“Killing al-Qaeda: Winning the Battle of Ideas”
Mr. Charles John “Chuck” de Caro
14 September 2009
Mr. de Caro: [Applause]. Thank you. Thank you, General Dunn.
Gang, I’ve only got 45 minutes, so I’m going to run like hell through all this and I hope you’ll enjoy it. Afterwards, we can go to Potomac 8 if you’re interested professionally. The things that we can do that we can make operational quickly. I am at your service for as long as you want me.
Okay, the first thing I’d like to do is open up with a three-minute video I did for NSA about my kind of information warfare called SOFTWAR. Can we run that, please?
Video: Hello. I’m Chuck de Caro. The Department of Defense has asked me to open your primary course on information warfare by walking you through some out-of-the- box ideas.
The Clausewitzian view -- “War is the extension of politics that uses the controlled application of violence to constrain the enemy to accomplish our will” -- reflected the technology of the early 19th century, but the arrival of global real-time television has replaced the fine line between diplomacy and warfare with a large gray zone, where the wills of societies can be bent without necessarily resorting to full-scale warfare.
I call this new kind of warfare SOFTWAR and define it as the hostile use of global television to shape another society’s will by changing its view of reality. SOFTWAR may help explain why, after three years of trying to root out Osama bin Laden, the United States has taken Afghanistan and Iraq, created global counterterrorist links, spent hundreds of billions of dollars, but the al-Qaeda attacks are still coming.
Why? The likely cause is the U.S. insistence on using Cold War legacy systems and even more archaic thinking in dealing with an asymmetric enemy who has totally adapted himself and his operations to the infosphere. He is, in effect, a virtual guerilla whose area of operations is global and four dimensional -- air, land, sea, and information. Thus, this stateless millionaire has been able to conduct a new kind of guerilla war on a global scale, with attacks against American interests from the Middle East to the once sacrosanct shores of the United States itself.
Bin Laden has demonstrated, distributed, and dispersed intelligence and command functions by simply using the ubiquitous internet. He has also used global television to greatly magnify the size and scope of his attacks and create a kind of international cult following based on the amplification of his alleged charisma.
America has inadvertently worsened the situation by attacking only visible tactical targets from the Philippines to Afghanistan to Iraq. This conventional doctrine is like the inept mechanic who fixes an engine warning light by cutting the wires to the light.
The same mentality applies to simply killing or capturing terrorists. The problem is in the engine, and the engine here is the virtual body politic that supports bin Laden through contributions of money, personnel, intelligence, operational assistance, and political support.
And this virtual body politic is hiding within the larger Islamic culture of some 1.65 billion people. What is needed is a four-dimensional military that operates equally well on land, sea, air, or the infosphere; a force that is doctrinally guided by an integrated information warfare plan with kinetic adjuncts, not the current kinetic plan with IW adjuncts.
I’m Chuck de Caro. Thank you for your time. Duty calls. Learn your lessons well. Good luck.
Mr. de Caro: Okay, can you bring the slides up please?
Gang, let me just give you a little background. My name is Chuck de Caro, as you know. I went to school at the Academy. I washed out, wound up in 20th Special Forces Group, so I get hybrid-ed super-zoomie grunt.
Then I ended up at CNN as a combat reporter in the early 1980s, where I learned that I could push around governments because I felt like it. That’s an awful arrogant statement unless you had a monopoly on television across the globe, as I did in 1983. I also realized that that touched on what we do in warfare, because I was affecting wills of nation states because I had control of information.
Now I want you to understand why I’m here. I’m pretty successful. I own my own home. I’ve got the Corvette. I’ve got the dogs. I’ve got everything. I’m a member of the Screen Actors Guild. I’ve done Hollywood, the movie stars, the governor’s daughter; done all that. [Laughter].
Now gang, what I’m going to do -- I’m 59. Between now and the time they put me in the ground, I am going to kill al-Qaeda. I see their jugular. I know how to do it, and I need your help. Got it? Okay.
Now let me tell you something. It’s personal and family.
First slide.
That’s my Uncle Joe Vitale. He shot down Gunther Räll, the number three German ace. Seventy-five missions in Europe, a hundred in Korea; he was killed on active duty in 1953.
Next slide.
That’s my Uncle Heck, that Italian boy right there. He bombed Berlin, and then he went out and bombed Peenemunde. And he volunteered for two more missions than his 25.
I’ve got a hell of a family and a lot to live up to, so I’m going to kill al-Qaeda.
