The enemy media strategy

The Belmont Club:

...

One security analyst I heard speak claimed that practically every insurgent operation in Iraq had a video camera unit attached, but until recently practically all Jihadi video was in Arabic. "Arabic is the language of the [Sunni Salafist] Jihad, and Jihadi videos were not even widely distributed in places like Indonesia or even Pakistan because they were in Arabic." But that has changed, he said, and now the videos were making their appearance in English, sometimes in American Internet forums, and that for the first time Jihadi propaganda was being produced in German. The connection with Germany was momentarily incomprehensible until the history of the 9/11 attackers came to mind. Et in arcadia ego sum. The overarching purpose of those videos was to demonstrate American mortality and the vulnerability of the West. To spread the word that it is fun and easy to hunt Americans. The American officer who had authored the counterinsurgency lessons learned in Anbar, Capt. Travis Patriquin, himself died in combat, but not before warning that the ideas which eventually killed him were leaping over borders into the wider world.

The virulence of this meme is suggested by the circumstance that, in order to charge it, an unending supply of snuff films was required. And the importance of the media, as a sphere of combat was illustrated by Patriquin's claim that the kinetic impact of insurgent operations themselves was itself subordinate to collecting the video of the operations. Lastly, the lethality of this meme is highlighted by the fact that those infected by it 'cannot be coerced -- only killed or captured"....

... while physical Jihadis can be effectively met by traditional arms -- including counterinsurgency -- the West is still casting about for a method to meet the dark spirit of the virtual Jihad with a puissant spirit of its own....

The biggest failure of the US in dealing with our enemies in the war on terror is our lack of engagement in the media battle space. The enemy has said that half the battle is in that battle space, but the US has assigned no commander to even be in charge of that area of the war. The traditional public information office is just not up to getting inside the enemy's OODA loop. Most of its responses take several news cycles to report what actually happened, meanwhile the 24 news cycle is already well beyond them and they never catch up. In a kinetic battle space this is a recipe for disaster and we are watching the same consequence in the media battle space.

The problem is made worse by the US media's compliant following of the enemy script in reporting events that the enemy admits are of no military significance. They are done solely to make the news. By following the enemy script the media is getting people killed.