Democratic Underground - Col. Sam Gardiner nailed in 2003

Truth from These Podia
Summary of a Study of Strategic Influence, Perception Management,
Strategic Information Warfare and Strategic Psychological Operations
in Gulf II
Sam Gardiner
Colonel, USAF (Retired)
October 8, 2003

Summary

* Clearly, the assumption of some in the government is the people
of the United States and the United Kingdom will come to a
wrong decision if they are the given truth.
* We probably have taken “Information Warfare” too far.
* We allowed strategic psychological operations to.
become part of public affairs.
* We failed to make adequate distinction between strategic
influence stuff and intelligence.
* Message became more important than performance.

The concepts of warfare got all mixed up in this war. I’ll come back to this
subject later, but what has happened is that information warfare, strategic influence,
strategic psychological operations pushed their way into the important process of
informing the peoples of our two democracies. The United States and the UK got too
good at the concepts they had been developing for future warfare.

...

Sam Gardiner is a retired Air Force Colonel and described as "an expert in military strategy and an expert on strategic games." <1> At one time Gardiner taught at the National War College. <2>

Gardiner estimated that that some 50 media stories backing the push for war in Iraq media orignated from what was to be called the Office of Strategic Influence. FAIR noted that Rumsfeld stated that while the Office of Strategic Influence was killed in name, it's activities were going to be carried out. <3>

Some of the stories he identified included that of the 'rescue' of Private Jessica Lynch and one in which defense officials claimed that the "first Iraqi unit marines encountered, the 51st Mechanized Infantry Division, had surrendered four days before it actually did." Gardiner said that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Richard Myers gave bad or deliberately incomplete info on several topics. "Never before have so many stories been created to sell a war. And they probably didn't need it," he told US News. <4>

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Sam_Gardiner

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