Strategic Communication - Concept Development and Experimentation (CD&E)

Concept Development and Experimentation (CD&E)

Strategic Communication is currently subject to multinational CD&E, led by the military, because communication is always an indispensable part of crisis management and compliance strategies. Across the spectrum of missions and broadly covering all levels of involvement in a civil-military, comprehensive approach context, the function of Strategic Communication and its military tool for implementation – Information Operations – have evolved and are still under development, in particular concerning their exact delineation of responsibilities and the integration of non-military and non-coalition actors.

Three major lines of development are acknowledged as state of the art, with practical impact on current crisis management operations and/or multinational interoperability: (1) U.S. national developments, which one can argue have resulted in the most mature concepts for both Strategic Communication and Information Operations so far; (2) NATO concept development, which in the case of Strategic Communication is very much driven by current mission requirements (such as ISAF in Afghanistan), but also has benefitted much from multinational CD&E in the case of Information Operations; and (3) multinational CD&E projects such as the U.S.-led Multinational Experiment (MNE) series and the Multinational Information Operations Experiment (MNIOE), led by Germany.

Intensive discussions involving civil and military practitioners of Strategic Communication and Information Operations - with a view on existing national and NATO approaches to Strategic Communication, and current best practice - have questioned whether a new approach and definition of Strategic Communication really is required. Consequently, a reorientation of CD&E efforts was suggested, focussing now on the theme of "Integrated Communication", which better reflects the shared baseline assessment with a broader scope, including but not limited to Strategic Communication:

- the ineffective top-down approach to communication (mission-specific, strategic-political guidance for information activities; information strategy; corporate vision; shared narrative) and

- the insufficient horizontal and vertical integration of communication (cohesion of a coalition; corporate identity; cultural awareness; communication by words and deeds - the "say-do-gap"; involvement of non-coalition actors - participatory communication).

This change also should prevent false expectations of potential customers of resulting concepts who currently are reluctant to engage in CD&E on the widely implemented subject of Strategic Communication.