Next slide.
Remember this? Zoomies? They made me memorize this 35 years ago, and it has stuck with me. Another Italian boy. [Laughter].
“Victory smiles upon those who anticipate the changes and the character of war, not upon those who wait until after those changes have occurred.”
Gang, we’ve been at this fight for seven years, eight years. We still haven’t won. Why? Because the enemy has adapted and we’re just getting around to it.
Next slide.
What is it that we do? What is war? War is violence to constrain the enemy to accomplish our will.
The end point of war has never been death and destruction; it’s controlling the enemy’s will. What did Sun Tzu say 2000 years earlier?
“To win a hundred victories in battle is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without having to fight is the acme of skill.”
And those of you who share my Italian ethnicity -- raise your hand -- we all know the efficacy of the horse’s head in the bed, don’t we? [Laughter].
The acme of skill is not victory in a hundred battles; it’s defeating the enemy without having to fight. And I believe that a late 20th Century invention, global real time, universal television, has changed the nature of war.
Next slide.
I call this new kind of war SOFTWAR, and I define it as the hostile use of global television to shape another society’s will by changing its view of reality. And when I say television, I mean the cinema, motion picture, electronically disseminated, whether you get it on an iPod, global television, satellite, terrestrial television, videotape, CDs. Everybody understands? Yes?
Okay, next slide.
Hey, guess who else thinks he knows about SOFTWAR? My buddy, Osama, who I’m going to watch die.
Look what he said in a captured document. How many people have seen this before? We’re eight years into this fight, and two people besides me know this.
In the Harmony -- everybody write this down -- Harmony and Disharmony compiled by the U.S. Army Counterterrorism Center at West Point, page 58, halfway down the page. I looked at this and said, here’s the Rosetta Stone.
Let’s all read it together and see how the enemy’s thinking, shall we? Together.
“It is obvious that the media war in this century is one of the strongest methods. In fact, its ratio may reach 90 percent of the total preparation for battles.”
Oh my God. This is like Mein Kampf, reading it in 1924 and not believing anything about going through Poland to get to Russia; let’s kill all the Jews. Don’t believe it. Okay? There it is. His ops plans standing in front of us.
If 90 percent of his effort is dedicated to information warfare, how come -- Does anybody see 90 percent of our effort in IEF, IOF, dedicated to information warfare? Mistake number one; this is what the enemy is thinking and we’re not doing anything about it.
Next slide.
The reason why television is so powerful is it transfers information to video illiterates, and that’s most of the planet, through perception of images rather than hard facts. I don’t have enough time to talk about it.
I can tell you in U.S. diplomatic history the effect of the Kennedy/Nixon debates, where Nixon was badly lighted, sweaty, didn’t look good, and Kennedy had a natural telegenic quality. Even though they broke absolutely even in the transcripts because both of them were pros and knew what they were doing, the perception was that Kennedy won by a landslide because of his telegenic quality. I’ll give you more data when we have time, and we can talk about it in Potomac 8 after this.
Next slide.
The U.S. military must be able to operate in a transparent environment because any TV uplink, which is now the size of this podium, means instantaneous global coverage. If you have instantaneous global coverage, it’s automatically political because all those people are watching. The United States can no longer participate in purely military operations; only in MilPol, because any effect you have, military, is going to be political instantly.
Next slide.
Global TV provides emerging powers extremely low cost, extremely high quality real-time intelligence on most U.S. government operations. Think about it. How much does it cost to watch television anywhere in the world and understand basically what the policy of the United States is going to be? Thirty bucks a month?
Let’s give you an idea of how obsolete we are. What year was the Air Force started? In 1947. What year was DoD started? In ’47. CIA? In ’47. NSA? In ’47 and then again in ’52.
Okay, how many computers were there in 1947? Three; MANIAC, ENIAC, and a secret one called Colossus that the British had developed during World War II. There were actually eleven, but they destroyed ten and kept one. Don’t ask me why.
How many fiber-optic communication systems were there in 1947? Oh tens of thousands, but they were a little crude; they took the form of 18-inch Lucite cylinders stapled to the sides of 1947 Pontiacs. So when the headlight went out, so did the cylinder. So you knew to replace the headlight. That’s where fiber-optic communications were in 1947.
How many globe-girdling television satellites were there in 1947? Three. They were all in Arthur C. Clarke’s imagination, and he would write a little essay about it in 1947. It took another decade before Sputnik went up.
