Smart Power Blog

TR calls for a 'SoftpowerScope, or a SoftpowerMeter! Excellent idea? What would go into a measurement of SP? Maybe some weighted combination of the Pew Foundation overseas opinion surveys, combined with % market share of movies, TV shows, and winning sports teams....Lets hold on to that thought.

In the challenge to understand “war”, I offer some definitions from people brighter than myself, none of which, however, comform to past or present conflicts perfectly.

I think that as we examine the idea of "coercion" it is important that we examine some of the assumptions we tend to make about hard power and how it works. RJ Art points out in "The Fungibiliy of Force" that when nations engage in "soft" negotiations or transactions, the "rules of the game" are held in place by underlying threats of hard power. I do not wish to dispute this argument. However, I think it is important that we recognize that "hard power" is similarly undergirded by forces of soft power.

I will try to explain this position by making a couple of conceptual points. I've also got some examples -- the liberation movement of India-Pakistan lead by Gandhi and the use of nuclear weapons by the U.S. on Japan -- but I'll save those for another post so that it doesn't get too long and unwieldy....

Disclaimer: Not a rant about the solely horrible nature of hard power or pure negativity of brutality.

Military. An armed force, meant to be used solely for the purpose of warfare.

This may sound unconceivable or untruthful at first, but there was a time not too long ago when the intersection of arms, insecurity, the desire for 'unjust' power, and brutal competition were associated with a domain and reality other than the 'normal'.

We know the hard power budget exceeds the soft power budget, but what are the components of the US Defense Budget for 2008? The Center for Defense Information has the high level details:

This post will be fairly brief compared to my posts thus far due to the my inability of integrating my views on intelligence in a tangible manner. However, this integration is currently in progress, and I will have more to say soon. For now, I have been able to identify 2 concepts with regards to the discussion of the so-called RMA (Rev. in Military Affairs) and RIA (Rev. in Intelligence Affairs) that have not been as obvious as there being a need for integration and dramatic rethinking of institutional culture..

I couldn't help but notice the contrast between two global news stories about Africa from the past couple of weeks. A quick review, as I'm headed to Colorado to build soft power with my in-laws.

On the one hand, French President Jacques Chirac hosted a two-day summit for African leaders in Cannes. Discussions ranged from international trade and the world image of Africa to the fight against AIDS and the crisis in Sudan.

What did the United States do? Well, it announced the "Department of Defense Unified Combatant Command for Africa."

More after the jump

Last week Secretary of Defense Robert Gates remembered the Cold Was as a "less complex time" and said that he was "almost nostalgic" for it. Gates was responding to comments made by President Vladimir Putin, who blamed U.S. foreign policy for causing countries to seek out nuclear arms in order to defend themselves from the U.S. and an "almost uncontained use of military force."

Why is Gates nostalgic for the "good old days" of the Cold War? It was a simpler time in terms of U.S. foreign policy and the definition of threats. Problems were more manageable than they are today. During that time, the world was divided in to "us" and "them"- the US and the USSR. Of course this is an over simplification, and there were some surrogate wars. But overall, the problem was defined in terms of this dichotomy. Given the structure of world power during this time, diplomats, policy makers and defense were trained with certain cognitive, linguistic and cultural skills and followed certain career paths. Indeed, Defense Secretary Gates served in the CIA for 27 years. Perhaps he is "almost nostalgic" for the Cold War days because he was trained to handle problems as defined in the framework of us vs. them.

Today, everything has changed - the threat, the power structure and the set of skills needed to deal with the new global challenges. It is no longer just us vs. them. There is not just a single threat that we can fight. There are various problems, which take different shapes and that change over time. If the world has changed and the threat has changed, it follows that our foreign policy should adapt as well. Because we no longer know what will be politically salient at any given time, there is a need to be flexible. In a network society, new competencies and organizational designs are needed. Unfortunately, U.S. foreign policy has not adapted. Herein lies the problem. The current administration is operating in the frame of mind that existed during the Cold War and during times when the threat was defined as us vs. them. The current administration has failed due to the militaristic frame of mind. It's the law of the hammer. If all you have in your toolbox is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.

