Rethinking Information Dominance and Influence Battlespace Effects

Abstract

Adaptive Campaigning – Army’s Future Land Operations Concept is a wake up call for the Army and ADF as a whole, as it seeks to generate effects in the modern complex operational environment. A core element of the concept is the requirement to recognise and utilise the global information environment to support operations. While the concept in various versions has been available for some time, Army has yet to fully embrace the capabilities already resident within its organisation to focus on winning the dominant narrative and successfully exploiting opportunities in the Information Actions Line of Operation.

This article proposes that unless Army creates an Information Operations generalist to effectively plan, synchronise and execute information effects in support of operations, the strong and successful work of disparate information actions task elements will continue to be limited and potentially misused. This article proposes that Army uses the pool of information specialists in the Australian Army Public Relations Service (AAPRS) to generate this much-needed capability. It traces the history of AAPRS and the issues uniformed members of the Defence Public Affairs area currently face and suggests that this pool of personnel may offer an opportunity for Army to expand into becoming the Information Dominance and Influence Battlefield Operating System subject matter experts. The article highlights the intellectual and operational growth of AAPRS officers over the past few years to justify further the argument that if Army is to truly adapt to the new environment, the resources are available but are currently misused.

The article also highlights many of the issues with Information Operations and puts to rest many of the myths and perceptions associated with the capability that have become common within both the ADF and the general public. It argues that to truly gain any level of information dominance requires substantial subject matter expertise, quality planning and a solid dose of Mission Command, all facets that are currently lacking across both Army and the ADF.

The article recommends today’s AAPRS officer as a first stop in creating the capability that is severely lacking at the operational level.

Introduction

In June 2006, Charles Sturt University academics Zoe Hibbert and Peter Simmons published the results of their Defence-sponsored research into the relationship between Australian journalists who specialise in reporting Defence matters and the Military Public Affairs Branch of the Australian Defence Force.¹ The study focused on the relationship between the two groups during the 2003 Iraq invasion and sought to ‘clearly identify gaps and problems in the relationship between the two parties’.² While laudable in its approach, the study failed to recognise that Military Public Affairs, for the most part, does not engage directly with the media. Current Military Public Affairs Officers have neither the freedom of action, nor the command authority, within the current military or political environment to act on most recommendations of the study. In fact the study, reported as ‘helping the military public relations department to change strategy, structure and policy’,³ did little more than redesign the wider Defence Public Relations area, within the existing constraints of manpower, to be almost singularly focused on media responsiveness.⁴ Anything beyond the internal restructure and focus was, and remains, simply beyond the authority of the organisation to change.

In reality, the study which sought to establish the relationships between Military Public Affairs—those uniformed officers of the ADF who operate within the global information environment⁵ in support of military operations—was more reflective of relationships between the media and the much larger, mostly civilian Defence Public Affairs area. In the current Defence construct it is civilian public affairs staff that primarily interfaces with the media. This interface is constrained to the provision of cleared responses provided for release by the relevant Service or branch of the Department. Most importantly, however, is that this approach is universally applied across Defence issues, which range from kangaroo culling within training areas through to the latest operational incident in Afghanistan. The current approach makes little distinction between a domestic public relations function—being good neighbours in a regional area—and supporting an operational commander in achieving effects within the Information Dominance and Influence Battlespace. It quite often ends up with a civilian who has no operational experience and little understanding of complex battlefield actions advising the Senior Leadership Group on communication strategies and, more importantly, deciding on the releasable content in support of current operations. Despite its shortcomings, the Hibbert and Simmons study clearly identified that there are significant issues within Defence in understanding exactly what ‘operations’ within the global information environment entail.

Across Defence, the focus on media relationships as the panacea to the information conundrum continues, yet the capability to specifically address the operational aspect of this issue has been mostly left to its own devices. Army continues to employ a small group of specialist communicators within the Australian Army Public Relations Service (AAPRS) to address ‘media issues’ but, unlike their US and UK equivalents, has completely disempowered them from proactively engaging with the media. This leaves an obvious question. Is Army and the ADF actually demanding and receiving the service it now requires from its uniformed specialists, particularly in light of the release of Adaptive Campaigning – Future Land Operating Concept?⁶ More importantly, what role does today’s AAPRS officer need to perform in a complex operational environment?