And yet, we still have the same command organizations, more or less -- parametal, industrial-age organizations -- we had in 1947. If we had to start the national security apparatus of the United States today, would it look anything like what we’ve got?
Next slide.
Adversaries are already projecting SOFTWAR against the United States. What do you think 9/11 was? In my view, 9/11 had very little to do with terrorism and everything in the world to do with marketing. Because they could.
Next slide.
SOFTWAR makes the concept of strategic, operational, and tactical obsolete. Why are we still organized in a Napoleonic fashion? If you have a subtactical event, an IED, a VBIED, going off in Afghanistan, and it winds up on the President’s television set and he then orders something else to happen, why are we still organized like this?
Next slide.
Now let’s get to killing al-Qaeda. Nations make war the way they make money. That’s what my friend Al Toffler said in War and Anti-War.
I said, once you know how UBL made money you can beat the bastard. Now that may be pretty strong language, but if you are one of 52 or 54 children, bastard may not be a bad word to describe exactly what you are. [Laughter].
Okay. So Intel guys, raise your hand. Okay. What did UBL do for a living before he got Allah? What? Engineering. What kind of engineering? Okay, construction engineering. But what did he actually do? Where was he working in the construction business? Chief Financial Officer. If you’re in the CFO, what do you know how to do? Hide money. Especially from tax people. That gives you some ability.
Okay, let me tell you, being an Italian boy, about construction companies. When I was eight years old, my Uncle John, my Great-Uncle John Caparelli, would take me over to his friend Amerigo Cardi’s construction company on Saturday mornings.
All you boys are all smiling because you got to see all the cement trucks with the little hypnosis line going around like this as they were being washed. The dump trucks, the rock crusher, the lake, and the cement mixer; all these things going at once.
And in the middle of this gravel lot was a two-story casement brick building, and Amerigo would open the door every once in awhile, or a window, and get on his bullhorn and go, yo Mikey, on truck six, make sure it’s a creamy mix for my brother-in-law. You got it? Yeah, Boss, I got it.
Okay. You go back to the same spot in Cranston, Rhode Island; there’s nothing there but a bunch of guineas dressed just like me, except they’ve got steel-toed boots, so they can get on the job site, and they’ve got a little hard hat, but they’re all dressed in Armani suits or Brioni suits. Where is everybody?
Well, the dump trucks are down in Westerly, 50 miles away. The engineers and architects are scattered up and down the east coast and they pipe it in by internet and occasionally they show up in their Lincolns to have a construction conference.
How did this happen? The information age made it happen. That giant monolithic organization that Amerigo had a generation ago, two generations ago, it doesn’t need to be there because in 1950 you couldn’t cash a Rhode Island check in a Massachusetts bank. Phone calls were expensive. Long distance was unheard of. Fax machines were twice the size of that podium. Computers only belonged to the government.
Now what’s happened? There’s a nice stainless steel and glass building with a wonderful lawn and everybody’s scattered everywhere. And yet, they do all kinds of new things.
It’s no longer monolithic marketing talking by word of mouth to the brother-in-law to get more business, but instead they do joint ventures. Everybody heard of joint ventures? Sometimes they’re subcontractors, sometimes they’re prime contractors. If they’re building highways, what do they do? They do teaming.
So too did Osama. Those very same things we talked about, joint ventures, teaming, subcontractor, prime contractor, are guess what? A mirror image of al-Qaeda.
Nations make war the way they make money. Why? All right. Let’s see.
Let’s knock down two U.S. embassies in Africa. Now how are you going to do that if you have a monolithic organization in Saudi Arabia? But if you do a little joint venture, you get some locals from two different African nations. Right?
You send your organizational cell. It may be in Saudi Arabia; it may be in Sudan. You put it together. You send it out by the internet. You bring some explosives in from Egypt. You bring in some money from Saudi Arabia. And presto chango, you get simultaneous attacks against a superpower and, oh by the way, people perceive you, al- Qaeda, as a superpower. Everybody getting this?
Let’s talk about sinking boats in Yemen. You know, I’m a Saudi camel driver. What do I know about sinking boats? But some of the boys down there locally know about that harbor. Let’s get one of them to be a suicide bomber. Fill it with explosives from somewhere else. Do all the actionable stuff on the internet and presto chango, what are we looking at? A mirror image. A mirror image of the construction company. Everybody got it?
Okay, now. Next slide.
