The bosun’s whistle shrieked Shift Colors. We sailed out of the harbor in Gdynia, Poland, as a unified, multinational force on a balmy morning in early June—our flagship, the USS San Antonio (LPD-17), gracefully cutting through the still water as the conning officer called the helmsman to make slight rudder corrections.
The rest of the Baltic Operations (BALTOPS) 2015 force followed us out to the Baltic Sea that morning. First order of business for what would be the 43rd iteration of this long-running exercise: Conduct a PhotoEx. “Standby . . . execute.” Forty-nine ships, sailing in perfect formation, synchronized, steaming a few hundred yards from each other.
A Royal Navy photographer and videographer captured it all from the air. Without words of narration or caption information, the video and photos of an uninterrupted line of ships powerfully spoke exactly what we wanted to say. Those images went in every which way across the vast ocean of today’s digital-media spectrum.
It used to be said that a picture is worth a thousand words. In the age of digital media—and the often viral nature of its environment—that number seems an underestimation compared to the actual effect a single photo can have. Indeed, we have seen how 140 carefully chosen characters can have an outsized impact when tweeted in the right way.
As operational commanders, we often think of warfare in terms of battlespace dominance—and the necessity to achieve superiority in a particular domain: air, land, sea, space, and now cyberspace. While some may lump it into the “cyber domain,” I would argue that the “information domain” is sometimes undervalued and should even be given coequal status with the other five warfare domains. To that end, superiority in this domain requires an effective strategic-communications plan. Yes, I said “strategic communication” (public affairs types who hold dear former Department of Defense Press Secretary George Little’s 2012 memo that pronounced the term null/void are probably gasping at my use of the term). The fact is, no matter what we call it, we must be strategic—and we must recognize that words and deeds truly do matter. BALTOPS 2015, in my opinion, was a showcase for STRATCOMs done right, as we used a myriad of communication techniques to connect with Baltic audiences in order to convey a resounding message: “We [NATO/partners] are united, and we are here for you.”
Do What You Say
My first introduction to the term “strategic communications” occurred when I served on the staff of Admiral Mike Mullen, our 17th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As his executive assistant, it was part of my job to organize and run the admiral’s personal staff. This was a challenging but rewarding assignment. The admiral had a Strategic Communications Advisor in Sally Donnelly, but he also had one of the best public affairs officers I’ve ever met in then–U.S. Navy Captain John Kirby. (After retiring last year as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Media Operations, he currently serves as spokesman for the Department of State.)
On many transatlantic or transpacific trips with the chairman, I listened intently as John and Admiral Mullen would argue over the definition and the virtues of strategic communications. Perhaps as an outcome of those discussions, Admiral Mullen decided to write about it—definitively—in Joint Force Quarterly in 2009.1 It is one of the best pieces ever written on the topic. The article focused on the campaign in Afghanistan and how coalition forces were being out-communicated by the Taliban because the Taliban backed up their words with actions, albeit in often barbaric ways.
In that JFQ essay Admiral Mullen wrote: “Our biggest problem isn’t caves; it’s credibility. Our messages lack credibility because we haven’t invested enough in building trust and relationships, and we haven’t always delivered on promises.”
Trust is something that our naval leaders have always made a centerpoint of strategic thinking. In the first Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower released in 2007, the foreword discusses an era of building partnerships, because “You can’t surge trust.”
In a republic like our own, trust is what connects the military to the population it serves. We are nothing without the support of our domestic populace. But in today’s globalized world, that relationship extends globally. When discussing military plans, it is common for service members to qualify the expected outcome with the reminder that “the world gets a vote.” The world, though, is not a monolithic idea; it is made up of people, and it is our job to make sure these “voters” understand what is at stake.