Aim

This paper seeks to further the debate started in the 2008 Chief of Army’s Military History Conference titled ‘The Military, the Media & Information Warfare’.⁷ The conference, through its range of speakers and topics, focused almost solely on the media element of the triumvirate and in doing so, furthered the misperception that the military’s relationship with media was the critical element of operations in the global information environment. The author contends that it is the third element, the mislabelled ‘Information Warfare’,⁸ which should be the focus of the uniformed Army and the ADF today.

In the current construct the media relationship aspect is almost solely the domain of Defence civilians, leaving a pool of uniformed officers in employment limbo who work hard to achieve operational effects but are usurped in implementing strategies by a civilian approach that focuses on media engagement as a measure of effectiveness.

The fact that convenors chose to use a term that fell out of favour almost a decade ago also highlights the single greatest issue facing any practitioner of effects in the global information environment today. Everyone has an opinion on what it is, who should do it, how they should go about it and, quite regularly, how it is failing. For a capability that Army requires to generate and sustain the dominant narrative in Adaptive Campaigning,⁹ very little has been done to actually direct its development beyond stove-piped enhancement within information task elements. Like the resultant changes from the Hibbert and Simmons research into Military Public Affairs, development of capability in creating information effects has essentially been self-generated, limited in scope and generally unsupported externally. The real issue therefore is not as Hibbert and Simmons or many of the Chief of Army’s History Conference presenters would contend—the relationship between the military, particularly Military Public Affairs, and the media—but one of the Army actually moving beyond a capability requirement that was developed in the 1980s, and actively supporting its own doctrine and policy through the directed development of capabilities to support the Adaptive Campaigning’s ‘Information Actions’ Line of Operation.¹⁰ Rethinking the uniformed Military Public Affairs capability is the first step in doing so.

Background to the AAPRS

The tendency to focus on relationships with the media as the panacea to improve and maintain support for operations is not new. Following the US Civil War, Union Army General William Sherman made his disdain for journalists well known, but also identified the requirement to seek ways to better manage their impact.

Newspaper correspondents with an army, as a rule, are mischievous. They are the world’s gossips, pick up and retail the camp scandal, and gradually drift to the headquarters of some general, who finds it easier to make reputation at home than with his own corps or division. They are also tempted to prophesy events and state facts which, to an enemy, reveal a purpose in time to guard against it. Moreover, they are always bound to see facts colored by the partisan or political character of their own patrons, and thus bring army officers into the political controversies of the day, which are always mischievous and wrong. Yet, so greedy are the people at large for war news, that it is doubtful whether any army commander can exclude all reporters, without bringing down on himself a clamor that may imperil his own safety. Time and moderation must bring a just solution to this modern difficulty.¹¹

Given the widespread use of General Sherman’s contention, it remains surprising that most authors focus on his negative opinion of journalists and not his insight into the requirements of operational commanders. He quite clearly identified that the issues concerning media in his area of operations were part of a commander’s responsibility based upon guidance from higher headquarters. He also acknowledged that the outcome was unlikely to be tactically or operationally suitable but such was the strategic imperative, a commander must make certain allowances to support the requirement.

Current military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan reinforce each and every day that tactical or even operational successes do not readily or automatically equate to strategic triumph. Military victories on their own rarely gain and maintain strong domestic or operational-area public support for the activities of a military force. Moreover, the success of Australia’s commitment to these ongoing conflicts matters little if perception of the wider campaign is increasingly negative. As seen over the past few years, the great work of Australians in Afghanistan does little to sway the general public towards supporting the conflict if they believe, based on information presented into the global information environment, that the conduct of the wider Coalition campaign is flawed.

The information element of operations, in which media in the battlefield are but a part, was identified as a command issue more than a century ago. The relationship between the media and the Army is clearly one between the journalist and the commander. If it was this clear in 1875, why have armies the world over invested in capabilities and processes to place a firewall between the commander and the media? Moving forward a century may provide an insight.

