Seminar: Media, technology change battlefield - Marine Corps News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Marine Corps Times

Seminar: Media, technology change battlefield

Young Marines and junior officers need to be educated and empowered to publicly address tactical events that may have strategic implications, such as those that command media attention, according to a working group of international military officers.

About 150 people from the services, U.S. Joint Forces Command and U.S. Strategic Command, along with military and civilian organizations representing 21 countries, met in Potomac, Md., May 19-24 for Joint Urban Warrior 07. The war-game seminar was co-sponsored by the Marine Corps and Joint Forces Command.

The brainstorming sessions focused on how best to create a unified message from the battlefield that works in tandem with ongoing information and public relations campaigns.

“The concern they had was there were a lot of nontraditional actors — people or information — that they couldn’t quite control but were affecting how they conducted operations,” said Dave Dilegge, Joint Urban Warrior project officer at Quantico, Va. “That’s the purpose of this, to really get a handle on this.”

While based on fictitious scenarios, the war game is rooted in reality, participants said.

“Modern technology, where you have satellite channels covering every conceivable subject — you have the media on the scene at major battles, you have the media in all military activities in a way that they never have been before,” said David Passage, former ambassador to Botswana. “Strategic compression, more or less, obliges those from the military or from the diplomatic world to be more agile, to be more nimble, to be more responsive in the more compressed time frame than they’ve ever been before.”

The days are gone when military and diplomatic leaders could take time to mull over how best to respond to tactical events on the ground, Passage said.

In the past, junior officers in the event “food chain” would “buck it up to higher headquarters,” Passage explained. “With intense coverage through a magnifying glass of activities that take place, you don’t have the luxury of being able to say, ‘We’ll give that to the [public affairs officer], let the PAO deal with it,’ ” he said.

“It’s not about spin, it’s about getting your message out that’s understandable to whomever your target audiences happen to be,” said Australian Army Lt. Col. Daryl Campbell. One of the consistent themes that we keep coming back to is if you can do that well, you may be able to avoid some of the kinetic, to win a battle without firing a shot.”