In the run-up to BALTOPS, as part of my attendance at the final planning conference in Estonia, I got to hear firsthand what was at stake for the people of Estonia and the greater Baltic region. I had the privilege of meeting with Estonia’s Chief of Defense, Lieutenant General Riho Terras, who spoke to me about presence. He told me that the people of Estonia want to feel safe and secure. They “want to see military presence in my country.” He was candid with me and expressed that he could see Lieutenant General Ben Hodges’ U.S. Army Europe M1A1 Abrams tanks, but he said he couldn’t see our ships, particularly when they were operating over the horizon. To him and the Estonian people, seeing was believing.
Lieutenant General Terras’ sentiments hit home for me. It was clear that security was not a mythical concept or buzzword but something that Baltic peoples hold dear. Given the nature of our sea service—we must operate far beyond the shores to protect shipping lanes—the kind of presence that the Army is able to achieve deep within a country is something that we cannot replicate. And I knew the answer to the people’s request for presence was to be found in how we communicate presence—that NATO is indeed here, ashore and at sea, as a collective of allies, standing together to defend the Baltics.
The general’s characterization of Estonians’ concerns stemmed from Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine and a perception—backed by proclamations from the Kremlin to defend minority Russian populations—that Russia would make similar incursions in the Baltics.2
Field of Dreams
NATO has not been idle in this period of increased regional tensions. The allies matched words to actions with the development of the very high-readiness task force agreed upon at the 2014 Wales Summit. But there had been no maritime show of force to assure member nations of the strength and will of the alliance.
“If you build it, they will come.” This quote, from the movie Field of Dreams, is how we built the vision for BALTOPS. The storyline in Field of Dreams is about a farmer who turns his Iowa cornfield into a baseball field with a vision of having the game come to life right there on his farm. We took the same approach to the BALTOPS exercise. My staff at Naval Striking and Support Forces NATO (STRIKFORNATO) headquartered in Lisbon were given the con for the exercise (being led for the first time by NATO), and they set out to build the most robust exercises ever planned for BALTOPS. By offering a platform for challenging training, the “players” came, more than ever before in the exercise’s 43-year history. Fourteen ally and three partner nations stepped up to the plate to participate in the exercise.
BALTOPS 2015 included an international flotilla of 49 ships; 62 aircraft ranging from fighter jets to helicopters to bombers to maritime-patrol aircraft; a combined landing force of more than 700 troops consisting of U.S. Marines, Royal Marines, Finnish Jaeger Marines and Swedish Marines; and a total of 5,600 personnel. Never before had such a large a force sailed into the Baltic Sea under the banner of this annual exercise.
The message of commitment to each other and to regional security was reinforced by our collective deeds and it was further carried by our communications in the information domain.
Battle of the Narrative
Much work over the years has been dedicated to doctrinally defining strategic communications, so much so that the concept has now been redefined as “Commander’s Communications Synchronization (CCS)” (Joint Doctrine Note 2-13). The former definition of the term ended up becoming entrenched in policy; it required commanders to feed communication efforts into national strategic/whole-of-government objectives. The most recent doctrine emphasizes communication at the joint-force commander level to shape the operational environment.
The doctrine, at its core, creates a communication planning process such that messages, delivery methods, and audiences are codified as an operational planning process.
Much of today’s warfare is purely physical; you can seize a piece of territory. But the information domain, also known as the information environment, has three dimensions: physical, informational, and cognitive. The physical (hardware) and informational (data) push information to audiences, who then interpret, digest, and may act (cognitive).3
Social media, perhaps more than any other communications advance, enables this information flow and cognitive response; it’s why social media is so powerful. Citizens have become active participants in the information process, not just consuming it, but retransmitting it in their own unique way and expressing attitudes publicly. News content/opinion pieces may get simply a “like,” or a “retweet,” or a “share” with a personal comment. Smartphones with applicable data-backbones allow people to capture an image and immediately put it on the digital spectrum. Some of the most compelling footage of the amphibious-assault portions of BALTOPS 2015, for instance, came from Swedish civilians observing the maneuvers from a distance—and putting them on social media.
Russia has been especially effective in how it operates in the information domain, using an expansive range of Russian-language media platforms that broadcast pro-government messages at high volume. As a parallel tactic, Russia seeks to create adversarial opinions of the NATO alliance by inferring that our ships and aircraft are encroaching on Russian territory in an attempt to threaten their homeland.