Populist opinion that media coverage lost the war in Vietnam for the United States and its allies has been the predominant thought in military environs through the decades that followed the war. The result of this thought has been the deliberate attempts to ‘manage’ media in the operational area as part of campaign planning and the employment of uniformed Public Affairs Officers to ‘deal’ with the media on behalf of commanders. A study of the approaches used during Grenada, Panama and the Gulf War of 1991 highlights the various attempts of the US military to gain ascendancy and control over journalists in the operational area.¹² These approaches, essentially the implementation of access limitations and the use of authorised proxies to engage with the media, also served the Australian Army well during its early inception.

The Australian Army took an almost unique approach of forming a specialist corps to perform this role. Army expected its Public Affairs Officers to ‘deal’ with the media and granted them freedom of action to do so as long as it did not interfere with the real job of soldiering. Together with highly proficient NCOs, Army’s PR Corps (originally an adjunct of Royal Australian Army Education Corps, which has been known as the Australian Army Public Relations Service since 31 March 1994¹³) undertook a range of generally self-directed tasks to gather and provide product to their major customer: the Australian media. Public Affairs Officers were specifically recruited from among civilian media agencies as journalism qualifications were deemed essential if they were to build and maintain relationships with journalists. A civilian qualification was enough to see generations of uniformed Army Public Affairs Officers progress through the ranks as ‘specialists’, many of whom had never completed any formal military training beyond an abbreviated induction (and some did not even do this). Even a cursory review of the revised AAPRS competency requirements published in 1999 highlights a significant shortfall in requiring officers to be anything more than a civilian public affairs specialist wearing a uniform. While the requirement to contribute to planning is acknowledged, competencies are heavily weighted towards executing public affairs activities.¹⁴

The result of the specialisation and focus on civilian equivalency led to the creation of a uniformed Public Affairs Officer who was neither 100 per cent military nor a member of the media. Surprisingly, this approach was for the most part successful during the 1980s and early 1990s. That this just happened to coincide with that period in time when the ADF’s major activities were domestic exercises, not operations, is perhaps the single greatest factor in its success. The period is also characterised by communication technology that was only just starting to increase exponentially. The mainstream media’s wire and courier services up until the late 1980s were not that different to those employed during Vietnam. The immediacy of communication encountered today was but a mere dream until the 1991 Gulf War/1993 Somalia intervention and their resultant ‘CNN Effect.’¹⁵ What the Army, and wider ADF, required of its uniformed Public Affairs Officers then and now has significantly changed yet, for the most part, Army is still recruiting and organisationally managing these personnel as it did in the 1980s.

AAPRS - Mislabelled and Misused

The 2000 review of Defence’s public affairs capability sought to apply civilian best practice, centralised, strategically driven communications with key stakeholders across Defence. The result, the Public Affairs and Corporate Communications (PACC) branch of the Department, encompassed all civilian and uniformed personnel working within the public affairs role. It took personnel from the Services, including the AAPRS Army personnel, and centralised them under a SES Band-1 Public Service officer in a Canberra-centric entity that was alternatively described as ‘making the leap from “managing public affairs” to “shaping organisational communication”‘¹⁶ by the authors of the strategy, through to a ‘nightmare or worse’¹⁷ by the media that dealt with it day-to-day. Services lost the independence to operate in the information domain, and despite assurances that the new organisation would seek to move beyond it, the transition to PACC increased organisational focus on media relations while at the same time increasing complexity of the task by requiring a centralised approach. The transition to PACC inculcated Defence with a mindset of engaging in risk-free communication that continues to this day. From these beginnings, the role of Army’s Public Affairs Officers has morphed. Policy implemented by PACC removed their ability to engage with the media, and lessons from operations highlighted an increasing need to support operational commanders with specialist ‘information effects’ advice rather than just ‘media’ advice during planning and conduct of operations.

AAPRS officers moved from doing public relations to keep the Australian public informed about military activities and ‘dealing’ with the media, towards planning and conducting activities to create information effects in support of operations. They have, through natural evolution and operational demand, become staff officers in headquarters working to a commander’s intent rather than independent beings filling their days meeting media requirements. The AAPRS moniker is not only an inaccurate description of what is required in today’s operationally focused Army—current Military public affairs officers are not public relations practitioners in the civilian sense—the baggage associated with it continues to devalue the contribution that the new generation of communications professionals bring to the current and future fights.