How do we get at them? First we attack their strategy. But first, let me show you how you think.
I’m going to show you their marketing videos. One is a U.S. propaganda video, what the Army calls a hooah video, a kind of a victory roll, as they’re leaving Iraq, and they put it on the internet. And in effect, it becomes inadvertent propaganda.
Then I’m going to show you some al-Qaeda propaganda. I want you all to watch the cinematic differences, and from that you’ll understand the doctrinal differences and thus the vulnerability of al-Qaeda.
Can we roll the first set of tape there, please?
Now watch this. Watch how it’s put together. Sound.
[Tchaikovsky 1812 Overture].
[Unknown music/chanting].
Mr. de Caro: Okay. Rerack that.
Now, what do you notice from the differences in the two styles about how people, how al-Qaeda thinks. Anybody see any cinematic differences. Raise your hand. Okay, we’ll rerun it and I’ll show you the differences. Just put down the sound a little bit lower.
I want you to notice that in all -- Go ahead and take it from the -- not from here, go from the top, from the very beginning. We don’t have time to do the sniper videos. Those people who want to see it when we get to -- okay, right here. Ready, go. Now watch.
In the American inadvertent propaganda, look, it’s always center of frame, center of mass, center of crosshairs, in every single case. Why? Ask yourself why. Also, the quality of resolution is poor. Why? And it’s shot from a distance of 1,000 to about 4,000 meters, the range of the weapons being used.
The answer is because the camera here, the camera, is slave to the weapon. The only reason why the camera is here is to record the acuity of the weapon system. Does everybody see that? Please respond yes or no.
[Audience response].
Yes? That’s what it’s there for.
Now in the al-Qaeda videos, you’ll notice something completely different. First, the action is always at the bottom third of the frame. Always at the bottom third of the frame. Why? Watch. You’ll also notice that the music and the chanting are in harmony with what’s going on; praising those warriors.
In the American video, it was Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture which had to do with Russians beating the French. They’re not linked.
Okay now, look at this. In every case, they are down- sun. Every case, down-sun; the sun is behind me. Okay. And there is always a vertical marker in the center of the frame. In each case, there is always three seconds between this or that in the center frame. Why?
Answer: In order to capture the explosive plume of the weapon. If you look at the selection of targets, there is very little military value. Very little military value. But there is visceral video.
The enemy -- this is really important, the weapon is slave to the camera; not the other way around. We, our camera, slave to the weapon. Their weapon is slave to the camera. How else would you know that that cloud is going to be exactly that big?
And if you notice, it gives the operator enough time to run in to the center post and go up. What they’re doing is using kinetics to support information warfare. We use information to support kinetic warfare; therefore, we cannot win.
We may not lose, but we cannot win. And if we do, it’s because of enormous amounts of brute force. We have to beat the enemy by outthinking the enemy, and the enemy is using kinetics to support information.
When we learn that lesson, we can beat him. In fact, what you’re seeing here is Schweinfurt. What you’re seeing here is Regensburg. What you’re seeing here is Ploieşti. Why?
The enemy’s primary strategic weapon isn’t the IED. It’s the video of the IED. They’re using it in three ways.
One, succor to their troops, to give them a sense of victory. Second, the ability to recruit other troops who might become terrorists. And third, to try to erode the will of the United States. It’s a three-fer, but it’s because they’re using this --
Look at this, that freeze frame. Do you notice they’re blowing up a load of porta-potties? They are literally blowing shit up. [Laughter]. Okay. Not funny, but very accurate in the way they think. There’s no military rationale.
We don’t have time for the sniper film now. Those people who come afterwards, we’ll get into this in detail. Let’s go back to the slides, please.
Any questions so far? Does everybody see my point? The enemy is completely different in his doctrine, but he has revealed in eight straight years the same tactics, techniques, and procedures; TTP as the grunts like to say.
Now the point here is that once we understand them, we can take advantage of them. Okay.
First, what is the goal of al-Qaeda? Regenerate the caliphate. But more than that, what does Zawahiri want? A monotheistic global state of Islam in which you have three choices; you can be dead, you can convert, or you can be a slave. I don’t like any of the three of those, so I’m going to have to kill al-Qaeda and I need your help.
What is their strategy? Their strategy is very simple in televisive terms; what they want to do is use the visuals they create to get the Ummah to see it their way, the Ummah being the totality of those believers in Islam. They’re using marketing techniques. Look at what we can do against a superpower. Look at our brand of Islam; it should be your brand.