One such instance of this misinformation campaign occurred when the USS Ross (DDG-71) was operating in the Black Sea. Russia’s international news agency RIA Novosti, quoting an anonymous source, reported that the Ross was acting “provocatively and aggressively.” Admiral Mark Ferguson, Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa/U.S. 6th Fleet (CNE-CNA/C6F), countered the misinformation using Twitter and published a video of the interaction on YouTube. That video showed how sailors of the Ross were navigating in the Black Sea when they observed SU-24s flying over in a routine nature. The Ross bridge team kept course and speed throughout the interaction. The world was so intrigued by what had originally been titled “provocative” behavior that people flocked to the YouTube page to see for themselves how it all played out. The video has achieved 3.6 million views to date—now that is viral!
Some may view the publishing of the video on YouTube as a U.S.-vs.-Russia battle in the realm of social media.4 But to me, it’s less of an us-vs.-them thing and more a process of presenting information directly to citizens and letting them decide. The world gets a vote.
That said, the world is beginning to take note of Russia’s misinformation tactics, and analysts say Moscow is losing credibility because of it. Pew Research Center surveys found that between 2013 and 2014 negative views of Russia rose from 54 to 74 percent in Europe, with the country’s reputation failing to improve in any corner of the globe.5
As a republic, we should embrace the information dialogue enabled by social media, and I am happy to say that we have done so in the U.S. 6th Fleet. To be effective, a message must be believed—and to be believed, it must ring true. Trust is built through truth.
BALTOPS and the Information Domain
Sifting through communications doctrine as a result of writing this piece, I have to admit that our communications plan was not as tactical as it could have been. More work could have been done on understanding Baltic audiences, what mediums those audiences used for information, and intricately defining how we would reach them. But what we got right—and what I feel carried the message around the globe and back—was providing audiences a close-up view through social media. My commander’s intent: publish quickly, publish accurately. Our combined landing force hitting the beach, maritime-interdiction operations, tactical maneuvers, B-52s escorted by Swedish Grippens flying overheard—all of these moments captured with a digital camera/smartphone and seemingly instantly sent out on platforms like Facebook and Twitter for folks of all types to share with those closest to them.
A perfect example of this was the aerial video—made possible by a drone—captured by NATO TV during a practice amphibious landing at the Swedish range at Ravlunda. That video of forces landing ashore from the unique vantage point above, was posted and repurposed on a number of different platforms. On Sunday morning, one day after the rehearsal, we posted the video on the U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa/U.S. 6th Fleet Facebook page. It now has an estimated 550,000 views, with more than 8,000 shares—that’s a lot of people who thought the video was so cool that they wanted their friends to see it.6
Conversely, I felt it was it was important to “depressurize” the information domain by making it clear that we were not looking to start a fight between NATO and Russia. I didn’t want the narrative to be one of heightened tensions, which the Western media were clamoring to disseminate. So when the Russian fighter jets flew by our formation during the PhotoEx on Day One of the exercise, much in the same way they had done with the Ross in the Black Sea, I directed our public affairs team to post the video before our presence in the Baltic was misrepresented by Russian media.
When the video went up on YouTube, I directed the caption: “Sailors and Marines enjoy an air show courtesy of the Russian Federation Air Force during #BALTOPS2015.”7 Some would call the caption “cute” or a jab at the Russians, but I saw it another way. In the age of social media, I wanted to provide language that spoke to the moment and exemplified our vantage point in the situation. We did not feel threatened or harassed—this was Phase Zero operations—and we mustered 49 warships to Russia’s 3 and operated 62 aircraft of all types/models/series throughout the two-week schedule, including high-end strike fighters and B-52s.
