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Pentagon Press Secretary Rear Admiral John Kirby answers questions for media during weekly press conference, October 2014 (DOD/Glenn Fawcett) Revisioning Strategic Communication Through Rhetoric and Discourse Analysis By William M. Marcellino Dr. William M. Marcellino is an Associate Behavioral and Social Scientist at the RAND Corporation. Strategic communication is an important but contested issue, visible in continuing criticisms over the last 5 years. One critique is that the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) definition of the term strategic communication is vague and idiosyncratic in relation to the definitions of other agencies. In turn, this argument runs, the lack of conceptual clarity and of shared, precise terminology hurts the implementation and further development of strategic communication. 1 Additional concerns have been raised about the lack of both domestic interagency and foreign partner coordination and cooperation and the absence of credible expertise in strategic communication. 2 Still, criticisms point to highvisibility failures in strategic communication—for example, the 2001 “Shared Values” campaign and the 2012 U.S. Presidential response to the “Innocence of Muslims” video—as evidence of both strategic communication conceptual flaws and implementation failures. 3 I propose here that strategic communication can be made more conceptually robust and draw on a more powerful and useful suite of tools and methods by borrowing from two language-focused 52 Commentary / Revisioning Strategic Communication JFQ <strong>76</strong>, 1 st Quarter 2015
disciplines: rhetoric and discourse analysis. Rhetoric offers an explanatory framework for how and why communication fails or succeeds, as well as practical domain knowledge for how to design and effect sound communication strategies, while discourse analysis is a set of approaches and methods to analyzing real-world language use (discourse). Rhetoric, a humanities discipline centered on argumentation and persuasion, has had practical value and been effective since Aristotle’s time, but it also has an empirical wing developed over the last 60 years. Discourse analysis is a relatively recent offshoot from sociolinguistics, which brings systematic, empirical analysis to language at the micro level and features a wide range of qualitative and quantitative methods. This issue of which disciplines, and thus which conceptual models, to draw from has high stakes because they imply different practical choices and methods. As a simple example, ask yourself: if you had to convince the authorities that you were not at place X at Y time, and if you had to convince them you were sincere, how would you do it? From an empirical perspective in discourse analysis, the answer would depend on the discourse conventions of the authorities. If American English speakers were asking you, then brevity, concision, and coming straight to the point might be convincing. However, if Arabic speakers were your audience, repeatedly proclaiming your innocence might be the right strategy. Most importantly in this example, those strategies are opposed—strategies suited for one discourse and culture would likely fail for the other. Below are two illustrative case studies that show both the conceptual power of rhetoric and discourse analysis and also the nuts-and-bolts methods for analyzing communication and communication failures. For these examples to make the most sense and provide context, I first briefly sketch out how rhetoric and discourse analysis conceptually differ from our current iteration of strategic communication. I then recommend how DOD in general and the combatant commands in particular could effectively and efficiently operationalize insights and methods from these disciplines. Strategic communication as it currently stands draws primarily from communications theory, public relations, and marketing. In this model, communication is understood to be primarily monologic (from a speaker to an audience) and dependent on the ability of the speaker to manipulate or tailor language to properly craft and deliver the right message to persuade or change opinions of the audience. This model also implicitly borrows from linguistic theories popularized by Noam Chomsky that treat language as having a preexisting structure that good speakers use to their advantage. It is from such a model that a ubiquitous phrase such as “controlling the narrative” can have currency and be in circulation. The above conceptual model is significantly different from much contemporary theory in linguistics and sociolinguistics. In more contemporary theory, communication is dialogic: everyone is talking to everyone else, all the time. Even when there is a single speaker at a given moment, such as a formal speech or delivery of a single author paper, all kinds of other talk are implicated (intertextually): prior speeches and writing, public talk in the news or private talk in the streets, and expected responses. This means that text and talk are more like conversations than messages. In place of linguistic code to be manipulated, we enter into a conversation with a set of dynamically evolving conventions and expectations that provide current structure. Instead of thinking about strategic communication as manipulating code (and thus manipulating an audience/outcome), contemporary linguistic science offers us a model of partners in dialogue and argument, working interactively and iteratively to accomplish practical ends. Even when these partners in dialogue have diametrically opposed goals and their interactions are hostile, they are still interactive and social. This model is inherently reflective because to be good at it, we need to have as much understanding of and insight into our own communication practices as we do into those of our enemies and partners. Instead of trying to control the narrative, the goal is to artfully and effectively enter into conversation—a subtle difference that has profound implications for practice. To illustrate the range of concepts and methods that we could borrow from rhetoric and discourse analysis and then apply to strategic communication, I offer two widely separated and disparate case studies. They include both quantitative and qualitative approaches, using computational and human means, for both international and domestic problems, at the macro and micro scales of analysis. Linguistic Smuggling in Taliban Information Operations Taliban strategic communication makes use of the rhetorical device “linguistic smuggling” as a tactic in opposing the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Their public statements appear to focus on technical details to which ISAF is most likely to react, disguising what the author(s) consider a more important point to Afghan audiences: defining ISAF as crusaders and invaders. As a result, ISAF’s responses likely will not credibly satisfy Afghans. As an illustrative example, consider how Taliban propaganda and an ISAF press release treat the same green-on-blue incident. Below is a two-part rhetorical analysis of a Taliban press release, coded to show linguistic smuggling (hiding a contestable claim) and an argument stasis (sticking point of contention): The casualties of the CRUSADE INVADERS: As “a handful is a specimen of the heap” and the evidence is that the CRUSADE INVADERS have always tried habitually to conceal their casualties. Let us have a look on the incident of the Jalraiz district of Maidan-Wardak province which took place on Monday 11th March. In this incident, an infiltrated Mujahid who was performing his duty among the Arbakis, turned the barrel of his gun to the CRUSADE INVADERS and opened fire. Consequently 22 soldiers were killed and a number of them were severely wounded but the enemy acknowledged only 2 casualties. 4 JFQ <strong>76</strong>, 1 st Quarter 2015 Marcellino 53
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