Matt Armstrong of MountainRunner, in an interview with USC’s Center for Public Diplomacy, said military personnel are often at the forefront of U.S. PD, while State Department initiatives take a back seat.

Unlike public diplomacy during the cold war, which was well organized and funded, Armstrong said, “today our public diplomacy wears combat boots.”

Of course, the soldier or sailor as diplomat is nothing new.  Sailors in the Great White Fleet introduced much of the world to Americans one hundred years ago.  Doughboys helped form many Europeans’ impressions of Americans during World War I.  By the end of World War II, the American GI, whether soldier, sailor, or Marine, was known around the globe – and much of the world had a pretty positive image of America.  Americans were the people who set you free from tyranny.

As Armstrong points out, overseas basing has always put the military in a PD mission.

This is certainly something of which the military has long been aware.  I remember during boot camp more than two decades ago having it drummed into me that we all were “American diplomats,” and that everything we did reflected on our nation.

As the ship’s public affairs officer, before every port call, I had to put together training for the crew that would help them avoid cultural faux pas and be better public diplomats (although we certainly didn’t call it that).

At least once during every deployment, we would volunteer at a school or an orphanage overseas, and there were programs in place, such as Project Handclasp, to support those PD initiatives.

So it is a fact of life that servicemembers are the face of America.  Is that a good thing?

Gallop Polls rating Americans’ trust in their institutions consistently place the military at the top of the list, far above, educators, the media, corporations and politicians.  From that point of view, the military seems to live up to American values fairly well.

Clearly, more can be done.  If PD is becoming a primary skill of warriors, more training in being a public diplomat would be a great benefit in winning hearts and minds.

With an increased emphasis on strategic communication, that training should become a priority.

Technorati Tag: strategic communication | public diplomacy

- Gaining a little ground by highighting AQI’s recent brutality in strapping suicide bomb vests to women with Downs Syndrom, but question the effectiveness of U.S. statements.  AM takes the position that highlighting AQI’s cruelty is more effective than polishing America’s image and sees this as as issue that needed to be addressed more vigorously.

- Releasing the AQI video of 10 and 11-year-old kids being trained in terrorism and insurgency, but wonder why the military released it, rather than passing it to a third party for release — perhaps a human rights NGO, who certainly would object to use of kids as terrorists and would have been more effective talking to target publics.

- Releasing the “insurgent diary” chronicalling the dire straits faced by AQI, but point to an unfortunate delay in getting word out.  The diary was discovered in early November.  And the target public?  Why release the story to the Washington Post, Kip asks, and why not Al Jazeera? 

Technorati Tag: strategic communication 

UPDATE: CannoneerNo4 commented on the origianal post at Beyond Blather:

February 11th, 2008 at 3:41 am

The diary story was released Saturday to whoever wanted it. The target audience was Americans who care about the Iraq Campaign. How much of the time between November and February was taken up obtaining approval and how much was taken up waiting for the optimum time to release it for maximum effect we can only speculate. Possibly the change in name from Awakening to Sons of Iraq had something to do with the timing.