While the video itself did not go viral as the other one had (nearly 179,000 views), it set the tone for future interviews with the Western press who wanted to know about “Russian interaction.” My response, as quoted by a Jane’s Defence Weekly reporter, was that Russian forces were “just showing interest, showing that they know we are here. And I think that’s a good thing because we’re broadcasting our message of unity and solidarity of the alliance, and safety and security of the Baltic Sea.”8 I viewed the coverage as a victory in transparency. It put everything on the table—why we were there, what we were about to do—and noted Russian interaction in a truthful, objective way so that it did not become the entirety of the narrative, but just a small portion. I think our intended audiences saw it the same way.
The effective use of strategic communication channels was a direct answer to what Lieutenant General Terras expressed to be me about the Estonian people’s desire to see and feel NATO’s security guarantee. Via one of their nation’s esteemed reporters, Ester Vaitmaa of Delfi TV, who spent a night on board the San Antonio with a group of other reporters, we were able to directly broadcast our message of presence to the people of Estonia, and I’m confident that much of what we were pushing on social media throughout the exercise reached them as well.9
In the end, Lieutenant General Terras got his wish, in the tangible form of physical presence: I sent the San Antonio alongside in the port of Tallinn, Estonia, just after BALTOPS. U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter visited the ship in conjunction with his visit to Tallinn, where he announced the deployment of tanks and heavy artillery to Estonia and other Baltic and Eastern European countries as PrePo (pre-positioned) equipment to be used in the event of a crisis. His message: We are committed to defend Estonia, as well as other NATO allies.
While BALTOPS 2015 is now in our rearview mirror, the importance of strategically communicating the unity of the alliance and its resolve to uphold collective defense is ever-important. The counter-narrative from Russia continues to be pervasive, particularly as the Kremlin’s newest maritime doctrine, released in August 2015, calls for increased naval presence in the Mediterranean, Atlantic, and Arctic as a response to NATO “expansion” close to Russia’s borders.10 Additionally, Russia continues to assert itself as a global power with bold actions in all warfare domains, as it mobilizes its forces outside its sphere of influence to tinker with stability near and far from its shores (at the time of this writing, the Russians are currently operating in Syria in support of the Bashar al-Assad government). Thus, our commitment to the Baltics and other NATO nations must remain firm—and we must continue to do what we say we will do. Deeds matter more than words, and you can’t surge trust.
1. ADM Mike Mullen, USN, “Strategic Communication: Getting Back to Basics,” Joint Force Quarterly, no. 55 (4th Quarter 2009), 2–4.
2. Michael Birnbaum, “In Latvia, Fresh Fears of Aggression as Kremlin Warns About Russian Minorities” The Washington Post, 27 September 2014.
3. Joint Publication 3-13, Information Operations, www.dtic.mil/doctrine/new_pubs/jp3_13.pdf.
4. Philip Ewing, “Pentagon’s YouTube War with Russia,” Politico, 15 June 2015, www.politico.com/story/2015/06/us-military-russian-brinkmanship-youtube-119031.html.
5. “Views on Russia,” Pew Research Center, www.pewglobal.org/2014/07/09/russias-global-image-negative-amid-crisis-in-ukraine.
6. U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa/U.S. 6th Fleet Facebook post, www.facebook.com/USNavalForcesEuropeAfrica/videos/vb.13278573391
5/10153951043508916/?type=2&theater.
7. “USS San Antonio in Baltic Sea,” YouTube clip, www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCRAnXyvPQI.
8. Grace Jean, “Russian Ships Shadow NATO Forces Participating in Baltic Sea Exercise,” Jane’s Defence Weekly, 10 June 2015, www.janes.com/article/52114/russian-ships-shadow-nato-forces-participating-in-baltic-sea-exercise.
9. Ester Vaitmaa, BALTOPS video package, www.delfi.ee/news/paevauudised/eesti/video-ringkaik-tana-tallinna-joudnud-usa-sojalaeval-san-antoniol?id=71759841.
10. Nikolai Novichkov, “Russia’s New Maritime Doctrine,” Jane’s Defence Weekly, 13 August 2015, www.janes.com/article/53643/russia-s-new-maritime-doctrine.