And in order to get to their published goal, which is to regenerate the caliphate, by definition they have to have most of the Ummah into the caliphate. Yes or no? So they’re marketing.
We can beat them. Once we attack that strategy, then you attack their allies. Who are the allies? Individuals, nation states from time to time.
How many people know about the fax campaign against Serbia? After 77 days of bombing, we got tired and there was a secret campaign run out of the IO working group that simply went through faxes to all of Milosevic’s allies that said, hey, we’ve run out of strategic targets, but that Coca-Cola bottling plant that you own -- We’re going to bomb it, because we think it’s a strategic target, unless you tell Mr. Milosevic to knock it off. It worked very effectively. Attack the allies.
Then anyone left standing, you can go put on your MP5 and ski mask and go wipe out anybody left standing. That’s how you kill al-Qaeda. Now subset.
Next slide. Six sets of SOFTWAR.
One. Counter-propaganda. The first thing you do is, who are they trying to convince? Elements of the Ummah. Who are you going to try to convince? Same elements, but use a better speaker, a better philosopher, to get at them point for point.
Counter-programming. If they’re trying to market televisibly, your job is to try to take them away, not necessarily with propaganda. It’s called counter- programming. If you’ve got, if you’re the last station in a three-station market and you can’t compete, what do you do? You run Baywatch against the news. That’s called counter- programming. You can do that with a soccer game. You can create a way to draw down those people watching without having to go into propaganda.
Saturation. What we have that they don’t have is a checkbook. If they’re on channel five, you’re on channel four, channel three, channel seven, channel nine. Saturation.
Seduction is using commercial means to make them less able to get their demographic, such as hiring away the friendly anchorman on Al Jazeerah, let’s say, to give them less ability to reach a demographic.
Special means has to do with ugly illegal things that go to Title 50.
And integration is the most important. The United States has no integrated IW effort at the strategic level. If there is some secret operation going on, it’s not very effective.
We must be able to use black propaganda, Title 50, CIA, with white and gray from DoD and from State, in an integrated way so that you oscillate the enemy’s reality. Get them to react to you rather than the other way around.
Next slide.
That means an imminent plan with kinetic adjuncts. Events have to support the information campaign. If we’re doing civil affairs in Afghanistan, you don’t do it the way the engineers tell you to do it. You do it the way an IW tells you to do it.
For instance, if you’re building a road with a bridge, what do you build first? The bridge. Why? It’s more visual. When the enemy sees you building a bridge, he understands that he’s going to have to destroy it because as you’re pulling the bridge up you’re getting a large information campaign about how much life is going to be better with the bridge.
What’s the enemy going to do? Attack the bridge. What are you going to do? Wait in ambush. Because he must attack the bridge. And when he attacks the bridge, you wipe him out and you make sure that your propaganda campaigns reflect the inadequacy of the enemy warrior. Everyone understand? Kinetics first, supporting information.
Next slide.
Okay. What can the Air Force do? A couple of notional ideas. Why not build a-purple-with-spots unit? The United States Air Force still has the highest IQ per capita of all the services. We have always been that way. Let’s take advantage of that. Bring in yet untapped methodologies like this one. Exploit the weaknesses of the network structure.
There are two things that we can do to kill al-Qaeda. One, exploit the weaknesses of the network structure and the second is to beat their marketing effort with a better marketing effort. Those two things.
How do you kill a network? Well if you listen to the Army, they’ll just find everybody -- bad guy with a computer—and you whack them. Well the whole point, as you heard from Dr. Cerf of an internet, which was the ARPAnet, was if you nuke one node you can regenerate the net.
This is a fool’s errand, trying to kill one node at a time. The way you kill a network is not by taking information out; it’s by putting information in.
If you destroy the veracity of the enemy’s system or his belief that the thing works, what happens to the network? It shrivels and goes away. It’s slow poison.
Does everybody understand it? This is craftsmanship, and it’s not cyber, gang. It’s not about zeroes and one; it’s about attacking the enemy’s gray stuff, about getting into his head, making him kill one another. You can do this, but it’s not the ones and zeroes; it’s this. How to defeat an enemy by out-thinking him. It can be and it, hopefully, will be done.
Now the information tsunamis -- If he has an event, you make sure that you’ve got ten and you multiply it by ten so that the target demographic, those people he must have in order to reach his goal, are denied to him. Does everybody understand this logic from a televisive point of view?