This change in focus highlighted the significant shortfall in the management of the capability by Army. Military public affairs officers were increasingly required to turn out complex staff documents and work within dynamic planning teams, yet most had received little to no training in this role. Up until the introduction of the Army All-Corps Officer Training Continuum there was no requirement to attend the suite of officer training Army requires of its General Service Officers, and for a period it was the author’s experience that attendance on courses was actively discouraged by the Directorate of Officer Career Management as it was not required for promotion. This led to a core of mid- to senior-level AAPRS officers with severely atrophied civilian skills and limited military ones. The job that they had been employed for had changed significantly and they were ill-equipped to undertake it. The shortfall was clearly evident in the perceived performance of many AAPRS officers employed in any role beyond media escort or liaison during the 2003 Operation BASTILLE/FALCONER. Through no fault of their own, most simply did not have the skills required to operate in a high-stress, operationally focused, staff and planning environment.

The Rise of Information Operations

An associated factor in the lack of development within AAPRS is the rise of Information Operations (IO) in the ADF and its allies during the late 1990s. Australia, keen to embrace the concept, relied almost solely on US doctrine for the formalisation of the function. In so doing it failed to recognise the impact of the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, which essentially forbids US Government information activities that may influence the US population.¹⁸ Correspondingly, the restrictions this act infers, coupled with selfimposed limitations following the organisation’s Vietnam experience, has left the US military with a uniformed public affairs capability which actively seeks to distance itself from activities designed to generate effects in the information domain. These self-generated separations were famously highlighted in the 2004 Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff Memo ‘Policy on PA Relationship to IO’,¹⁹ a direct result of the decision to consolidate the Information Operations, Public Affairs and Public Diplomacy functions of the Multi-National Force – Iraq (MNF-I) under one commander, and the more recent opposition to General McKiernan’s’ attempts to similarly merge the Public Affairs Office and IO functions within International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) headquarters.²⁰

The result of the ADF’s reliance on US doctrine has been threefold. Firstly, the role and function of a uniformed Military Public Affairs Officer in supporting information effects has become distorted. Years of educational exchange at US Army colleges and institutions has created a cadre of senior Australian officers who naturally apply the same limitations on their return to the ADF, limiting the versatility of the developing AAPRS capability. Secondly, because our doctrine has been sourced from the United States it relies on an IO functional specialist to implement it. IO is not an Australian Army speciality, despite its recognition as a separate Battlefield Operating System, only recently renamed as Information Dominance and Influenced Finally,²¹ the lack of clarity in the doctrine and the sweeping changes across the field in recent years have left the capability open to exploitation by organisations and elements seeking to generate justification for activities. The term ‘Information Operations’ is variously and incorrectly used across the ADF as a euphemism for Psychological Operations, Computer Network Operations and even Information Warfare. The 2009 Defence White Paper furthers the misperception by placing reference to developing Army’s IO capability within the very same sentence as enhancing intelligence capabilities.²² The Chief of Army added to this confusion by releasing a supporting Order of the Day that described ‘information operations specialists’ as a ‘tactical intelligence capability’.²³

'Information Operations 101' Or 'Busting the 10 Myths'

Despite the regularly reported mysticism incorrectly associated with it, IO, in the ADF context, is extremely straightforward. As the ADF definition clearly states, IO is simply a coordinating function.²⁴ To take it further, IO coordinates and synchronises lethal and non-lethal effects during both planning and execution in support of a main effort. IO, in the Australian context, does not actually do anything beyond tying together a range of disparate activity to generate targeted effects in either the physical, information or cognitive domains—preferably all three. It is impossible to ‘IO a target’ in the same way that it is impossible to ‘Mobility and Survivability’ one. IO, or in Australian Army lexicon, Information Dominance and Influence, is simply one of the eight Battlefield Operating Systems that Army commanders should consider in operations. It is in essence an operational-level planning function that requires a strong understanding of the complex environments that the ADF routinely operates in and the wide variety of capabilities on offer to commanders.

