .pdf].
… while the ponderous American defense bureaucracy has been slow off the mark, the enemy – the insurgent groups against which the U.S. has fought in both Iraq and Afghanistan – have proved more than proficient at the art of propaganda, media manipulation and shaping the way operations and events are perceived by enemy, friendly and neutral populations. In the same way, though the U.S. and its allies talk of the “comprehensive approach”, it is more often than not groups like Hizbullah and Jaish al-Mahdi who best understand military operations as part of a combined effort incorporating “political, military, diplomatic, economic and strategic communication” efforts.
To a large degree, though, the U.S. military cannot be blamed for being caught off-guard by their enemy’s sophistication in managing the way battles and campaigns are perceived. In the past two decades, insurgent, terrorist, and guerrilla groups in the Middle East have grown exponentially more sophisticated in the way they use the media available to them in order to affect the way battles are perceived. From the perspective of someone who studies military innovation, it is a remarkable achievement.
This paper focuses on the evolution of insurgent media operations in support of political-military objectives. Groups like the Taliban and Hizbullah did not start off, from the beginning, as sophisticated manipulators of popular perception. They learned, over time, how to shape the way in which military operations are perceived, and in the process, have taught Western militaries a valuable lesson in the nature of war itself.
Read the rest of the article here.
Similarly, Brigitte L. Nacos writes on Media Power and Terrorists at Complex Terrain Lab, with particular emphasis on Hezbollah:
… modern-day terrorist organizations’ impact on domestic and/or international spheres depends to a large extent on their ability to establish their own means of communications or find alternative modes to communicate their messages directly to friend and foe.
Without taking the centrality of communication in the terrorist calculus into account, counterterrorism cannot succeed.
The burning of TV stations in Beirut (Counterterrorism Blog)