What else could we do? If his primary strategic weapon is video, counter-weapon, the camera is the weapon. The other day, how many people remember the U.S. air strike against the stolen gasoline tankers? Raise your hand. And all the crap we caught for that.
General Dunn and I were talking. General Deptula and I were talking. I said, guys, you cannot counter video, you know, dead people on the ground, with words. You have to counter it with video. A television guy would have said as soon as he heard that this was creating a political storm --
Immediately I go to my geek and say, generate, in one hour, video of a 5,000 gallon tanker exploding in an urban area. Make it a cartoon. I don’t care if it’s South Park quality, just give me that video.
Now you go up and say, the reason why we took these measures was because we wanted to prevent this. And you see this giant fireball in an Afghanistan village with hundreds of people killed.
That is how you counter the enemy’s message. Does everybody understand this?
The problem is that, except for DINFOS and a few Air Force combat camera teams, we have no such body of officers thinking about how to counter the enemy. It ain’t here.
How many of you had television training professionally? Raise your hand. That makes two of us. All right. Three? Okay. What’s wrong with this picture of only two of us in this room?
How many people here have ever assembled from scratch a one-minute television video? Two of us? That’s it.
Now how are you going to run an information campaign if you can’t use it? If you don’t know the first thing about television?
When I went to the Army Command and General Staff School, I asked my grunts, stand up, and pick up your invisible M4. What’s the first thing you do? Even the Coast Guard guy did this. Great.
Now pick up your TV camera and show me what to do. Well the poor Coast Guard guy picks it up and I said, that’s the wrong end. So he turns around his invisible camera.
What do you do? See if there’s a battery in it and turn it on for the bit check. That’s what you do. But if you can’t do that, how are you going to run an information campaign?
We’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars having contractors do it, with no officers who know how to supervise. So millions and millions and millions of dollars get wasted because you can’t hold a contractor’s feet to the fire.
If you can’t look at the video and estimate how much it costs, you shouldn’t be running an information campaign. Any television guy, whether it’s news or entertainment, can look at video and tell you how much it costs within a few grand.
Now quality counts. When I was a tech advisor at the TV show “Jag” and again at “NCIS”, each one of the Jag shows that I worked on was only 45 minutes and 47 seconds to the frame and required an average of 15,500 man hours.
Squadron commanders, think about 15,500 man hours to produce 45 minutes of video at a cost of 2.7 to 3.3 million dollars a shot. In four weeks, producing three hours of video, we exceeded the entire annual budget of the Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group and all we did was three hours of video. However, we could guarantee that at 8:00 o’clock on Tuesday 16 million people who we could define in blocks would be watching.
So the real information warfare guys, those guys who make commercials, who can affect people’s wills, would have a target demographic that they could hit. That’s how you play for keeps, because information warfare for profit that Hollywood has perfected is the same as information warfare for policy that we have not perfected.
Does everybody understand? Answer yes.
[Audience response].
Mr. de Caro: Okay. All right. The other thing is --
Ladies. All the females, please stand up. Right now. Stand up. Our secret weapon is looking at us. Okay, sit down. The enemy -- wait.
Who knows what neurolinguistic programming is? Raise your hand. Nobody? Do you know what it is? NLP? Did somebody raise their hand there? Neurolinguistic programming. Stand up. Give me five seconds of NLP.
[Laughter].
Neurolinguistic programming. We’re hardwired to do things. Take a Playboy foldout in front of a heterosexual male; you’ll get an iris displacement; it happens. Put it in front of a woman; nothing happens. Take a newborn child and put it in front of a guy; nothing happens. Put it in front of a woman; iris displacement. You’re hardwired to react to certain visuals. Some of those visuals are completely neutral to males.
We have thousands of highly educated female officers who could be put in an information campaign against the women who would produce new al-Qaeda warriors. If you take a generational approach, we’re going to lower their numbers the hard way. Think about it. Why not? We have the talent. We have the technology. We have the money. We’re not using it. Okay.
Steady influence operations can render al-Qaeda irrelevant. Remember, we have the highest ratio of females. We have more brains per capita.
Next slide.
Okay. How do we do this? Oscillate their reality. Their system of operations has flaws and can be exploited.
If their primary strategic weapon is video, then if you deny them the ability to use it they’re going to react to you. Now we’re inside their ooda-loop and we can kill them. I just demonstrated to all of you that the enemy uses kinetics to support information. What could we do?