Importantly, IO is not conducted at the operational level in isolation. In the ADF, IO planning is supported by two key documents: a whole-of-government strategic communications guidance and targeting guidance. The strategic communications guidance, an output of an interdepartmental committee, provides IO planners with agreed limits, a strategic narrative, and broad themes and messages for activities within the information domain; the targeting guidance provides formal authority to implement, and place restrictions on, the conduct of information actions. Actually carrying out the information effect tasking is, generally, a tactical activity which is well covered within Army’s new doctrine Information Actions.²⁵

It is also important to recognise that IO does not do anything by itself. IO planning supports the main effort as defined by a commander and is managed and executed by the operations branch of a headquarters. IO-trained personnel supporting the execution of a plan work to the principal Operations Officer and, ultimately, to the Commander. To not integrate the IO capability into the operations function is tantamount to ignoring doctrine which seeks coordination across the Battlespace Operating Systems. The Operations cell, through its IO specialists, coordinates the activities of all Information Actions task elements in accordance with the plan or the Commander’s direction. This is no different to the Operations cell mobility and survivability or combat service support specialist coordinating the activities of the tactical elements within their relevant Battlefield Operating System.

If IO only coordinates activities and is working to the principal Plans Officer or Operations Officer, why would the Army actually need specialists in this field? The answer is summed up well in Adaptive Campaigning (2009):

Influencing public perceptions of battlefield events will become both more important and more difficult. Commanders even at lower levels may find themselves as concerned with shaping the narrative of those events as with planning and conducting the operations that produce them.²⁶

A commander would not think to go to war without officers in logistics, communications or offensive support to advise him, yet when it comes to the Information Dominance and Influence Battlefield Operating System we are stuck in a paradigm that provides a range of insular information task elements all operating within the global information environment, but no trained, qualified and practised officer to coordinate them. Army’s current maxim that every soldier is a media performer is simply not enough to generate well-considered, executable information effects in support of operations. The author’s experience has been that a trained and dedicated IO planner on any operational headquarters is an extremely valuable commodity to the commander. It is also the author’s experience that an untrained officer purporting to be an IO planner is disruptive and ultimately dangerous to both the mission and the force.

The Current Reality

Plans developed within the Information Dominance and Influence Battlefield Operating System are severely constrained by policy, procedures and command decisions developed by operational commanders, policy advisors and the Australian Government. Neither the Information Actions task elements nor the IO planner have the freedom of action to implement tactics, techniques and procedures to engage in the global information environment to generate and sustain the ‘dominant narrative’ under the current manifestation of policy. The Army and ADF ethos of ‘Mission Command’²⁷ remains almost impossible to invoke for operations within the global information environment because of the constraints and limitations placed on the ADF as a whole. These constraints and limitations are, in part, a direct response to the effect the ‘strategic corporal’²⁸ can have on today’s battlefields and the immediacy of modern media capabilities. This issue and associated concerns, such as the centralisation of product approval, are well documented in the US military as a result of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is the author’s opinion that instead of adjusting to the new environment in order to exploit all that it offers, the ADF and government have instead sought to tightly control and restrict activities that occur within it. Mission Command, or at the very least a strong intent to apply Mission Command, is alive and well in every Battlefield Operating System, with the exception of Information Dominance and Influence. The ideals presented within Adaptive Campaigning (2009) will be difficult to achieve unless an understanding of coordinating the total information capability is improved and a better understanding of the global information environment is developed throughout the ADF. A key element of this must be professionalising the Army’s IO capability.

Building a Professional Army IO Capabiltiy

The Australian Army, unlike its US ally, does not currently have a professional career stream for IO officers. It does have a range of IO task elements within various corps and organisations that allow junior officer specialisation such as Psychological Operations within Intelligence and Computer Network Operations, and Electronic Warfare within Signals. In addition, civil-military cooperation draws personnel from across the Army, as has Military Public Affairs in recent years. Army currently has a core group of individual specialists but only very few that have broadened their skills across a range of IO task elements. The author’s experience on operations is that an IO generalist, someone with training across several disciplines and exposure to many more, supported by specific IO and operational planning training, is always better than a task specialist that is simply thrust into the role. During the existence of MNF-I Strat-Com in 2004, the plans cell included both individual specialists and IO generalists. Their background was readily reflected in the breadth of the planning that was performed by the individuals. Excellence in the Information Dominance and Influence Battlefield Operating System requires coordination of all available assets with a scheme of manoeuvre. It also requires the ability to synchronise tactical actions to generate effects both inside an area of operations and beyond. Incorporation of strategic requirements into an operational-level IO plan is critical for success.

