ONE HELLUVA ROAR: US AIR FORCE PUBLIC COMMUNICATION SINCE 1942 BY MAJOR TADD SHOLTIS A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE SCHOOL OF ADVANCED AIR AND SPACE STUDIES FOR COMPLETION OF GRADUATION REQUIREMENTS SCHOOL OF ADVANCED AIR AND SPACE STUDIES AIR UNIVERSITY MAXWELL AIR FORCE BASE, ALABAMA JUNE 2008 APPROVAL The undersigned certify that this thesis meets masters-level standards of research, argumentation, and expression. DR. EVERETT C. DOLMAN (Date) DR. JAMES M. TUCCI (Date) i DISCLAIMER The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author. They do not reflect the official position of the US Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force, or Air University. ii ABOUT THE AUTHOR Maj Tadd Sholtis is a 1993 distinguished graduate of the United States Air Force Academy. He holds an MA in English literature from the Pennsylvania State University and an MS in strategic intelligence from the National Defense Intelligence College. Major Sholtis has served as an Air Force public affairs officer for most of the past 14 years. His assignments include a total of six years as chief of wing public affairs at Vance AFB, Oklahoma, and Travis AFB, California. Assigned to Headquarters Sixteenth Air Force in 2002, he was one of the lead public affairs planners for European- based air operations during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In 2004, he volunteered to be a strategic communication planner for the Coalition Provisional Authority and US embassy in Baghdad, after which he was selected as the chief of manpower, organization, and readiness for the Secretary of the Air Force’s Office of Public Affairs (SAF/PA). After graduating from the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, Major Sholtis returned to the Pentagon as chief of strategy for SAF/PA. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work is the product of a year of study at Air University’s School of Advanced Air and Space Studies. Any merit in the following pages derives from the many hours of seminar discussions and camaraderie shared with the students and faculty of this extraordinary institution. If luck holds, then several of the friends I made this year will rise to be senior leaders in the profession of arms, and America will be better for it. To a man and woman, these 41 officers came to SAASS as exceptional people, and—thanks to the constant dedication of a gifted faculty—they leave as the thoughtful warriors we need in this curious age of peril and promise. I am a better person and a better airman for having spent this year with them. I owe tremendous thanks to Dr. Everett Dolman, my thesis advisor, for his intellectual example and thoughtful contributions to the entire text. The fact that a scholar such as Dr. Dolman exists within the professional military education system gives hope to us all. Dr. James Tucci, Dr. James Kiras, Dr. John Sheldon, and Dr. Richard Muller helped put me on the trail of sources and shape the scope and direction of the study. Dr. Tucci’s final review ensured the text was as good as I could make it. My research greatly benefited from the oral histories of former public affairs officers compiled by the Air Force Public Affairs Alumni Association, specifically Lt Col (retired) John Terino and Lt Col (retired) John Gura. Hopefully the association can continue this valuable project with another generation of veterans. Mr. Joe Caver and the staff of the Air Force Historical Research Agency, Maxwell AFB, Alabama, and Ms. LeAnn Fawver and the staff of the US Army Military History Institute, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, also patiently assisted my search for primary documents. I would also like to thank Professor Russell Rochte of the National Defense Intelligence College, whose colloquium on strategic communication was a revelation and the genesis of many of the better ideas in the text. The worst ideas are my own. My thanks to Maj Sam Highley for his help in getting me through SAASS and also for his early, insightful comments on the thesis. Sam, his wife Allison, Maj Regi Winchester, and Lt Col Robyn Chumley are great friends who pulled me out of the books often and long enough to keep me sane—no small feat. Rather than move from and back to Washington in the same year, Elizabeth and Tyler agreed to go without their dad and behave for their mom, most of the time. As always, Kim was amazing. It is a miracle that she loves me, but I am willing to continue overlooking her mistake if she is. Finally, this thesis is dedicated to the small but resolute band of Air Force public affairs, multimedia, and other influence operations professionals. What follows is not a criticism of their work but a testament to their accomplishments despite very long odds. iv ABSTRACT This study explores how the United States Air Force negotiates the problem of publicly communicating on behalf of its own interests while subordinating its communication to national objectives during military operations. The author proposes a theory of military public communication that links the act of persuasion to a military service’s core function, the application or threat of coercive force. The theory predicts that, as the level of coercive airpower exerted or implied in a conflict increases, the character of Air Force communication becomes more domestically focused, more reliant on needs-based appeals, and more concerned with ensuring information security and controlling information flows through censorship or propaganda. When national priorities clearly align with the coercive force that airpower provides, service communication generally coheres with stated policy. As lower levels of violence become the intent of policy, airpower may seem contradictory. This disparity encourages higher authorities to control Air Force communication in the interest of policy coherence. Nevertheless, national or Air Force preferences for information control will be frustrated by the need for organizational advocacy within the policy process as well as trends favoring public transparency in cyberspace. The study evaluates these theoretical predictions using several case studies. The high level of violence associated with air operations against Japan in the Second World War sanctioned censorship while channeling most government communication toward domestic audiences or psychological operations supporting tactical military actions in the Pacific Theater. Under the emerging realities of the brutal air war, the air-minded propaganda favored by early airpower advocates yielded to a more transparent but overly technical mode of objective communication about airpower’s effects—a style that has characterized much subsequent Air Force and other US military discourse. US officials supporting actions against the Hukbalahap insurgency in the Philippines downplayed American involvement, which enhanced the legitimacy of the Philippine government’s response. The Philippine armed forces employed airpower as a discrete language of force against hard-core insurgents. Conversely, civil-military operations and broader government reforms spoke a language of friendship to soft-core Huk supporters. During the Vietnam War, the Johnson administration encouraged an unprecedented level of public transparency in military operations. Still, the military hierarchy attempted to impose more stringent controls on information about air operations. Around the time of the 1968 Tet Offensive, transparency began to reveal a breakdown in consensus among policy elites as well as the hollowness of technical military assessments. The overall policy therefore drifted toward information control. President Nixon imposed rigid censorship on information about air operations in Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam, since these operations contradicted his professed strategy of pairing peace negotiations with Vietnamization of the conflict. Censorship resulted in unanswered enemy propaganda and government leaks that severely damaged v the credibility of American institutions. In contrast to the Huk insurgency, the emphasis on bombing marginalized airborne psychological operations in Vietnam, which further undermined any prospects for successful persuasion. Both the Huk insurgency and the Vietnam War provide examples of strategic communication in which a central authority controls institutional communication to achieve specific national objectives. Although such an approach can be effective, as it was in the Philippines, it can also be abused, as it was in Vietnam. Efforts to maintain control over communicative actions for an extended period of time will prove difficult in a large, liberal-democratic bureaucracy confronted by a free press and an adaptive adversary. Effective strategic communication appears to require the use of diverse communicative styles developed within distinct organizational cultures, rather than a homogenization of government communication. During Operation Desert Storm in 1991, dramatic images of airpower commanded attention at a time when worldwide media had little information beyond what coalition and Iraqi forces would provide. Popular perceptions of airpower benefited the Air Force in the short term but skewed public understanding of the precision and effectiveness of air strikes. America’s adversaries began to exploit discrepancies between public expectations and the actual results of air operations as the transparency of conflict zones increased with the expansion of global information networks throughout the 1990s. Ironically, although propaganda against US airpower encouraged Department of Defense