HH: Is the American media doing a good job of covering the war in all of its facets?DR: Oh, goodness gracious. You know, I'm not a judge and a jury. That's up for the American people to decide, and you know where they rank the media.
HH: Well, transformation has been a watch word of your tenure. But has the Pentagon's focus on the information war that's aimed at the American public undergone a similar transformation?
DR: Well, it has to. I can't say that it has, but there's no question. This is the first war that's ever been conducted, in the 21st Century, in an era of these new media realities, where you have the internet and 24 hour talk radio and news and bloggers and video cameras and digital cameras and instant communications worldwide. And the enemy understands that they can't win a battle out on the battlefield in Iraq or Afghanistan. The only place they can win a battle is in Washington, D.C. So they have media committees, and they get up in the morning and figure out how they're going to manipulate the American media, and they do a very skillful job.
HH: Against that backdrop, that's really what I wanted to focus on. Are the pressers like the sort you just concluded, ten minute interviews and an occasional Sunday show, sufficient for you and the military to get across not only the good news, but the bad news, the challenges, the strategy? Are you using last war techniques in the new war?
DR: To a certain extent, we are still using the old 20th century techniques. And we're trying to figure them out and adjust them, and adapt them to the 21st Century. But it's painfully slow. People get set in their ways, and it's a difficult thing to do. We do provide, the Pentagon does, an enormous amount of information. There's someone briefing at the Pentagon, somewhere in the world, every day. And there are people providing information to people in a variety of different ways: through our website, through the Pentagon channel, through radio and television and print media. But it is still basically, I would guess, 80% 20th Century, and maybe 20% 21st Century.
HH: You've got people like Col. Austin Bay down in Austin, Texas, you've got Mudville Gazette, a bunch of bloggers, you've got Specialist Claude Flowers down at Centcom. They're all fighting the new media battle. Are any of those inside the E-ring, close to the control of actually the message machine?
DR: I don't know how to answer that. First of all, the truth is, and it's embarrassing to confess this, that I suppose I work about 13 hours a day. And I'll bet you that 12 1/2, or 12 3/4 of those 13 hours a day, I spend doing things instead of thinking about how I communicate, and what the message ought to be, and fighting the enemy on their level, against their media committees, and their active efforts at disinformation. And I probably ought to spend, and we here in the Department, ought to spend more time thinking about those messages, and how we can counteract the lies, because they are enormously successful. They can put out a lie, and then we're asked the question is that true. And we can know we think it's not true, but we have to be honest, and we have to be accurate. So we then have to spend two or three days trying to find out what the truth is, before we can rebut the lie. Well, the lie's been around the world 15 times by the time we even get our boots on.
And then this:
HH: Mr. Secretary, do you think that American can lose this war?
DR: Oh, sure. There's no way we can lose it on the battlefield. The only place we can lose it is if we lose our nerve, and if we decide that it's just too tough, and we're going to toss in the towel, that the dire consequences for the world, for the region, for the Iraqi people, for the Afghan people, and for the American people, are so serious, that the thought of it is just unacceptable.
In the first quote Rumsfield admits that we're not doing a good job of combating the terrorists in the media. Then, in the second quote he says the only way we can lose this war is here at home. That doesn't sound good to me.
If the only way we can lose this war is here at home, why isn't the Pentagon doing more on that front? Institutionalization? I like Rumsfield and think he has a very tough battle on his hands in trying to modernize the military to confront Islamofascism. However, this simply will not do. If the only battlefront on which we can lose is here at home I would suggest that the Secretary get busy fighting it.
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