This requirement brings today’s evolved Military Public Affairs Officer to the fore. Recognising the increasing need to support Army’s requirements into the future, today’s AAPRS officers have moved to militarily professionalise their capability. The All Corps Officer Training Continuum formalised a process that was, for the most part, occurring since 2003 among some AAPRS officers, with all Army Military Public Affairs Officers now required to attend Grade 3, the complete Grade 2 and compete for Grade 1 Command and Staff Course selection. In addition, a training continuum has sought to maximise the focus on support to operational planning by completing a range of Australian Defence Force Warfare Centre Planning Courses, including mandatory attendance on Introduction to Joint Warfare and Joint Operations Plans Course as well as the Information Operations Staff Officers Course. Selected officers complete the Psychological Operations Staff Officers Course, the Civil-Military Cooperation Planners Course, the Joint Targeting Course and the Special Operations Plans Course. Several also complete training in US or other allied institutions in relevant IO and targeting fields. In addition, they usually hold post-graduate organisational communication qualifications by the time they are promoted to major (O4). Interestingly, it is only Army that has formalised this structure. RAAF and Navy Military Public Affairs Officers do not complete the range of military specific training now required of their Army counterparts unless they are selected for operational service in a specific role. For the most part, RAAF and Navy require only a media operations function and achieve this by attracting working journalists for reserve service. By the time Army’s AAPRS officers reach major (O4) they have usually worked at Division headquarters or higher, and have joint staff experience at Headquarters Joint Operations Command. Their exposure to levels of planning, and the requirements for operations in the global information environment, from strategic influences through to tactical actions, is unparalleled. An AAPRS officer, shaped by their formative experiences, brings information planning reality to the Information Dominance and Influence domain. They, more than most, are aware of the effect of perceptions, and approach all planning with a view towards the second and third order effects of proposed actions across the complete information environment, not just in the tactical area. They are also highly cognisant of the topical line in the sand when it comes to generating information effects.

The usual argument that Defence Public Affairs will lose credibility if it works with IO because it is associated with deception planning or psychological operations directed at the adversary loses relevance because one of the people developing the plan is inherently aware of the constraints and limitations in employing the capability. It is in effect no different to an offensive support planner using different ammunition natures for different targets. More relevant is the fact that the public affairs approach, under current policy, is actually executed by the commander or their designate and not the Military Public Affairs Officer. Their actual interaction with the media is now almost solely limited to escort tasks so the credibility argument becomes null and void. Most importantly, recent history proves that this level of integration and coordination is highly successful. The information successes in the 2004 Operation AL FAJR to secure Fallujah are directly attributable to the level of coordination that was achieved in MNF-I Strat-Com, working with its subordinate and superior headquarters, and the execution of that plan under the direction of the Deputy Chief of Staff Strategic Operations.²⁹ For the first time in the campaign an adversary spokesperson admitted to losing the ‘media battle’.³⁰ The dominant narrative had been generated and sustained by the Coalition and the Iraqi Government.

This shift in focus from media relations towards holistic and coordinated communications campaigns is not unique to the ADF. Australian and international universities are predominantly offering post-graduate communications courses to expand a civilian public relations practitioner’s scope beyond media relations and crisis communications. The Charles Sturt University course focuses on ‘a world-class learning experience for communication professionals to develop their communication management and strategic skills’,³¹ and includes topics on strategy planning, research and communication audits, stakeholder engagement, crisis and issues management, culture and integrated communication. Similarly the School of Communication at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom recognises the importance of coordination in its Masters-level program in international communication, which seeks to integrate theory and applied knowledge across a range of aspects for a communication effect.³² No longer are civilian public relations personnel simply focused on one area of communication. They seek to utilise all available elements to support their parent organisation’s raison d’être. The development path of Army’s AAPRS officers has taken a similar approach. They are now, more than ever, organisational communicators with a range of skills well beyond media management.

Problems associated with sustaining a small IO capability have often been cited as reasons why the Army has not sought to create a career field in this area. Generally, other specialists in IO disciplines have a career path that is managed through to the Army’s senior ranks, if they so choose, by drawing on their parent corps. An Army Psychological Operations specialist, for example, continues with a career in intelligence long after their time at 2nd Intelligence Company is finished. Career management of AAPRS officers is not that simple. Once they have completed their junior postings as a lieutenant and junior captain they are locked into a career progression that sometimes removes them from Army. Presently there are only six major and three lieutenant colonel positions for the Regular Army members of the corps and the vast majority of these are in the non-Army group. The opportunity to stream into and out of the IO field, competing against other qualified Army and ADF personnel enhances the sustainably of AAPRS in addition to providing a valuable commodity to Army and the wider ADF.

