“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.