Revisiting the First Salvo: The Importance of Getting the Narrative Out

The Defense Department did an excellent job embedding a CNN reporter and camera crew aboard the P-8 that challenged Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea back in May. By doing so, the U.S. established an independent and credible record of the flight’s events that could stand up against Chinese propaganda efforts. More importantly, it created a precedent that the U.S. might embed international media aboard any such flight over contested international waters in the region. The Chinese would have every reason to assume that the reactions of their on-scene forces to these flights might be broadcast to the world within hours, and as such might be encouraged to practice the utmost restraint in those reactions.

Not every claims-challenging U.S. Navy flight or warship transit will have embedded media aboard, though. It might be even harder (or perhaps entirely undesirable from an Operational Security standpoint) to embed media in frontline forces during a precipice-of-war crisis. And the issue is hardly isolated to the Far East; there have been applicable incidents within recent memory in Europe and the Mid-East.

Recall, then, what I wrote when I touched on this topic last October:

“…defeating a first salvo also means defeating the attacker’s inevitable diplomatic-propaganda campaign. Attackers within range of their homeland cellular networks, or otherwise using satellite uplinks, can quickly post audiovisual content recorded and edited on smartphones or similar devices to websites such as YouTube. From there, propaganda specialists can work to push the material via social networks to critical audiences; it may not take more than a few hours to become ‘viral’ and make the jump to traditional global media outlets. The side that gets seemingly-credible evidence of what happened out first seizes the initiative, perhaps decisively, in the diplomatically and politically-critical battle for the international and domestic public narratives regarding culpability and justification.

In a first salvo’s immediate aftermath, the defender must be able to quickly collect, process, and disseminate unimpeachable audiovisual evidence of its victimization without harming Operational Security. This would be no small feat, especially aboard a warship that is severely damaged or steeling itself for follow-on attacks. Even harder is developing continuously updated, interagency-coordinated, ‘stock’ narrative outlines in advance of any operation that might expose units to direct first salvo risk, not to mention the doctrine and training necessary to swiftly get an initial narrative out into the global media. Contrary to current public affairs practice, in some scenarios this might require evidence processing and public dissemination by lower echelons to be followed thereafter with amplification and context by executive Navy and national leadership. This will be a vitally important area for exploration through war gaming and fleet experiments.”

Jerry Hendrix makes the same point in his commentary on the Su-24 flyby of the USS Ross in the Black Sea on May 30th:

“We're a bit like lawyers," Hendrix said. “Before we make a response we are going to go back, gather the facts, look at the tape and then issue our response. But by the time we do, 24 to 48 hours later, Russia has already established the narrative: The ship was going to penetrate Russia's sovereign waters and the Russian military gloriously forced it to alter course.”

This dovetails with my ongoing crusade in favor of decentralized command and control doctrine, mission command, and command by negation. We have to start training and equipping our crews at the ‘tip of the spear’ so that they can engage in the narrative battle as an incident unfolds or immediately after it occurs. At bare minimum, we must give our crews what they need so that the U.S. and its allies do not lose the “first narrative salvo.”

Although this requires considerable delegation of “media messaging” authority and is accordingly not without risk, it is not fundamentally different than delegating tactical decision-making authority to the lowest practicable level in accordance with a higher-level commander’s intent. If we trust our trained ship, submarine, and aircraft squadron Commanding Officers and crews with the proper use of weapons systems in a tense situation, then we should also be able to train them so we can trust them with wielding smartphones and internet connections as an incident unfolds.

We could develop specially trained public affairs detachments for embarkation in our forces headed into contested waters; they could serve as Commanding Officers’ dedicated specialists much like any other division or workcenter. Or we could develop training regimes to prepare ship and aircraft crews, themselves, to fill these roles. Either way, if we’re serious about winning narrative battles—or at least not losing them when they matter most—we will have to empower our frontline forces. Our broader strategy in a given crisis or conflict may depend greatly on it.

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and are presented in his personal capacity. They do not reflect the official positions of Systems Planning and Analysis, and to the author’s knowledge do not reflect the policies or positions of the U.S. Department of Defense, any U.S. armed service, or any other U.S. Government agency.