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Rumsfeld: Ramp up information warfare

The U.S. military can’t fight the war on terrorism alone. It needs help from a host of other U.S. government agencies, including a new one that should be created to use the Internet to wage an information offensive against Muslim extremists, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Jan. 23.

In an address to an information warfare conference, Rumsfeld said the United States is “sitting on the sidelines” in a global battle of ideas. “We’re barely competing,” and for that reason we are losing, he said.

Islamic radicals are winning despite the fact that they blow up mosques, kill women and children and publicly behead their foes, Rumsfeld said.

The United States needs a “21st-century agency for global communications” to use modern methods to spread the United States’ message about the importance of democracy and freedom, much as the U.S. Information Agency spread that message during the Cold War, he said.

The USIA was folded into the State Department in 1999 and the United States “lost a valued tool to help tell the story of a nation that was carved from the wilderness and conceived in freedom,” Rumsfeld told an audience of military members and defense contractors.

A 21st-century version of the USIA is needed to harness new communications techniques — from blogs to online social-networking sites to talk radio — to counter a constant torrent of propaganda from radical organizations, particularly in the Middle East, he said.

In addition to an Internet information agency, the U.S. military needs help from U.S. agencies that specialize in activities from agriculture and education to policing and health care, Rumsfeld said.

That’s an idea he and President George W. Bush pursued in 2006 while Rumsfeld was still defense secretary.

The U.S. military cannot be defeated in a major battle, Rumsfeld said, but it cannot win a non-conventional war without help from nonmilitary specialists who rebuild damaged countries and construct new national institutions.

A serious shortage of deployable experts in those nonmilitary fields has meant that military personnel have had to fill posts in Iraq’s civilian agencies. But the military substitutes lack the expertise of their civilian counterparts and the duty takes them away from military tasks, he said.

The United States doesn’t lack the experts; it lacks a personnel organization that would put them in line to deploy.

Does he foresee change? “Necessity is the mother of invention,” Rumsfeld said. “The necessity is there, but whether it will be felt strongly enough” to prompt change, “I don’t know,” he said.