The public affairs person does public affairs: advises the commander, does media engagements, maybe slings some PAG … even a tweet or two.
The PSYOP person does PSYOP ( or MISO): makes videos, radio messages, lots of social media work and … yep, leaflets. Good PSYOP people even do things we won’t talk about on MaxDis.
Then you have the cyber professionals doing cyber stuff. Give me some Electronic Warfare, I love for the EW person to mess with the adversary’s capabilities.
We have intel guys in this mix doing intel. We surely have ops guys, getting after it with some lethal firepower … also coordinating the whole operation.
We all work together to get things done. We all do things to contribute. We bring capability.
As a public affairs professional, I coordinate across all of the information capabilities. I have to know what they’re doing and they need to know my plan. Better yet, our plan – because our information plan is coordinated and holistic.
Oh, but the IO guy. The IO guy? What does he or she DO? Everyone should have a tangible thing that they DO, right?
The IO person coordinates between the information functions? No thanks. We’ve got that covered. As staff professionals we coordinate capabilities between each other, internal to the staff and externally; just like the intel and ops people do.
The J4 and the J8 have to coordinate with each other. Do they need a guy just to oversee their coordination? Should the Army create a Support Officer specialty who’s job it is only to coordinate between support functions? Coordinate, but not actually execute the support? Arguably, the Chief of Staff helps this effort; the Chief of Staff is the chief of all staff, not just logistics.
I’ve been doing Public Affairs for a while. Sure, I’ve worked with plenty of good staff officers who are IO. Regardless of their goodness or professionalism, they still don’t actually do anything a good staff officer shouldn’t already be doing.
Maybe the angry responses we will get from this post will explain it to us.
“IO is not about ownership of individual capabilities but rather the use of those
capabilities as force multipliers to create a desired effect. There are many military
capabilities that contribute to IO and should be taken into consideration during the planning process.”
– Joint Publication 3-13 – Information Operations
We (as a staff) already got it covered guys, thanks!
Photo: Courtesy of Center for Information Warfare Training