As an example, how many people here have ever heard of JIEDDO? Ever heard of JIEDDO? Joint IED Defeat Organization. That’s fine. They’re missing the point.
The point isn’t the IED; it’s the video of the IED, as I think I’ve demonstrated. They’ve been dealing with the wrong end of the equation for the last six years. Aim at the camera, and you’ll get a reaction from the enemy.
What if we were to jam their cameras instead of their bombs? What would they do? How many people here have had combat tours in Iraq? Raise your hand. Okay. Iraq? No.
Think about what the enemy has been doing with IEDs. They apparently, from what I understand from sources that are not classified, you can’t get paid for your work unless you bring back the video. The scalp. The video is what counts.
What would happen if some specialized jamming were to occur, and the camera started rolling uncontrollably? What would happen? Would they detonate the IED? What’s the likelihood? Not likely. They’ll fix the camera. If they can’t fix this camera, what do you think they’ll do? They’ll open their cell phone and call Haidid to find out if they can get either a new camera or get them to fix the camera.
Does everybody begin to see the vulnerabilities here without starting to go into sensitive areas? We can talk about that later. Does everybody see where I’m going?
Then you use your black, gray, and white propaganda. We could do something like this. Here.
Next slide.
With an Air Force unit like this, we could convince the enemy that their primary means of strategic weapon is obsolete. What if we were to create such a jammer? The enemy would then leave his hole at dark. We’ll put a couple of more cameras in his hole; he comes back the next day. The next day a Humvee comes into his sights. We’ve demonstrated the four-second approximately 200-foot gap between the center verticals. Right? It starts to roll.
At that moment the camera with the Humvee outside the blast zone suddenly sees a black object coming closer and closer and then foomph. There’s nothing there except people crying in agony. Okay.
The white propaganda says the United States Air Force has developed a TV camera-seeking bomb. Okay? Think about it.
The gray propaganda, you bring the local people over to the TV and they interview the guy in his hole who has been mangled by a laser-practice bomb. Hmm. Hey, Haidid, does that hurt? Okay, you’re going to get your virgins; it’s going to be about 50 years. Yeah. No legs. Great propaganda.
Black propaganda. You put it in their loop that Haidid is a traitor. The guy that fixed the camera let it out. Then you go over and whack Haidid and blame it on the next group.
What will the enemy’s calm situation look like? Can anybody say through the roof? Because they’ve got three different things they have to deal with.
One, they’ve got a technology problem. If we can find their cameras, what are they going to have to do? Go to film. Guess who bought up all the film stores? Uncle Chuck. And every camera I give them has got a GPS chip in it. Just like little roach motel. A little bait and go.
And then they’ve got a morale problem, because suddenly the glorious end isn’t there. And third, they’ve got a problem of who’s the traitor. And now, you can oscillate their reality.
Does everybody understand this and how the enemy functions by the utilization of video? We can kill al- Qaeda. We have to be organized to kill al-Qaeda.
Next slide. By the way, go back one.
This. We’ve already got a cooperative research and development agreement with the Academy. What we need is a body of officers, male and female, who understand television. Not as majors, but as cadets, as young lieutenants,
So we have a body of officers going through our Air Force, who have a consistent understanding of how to do this. Right now, we’ll get officers. We’ll give them the IO mission. Right? And they’ll do this for 18 months and they’ll get good. And then the next guy is so-so, and the next guy gets good.
The al-Qaeda guys are in for the duration, and their arithmetic progress is a slow climb. So over here the gap is like this, when before it was like this. Well we need a people who are trained to do this stuff -- educated, not just trained, to outthink the enemy and to kill his movement. Okay.
Next to the last slide. Okay. Last two slides.
I just want you to remember, when the situation is grim, the odds are against you, and the stakes are high, just remember two words.
Next slide.
Call Chuck, at that number. [Laughter].
Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you for your time. If you’d like more, please join me at Potomac 8 after this. Thank you very much. [Applause].
General Dunn: Well you can see why we asked Chuck to come down and talk to you. This presentation, I know, is way abbreviated. When I was at NDU, he spoke for four hours to some of our students and to plant the ideas that you need. It’s a very important science that we have left, in my view, untapped.
Chuck, on behalf of all of us at AFA, and especially on behalf of this audience here, I want to thank you very much for what you’ve done. I have for you an Air Force flag, flown over the Air Force Memorial on Memorial Day. [Applause].
Mr. de Caro: Thank you. [Applause].
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