There is an over-reliance on one instrument of state power; the military, and as Putin put it, "an almost uncontained use of military force." Of course it is not only Putin who disagrees with the reliance on hard power; the U.S. public also thinks that the Bush administration has gone too far in terms of hard power. Opinion polls shows that the U.S. public would prefer a multinational approach to foreign policy. Use of solely hard power is a failing strategy to pursue U.S. national interests, and a balance must be restored to state power. It is clear that hard power alone will not work. Nor will only soft power. Instead, an integrated approach is needed - smart power.

The challenge is that many current military, defense and intelligence people were trained with the Cold War frame of reference and probably share Secretary of Defense Gates' belief that the Cold Was as a less complex time. This is because they are trained to deal with the problems of that time, not today's environment. Therefore, the struggle for those who believe a balance to state power must be restored will be to make a sophisticated argument of the need for an integrated approach. The hard power side must be understood and an argument must be made, taking the major issues as seen from that perspective in to mind. Gates' nostalgia for the Cold Was days must be understood in terms of the Cold War frame of mind and the skill sets that were necessary and developed during that time. The world has changed structurally in a way that makes soft power more important. But the military and hard power and their strengths and weaknesses must be understood in order to make a convincing argument that whether or not you believe twenty or thirty years ago our problems were more manageable and more stable, times have changed. And so too must U.S. foreign policy and state power.

Cross posted at MountainRunner

This is the first post in a multi-part series about the design and application of "smart power".

Counterinsurgency, much like international relations, is about the right amount of power in just the right places. However, in the macro scheme of international relations, there is room for fudging and fine grain controls aren't as necessary. Counterinsurgency requires, as I see it, requires greater finesse to be successful.  

Bridging the ideas of hard power (generally kinetic use of force) with soft power (non-coercive persuasion), we arrive at the somewhat new and fashionable term Smart Power (side note: see the Smart Power Blog for one of the few overt discussions on the topic under the banner "smart power"). To counterinsurgency, this isn't new. 

Looks like the United States might.

Check out this news from the Horn of Africa in this morning's New York Times.

News came in late December of U.S. operations in Somalia and elsewhere, but what hadn't been reported was the level of U.S. involvement with Ethiopian operations.

It has been known for several weeks that American Special Operations troops have operated inside Somalia and that the United States carried out two strikes on Qaeda suspects using AC-130 gunships. But the extent of American cooperation with the recent Ethiopian invasion into Somalia and the fact that the Pentagon secretly used an airstrip in Ethiopia to carry out attacks have not been previously reported. The secret campaign in the Horn of Africa is an example of a more aggressive approach the Pentagon has taken in recent years to dispatch Special Operations troops globally to hunt high-level terrorism suspects. President Bush gave the Pentagon powers after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to carry out these missions, which historically had been reserved for intelligence operatives.

When Ethiopian troops first began a large-scale military offensive in Somalia late last year, officials in Washington denied that the Bush administration had given its tacit approval to the Ethiopian government. In interviews over the past several weeks, however, officials from several American agencies with a hand in Somalia policy have described a close alliance between Washington and the Ethiopian government that was developed with a common purpose: rooting out Islamic radicalism inside Somalia.

Indeed, the Pentagon for several years has been training Ethiopian troops for counterterrorism operations in camps near the Somalia border, including Ethiopian special forces called the Agazi Commandos, which were part of the Ethiopian offensive in Somalia.

U.S. power is alive and well in Africa. But is it smart enough???

There's a new wiki in town: ConflictWiki. The purpose is to create a repository for both hard and soft power folks that's more community specific with terminology, categories, and entries than what Wikipedia can offer. The goal is to provide an open source collection of information, data, and links aimed at the cointerinsurgency / irregular warfare, public diplomacy, smart power, private military, and terrorism communities. These groups are intricately linked together and require greater or at least different details on these topics than can be found in one place today.

As it's a community tool, create entries related to Smart Power aimed at the Smart Power community (pretty much anyone interested in relations beyond the border). The easiest way to start is by going to the wiki, searching for a term and then creating a page if what you're looking for does not exist.

The new commander of U.S. forces in Iraq gave his first news conference the other day and said that military force alone is "not sufficient" to end the violence in Iraq. He said that political negotiations "will determine in the long run the success of this effort."
Furthermore, "any student of history recognizes there is no military solution to a problem like that in Iraq..."

This is significant that the commander himself says there is no military solution to this problem. It's time to use other sources of American power - cultural, political etc., instead of an over reliance on military force. Even for the commander of US forces, a smart solution involves more than military power. What would be the correct mix of smart power in this situation?