As adaptive and creative as the United States claims to be, one would think that, eight years after 9/11, the foreign policy establishment would have come up with a workable way to communicate its strategic message to the rest of the world. It hasn't. Call it the $10 billion bungle, because that's a reliable estimate of how much the U.S. has spent since 9/11 on the effort.
Bringing the dilemma to the fore is a scathing indictment issued by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen in the latest issue of Joint Forces Quarterly. Mullen's broadside goes after the entire "strategic communication" community, known as "Strat Comm," taking practitioners to task for doing too much strategy and not enough communicating of the reality that is American foreign policy.
"Our biggest problem isn't caves," he wrote, referring to the secretive hideouts where al-Qaida supposedly engineers its public relations messages, "it's credibility." The problem, according to Mullen, is that the U.S. isn't backing up its words with actions.