The Chief of Army’s recently released directive on an Officer Career Pathway Strategy³³ may provide a vehicle to achieve the growth and maintenance of a small-group of IO generalists to support Army’s Information Dominance and Influence requirements and the ADF’s ongoing planning capability. By offering an IO generalist streaming option at senior captain (03) or major (04), Army’s requirement to fill IO/IA plans and operations functions on Brigade, Divisional, and Command staffs and to provide suitably qualified and experienced personnel for joint and combined operations is dramatically improved. With a clear streaming option comes a training burden, but generally the personnel seeking to stream into this area would already have completed several of the required courses and should possess strong tactical experience with at least one IO task element. To be successful, Army should be seeking to create an IO generalist, an officer with a strong planning background with training in and exposure to the widest variety of IO task elements. At present Army officers that fit this requirement are extremely limited and, despite strong operational experiences while attached to coalition partners, are all but forgotten in terms of this capability on their return to Australia. It is envisioned that with a generation of AAPRS officers who are meeting the requirements of the All-Corps Officer Training Continuum and the AAPRS internal qualification requirements, the desire to be seen as more than just a Public Affairs Officer is increasing. In addition, AustInt, RASigs and other corps contain experienced officers that would willingly form the cadre of the new streamed capability. Moreover, if the Army is to be truly adaptive they should form this cadre to develop and enhance what is a poorly managed and misunderstood capability. The key to providing the capability required of the ‘Adaptive Army’ is to clearly focus on individual talent and experience and maximise its use for the betterment of the organisation as whole. The IO stream cannot be seen as an opportunity for those not progressing in their parent corps. It has to offer a growth from those involved in the development and delivery of tactical information effects towards generalisation as a competent IO planning officer.

Conclusion

In his paper on ‘Rethinking IO’,³⁴ the US Army’s retired Brigadier General Wass de Czege states ‘lessons from commercial advertising are not necessarily as directly applicable as some practitioners in the field believe. Soldiers and Marines are not selling soap.’³⁵ His assessment rings true when considering how the AAPRS capability has developed over the past decade. It has sought to become more military and less civilian and has usually achieved that. The AAPRS, in spite of its size, organisational perspectives and tempo has developed well beyond what the Army originally envisioned for the specialist capability. Restructures and reviews have consistently adjusted internal structures and requirements but, for the most part, Army is still managing its global information environment specialists as it did in the 1980s. The Army Public Relations Officer of a decade ago bears little resemblance to the capability that exists in a Military Public Affairs Officer of today.

The recent adoption of the All Corps Officer Training Continuum, the release of Adaptive Campaigning and the 2009 Defence White Paper all provide the impetus for the Army to holistically review its individual information capabilities and identify a way to provide the subject matter expertise in the Information Dominance and Influence Battlespace. Expanding the role of a ready pool of trained specialists in this area is a relatively easy solution to getting the task underway. AAPRS officers are simply not what they were nor what they are often thought to be as a result of a corps label that is misleading and inaccurate. There is much to be gained by employing already highly qualified personnel in a role that is sadly lacking in the Army and the ADF.

About the Author

Major Jason Logue is a currently serving AAPRS officer and a 2009 graduate of the Australian Command and Staff College. He was commissioned into AAPRS in 2001 after several years serving as an infantry soldier in the Royal Queensland and Royal Australian Regiments. He has served as an embedded Australian IO planner in Iraq and Afghanistan and has completed a wide variety of Australian and International IO and targeting courses. He recently completed his Masters of Arts (Organisational Communication) from Charles Sturt University.

Endnotes

1     Z Hibbert and P Simmons, ‘War Reporting and Australian defence public relations, an exchange’, Prism, Vol. 4, No. 2, June 2006. Special issue in public relations measurement and evaluation, <http://praxis.massey.ac.nz/evaluation.html&gt; accessed 5 June 2009.

2     Ibid., p. 1.