Hearing of the House Armed Services Committee's Terrorism, Unconventional Threats Subcommittee - Countering Ideological Support for Terrorism

Interview

Hearing of the House Armed Services Committee's Terrorism, Unconventional Threats Subcommittee - Countering Ideological Support for Terrorism

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

REP. KATHY CASTOR (D-FL): Good morning.

How do you divide the differences and responsibilities and missions of the Department of State and the Department of Defense? I know you all work together and collaborate on a lot of different initiatives when it comes to worldwide communications. But I'd like you to detail how they differ, and where your concerns like with maybe mission creep of one agency to the other.

MR. PITTMAN: Okay. With regards to my specific area of expertise, the strategic communication and integration group, essentially the development and staffing of strategic communication plans on behalf of the Department of Defense. Obviously any efforts that we make are designed to plug into the greater efforts of State Department.

But we, you know, the process of staffing plans and development is a time consuming process of ensuring that all the offices with tasks and responsibilities in a particular communication plan come together in harmony, horizontally integrating all those efforts, kind of across multiple lanes.

A perfect example is the recent Afghanistan strategic communication plan that we worked on. It took probably about four months to complete that plan, but once completed it had elements of interagency support. It was nested with the plans that were already in place from the State Department and through NATO ISAF. And it had specifically execution pieces that were responsibility of Central Command elements, of other elements, you know, within the theater of operations there.

It's a challenging responsibility, but we have multiple meetings on an ongoing basis with our colleagues kind of across this spectrum and in larger groups. And again, it's about integrating the process. It's not about creating new stovepipes or organizations, but rather making sure that we're all working in harmony, in synchronization.

It's a challenge. It is hard to align those efforts. But we're working to that end.

REP. CASTOR: Are the DOD communications efforts concentrated on the CENTCOM area and then of course through SOCOM especially.

MR. PITTMAN: I would offer to you, ma'am, that there are certainly discrete efforts across all the combatant commands. And I used the CENTCOM example because it's one example of a pretty robust plan that we recently tackled.

But there are multiple efforts. Obviously there's a lot of time and energy currently spent on activities and operations in the central command theater, so there is a lot of effort that goes into that. There's a lot of resources, and a lot of people working at different levels, kind of across the spectrum on those particular issues just because they are so dynamic, and they involve our government to such an extent.

MR. MACINNES: From the State Department's view, two things, mentioning what Captain Pittman talked about. We are actually doing a lot more things than we did in the past. The scope of what we have to handle is global, and the borders for Internet and other activities don't exist.

And we have a very close coordination relationship with public affairs. That's traditional; that's always been that way. SIOPs and operations that were theater-based, meaning in areas of active war, are now global because of the nature of the global war on terror. In other words it has moved beyond being localized.

And that means that we've had to learn how to coordinate our efforts globally on issues like information operations, SIOPs, and public affairs and public diplomacy. It is not an easy thing, and actually we didn't do it well, certainly at the turn of the century.

But we actually have taken this on, we've realized that because so many different elements are now involved in this activity of what you might call strategic communications written large, that we do need these coordinated mechanisms to be able to sort out and to reinforce and to not duplicate, but to also -- and not stumble over each other. And we've actually created I think ways that we are moving in that direction quite robustly right now. I think that was missing before. But -- that's all.

MR. DORAN: If I could just add to that, since Duncan set up the CTCC, that's been enormously helpful to us. We in the Department of Defense recognize that State has the lead on this, and we need their leadership.

And the problem that we had before the CTCC existed, I think, was not so much that we were getting in each other's business, but that we weren't synched up, and that we weren't working as closely together as we might have been. And we hadn't explained, I think, to State what we need from them by way -- by way of leadership in this area.

Now that the CTCC is there, we have developed processes and relationships that I think allow for the two agencies to understand each other much better, and to work much more effectively together in this area.

REP. SMITH: Thank you. The gentle lady's time has expired.

Mrs. Drake.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source