The Pentagon is engaged in bitter, high-level debate over how far it can and should go in managing or manipulating information to influence opinion abroad, senior Defense Department civilians and military officers say.Such missions, if approved, could take the deceptive techniques endorsed for use on the battlefield to confuse an adversary and adopt them for covert propaganda campaigns aimed at neutral and even allied nations. Critics of the proposals say such deceptive missions could shatter the Pentagon’s credibility, leaving the American public and a world audience sceptical of anything the Defense Department and military say.The efforts under consideration risk blurring the traditional lines between public affairs programmes in the Pentagon and military branches — whose charters call for giving truthful information to the media and the public — and the world of combat information campaigns or psychological operations.The question is whether the Pentagon and military should undertake an official programme that uses disinformation to shape perceptions abroad. But in a world wired by satellite television and the internet, any misleading information could easily be repeated by American news outlets.The military has faced these issues before. Nearly three years ago, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, under intense criticism, closed the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Influence, a short-lived operation to provide news items, possibly including false ones, to foreign journalists.Now, critics say, the missions of that discredited office are quietly being resurrected elsewhere in the military and in the Pentagon. Pentagon and military officials directly involved in the debate say that such a secret propaganda programme, for example, could include planting news stories in the foreign press or creating false documents and websites translated into Arabic, to discredit and undermine the influence of religious schools that preach anti-American principles.The debate today is focused most directly on a secret order signed by Rumsfeld late last year and called ‘‘Information Operations Roadmap’’. The 74-page directive, which remains classified but was described by officials who had read it, accelerated ‘‘a plan to advance the goal of information operations as a core military competency’’.He ordered studies to clarify the appropriate relationship between Pentagon and military public affairs and the practitioners of secret psychological operations and information campaigns to influence or confuse adversaries.One study recently produced a proposal to create a new post for a ‘‘director of central information’’. The director would have responsibility for budgeting and ‘‘authoritative control of messages.”
