What Is Leadership

It’s Time for Change. I am interested in studying three areas; leadership, cyber warfare and information warfare; studying them will allow me to better drive innovation within the Department’s broader need to advance non-lethal activities below the threshold for war.

Everything Starts With Leadership. Leadership is key to any organization’s health and success. Developing a positive organizational climate for every Psychological Operations Soldier is key to building an innovative and thriving community capable of defeating our 2+3 adversary narratives in the information environment. Further, participative management, defined as leveraging our young millennial minds, enables rapid advances in technical and training solutions to compete at scale in the digital information environment.

Constraints to Organizational Change; Adding Value Not Force Structure. Any organizational change requires senior leaders to realize current processes and paths are not optimal. Massive personnel requests and constant organizational redesign isn’t the key to PSYOP’s future; though admittedly deploying PSYOP “flags” as dictated by current policy isn’t acceptable either. Instead PSYOP must spend more money on training and the digital tools required to advance online influence. Instead of burning energy developing larger force structure, the Department must invest more training into our young, specially selected, PSYOP Soldiers and deploy them Strategically across the globe as part of a persistent influence network.

A New Role for PSYOP. Our PSYOP Soldiers Within the broader influence network, must understand cyber, behavioral economics and digital marketing techniques to effectively defeat our adversaries’ narratives. Statutory and Policy authority change requirements aside, I am interested in learning more about the application of digital marketing techniques as they apply to influence operations and how, through cyber exploitation, we can refine, to the person, our influence activities. Combining digital marketing and cyber techniques, with deep understanding of the behavioral economic theories capable of influencing foreign cultural and linguistic filters through long-duration overseas assignments is how the U.S. will effectively dominate the global information environment.

What’s Driving our New Role and What’s Hindering it. Technically PSYOP units are falling behind in the areas of online influence. Now, 8 year’s after the Arab Spring, 10 years since CENTCOM began its online engagements and, 5 years after Congress directed DoD to change how it conducts engagement through websites, the Department has not fundamentally shifted its online practices. Why? A demonstrable portion of our innovation failure is rooted in a Department wide fear; a fear of driving authorities lower, to conduct operations on the internet at an actionable level where advances can be innovated by our younger millennials.

What’s Old Isn’t New. As such, fear within our older generation restricts online influence activities to either broadcasting information for broad regional audiences using webpages or swaying sentiment via social media platforms and forums. PSYOP attempts to optimize its websites by measuring click counts, dwell, bounce rates and unique visitors in the near-term and longitudinal surveys to measure long-term shifts in perceptions or beliefs. We measure sentiment, likes, and shares to determine effectiveness in PSYOP social media endeavors. Our sentiment analysis is industry standard, our website metrics are industry standard for search engine optimization, but neither is weaponized in a manner conducive to achieving any physically measurable change to the information environment. As such, though we are dabbling in the internet of things, we will never engage our adversaries or foreign audiences on a comparative scale.

The Clash Of Behavioral Theory and Digital Influence. Current psychological operations doctrine and processes are rooted in the theory of planned behavior; the need to understand everything about our audiences before engaging them. Needless to say, those processes do not account for the digitization of influence where engaging an audience can generate greater understanding. Further, unlike industry digital marketing campaigns or the best political campaigns, our digital PSYOP world and our physical PSYOP world are not connected. Digital marketing processes leveraged by thousands of firms are readily available, easily instructed, relatively low-cost, and can be rapidly incorporated into U.S. influence operations. Our young millennial PSYOP Soldiers will quickly grasp and understand how to integrate the digital and physical PSYOP effort if we only make it accessible to them. Rounding everything out, psychological operations could achieve greater effect if the branch had a better understanding of Cyber capabilities.

The Unholy Union of Cyber and PSYOP. Cyber and PSYOP are more closely intertwined than either career field is willing to acknowledge. Increasingly Cyber seeks to influence foreign behavior necessitating support from PSYOP. Conversely, PSYOP sees an increasing need to leverage Cyber tools to understand and influence the information environment. As PSYOP advances into digital operations, the barriers between PSYOP and Cyber, which seemingly originate from Offices in the Pentagon, disparity between Career Fields, and Combatant Commands must be overcome. As such, my reading plan for the coming months is informed by DoD policy restraints, my limited knowledge of cyber and digital influence, and a need to improve my organizational leadership skills.

The Tip of My Reading Iceberg. In the following months I plan to read Dark Territory by Fred Kaplan, Cyber War by Richard Clarke, and Future Crimes by Mark Goodman as I attempt to understand the possibilities for future cyber integration into digital influence operations. As I work to understand digital marketing, I will start my reading with Like War by P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking, Grokking Algorithms, Armada by Earnest Cline, and Net Locality: Why Location Matters in a Networked World by Eric Gordon and Adrian De Souza e Silva. I will supplement Book reading with forum research derived from the various search engine optimization sites, such as Ahrefs.com, to better imagine and guide the employment of digital influence research and execution. Finally, I plan to read Leaders by General Stanley McChrystal, Jeff Eggers and Jason Mangone, Leveraged Learning by Danny Inny, Building a Storybrand by Donald Miller and Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss to better frame the concepts for organizational design researched through various free online blogs and forums.

So Who Will Enable Me. These 11 books, along with a variety of forums, blogs and web pages will serve as the core of my research to address the PSYOP Branch’s organizational design challenges and the Department’s advance into the weaponization of digital influence. Through incorporation of digital marketing strategies, increased collaboration with Cyber, and potentially a reconsideration for employment of PSYOP forces, our ability to defend the Nation will improve. I say all of this ahead of a significant statement, I must be enabled by persons who know how the Army runs. These persons must be able to articulate how changes are made to the Army system and be capable of making said changes. I understand this is not an individual effort. As such, the only one question in two parts remains for me. Where will the Army place me to support our Nation’s effort in the non-lethal fight and who wants to support my efforts?