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In today’s world, NATO military forces and their leaders on all levels navigate through a complex and dynamic information space, using the mindset and methods of Strategic Communications in order to ensure the successful pursuit of their objectives. How does this work?

Everything communicates. This assumption is the foundation of the rationale for Strategic Communications. The notion of warfighting as a battle of wills is seen as equally important. This is what NATO nowadays considers a confrontation in the cognitive dimension. Even before and beyond an open armed conflict, strategic adversaries are prone to compete with each other to win the minds of society and their audiences. NATO, therefore, reassures its own audiences through a show of unity and strength in word and deed, for instance by establishing and maintaining the enhanced Forward Presence (eFP) battlegroups. That sends a powerful message and is precisely what deters adversaries from directly challenging NATO militarily. Reassurance and deterrence not only are two sides of the same coin, but are also cognitive in nature. They are successful only if audiences perceive the actions and words of NATO as credible and befitting an alliance of nations determined to defend values of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.

Riga StratCom Dialogue 2022. Photo by NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence

Credibility is the Key

Throughout its existence, NATO has succeeded in maintaining its cohesion and appeal as an alliance committed to the deterrence of adversaries through credible collective defence, whatever the challenge was. Today, systemic rivals in a global continuum of constant competition challenge the Alliance and particularly the values NATO represents. These rivals primarily employ ways and means to undermine our credibility. Strategic Communications (STRATCOM) is the adequate mindset and method for NATO forces to ensure vertical integration and horizontal cohesion of all levels of command on the one hand and to successfully implement and pursue strategic intent in word and deed on the other. NATO is an alliance of nations dedicated to defending values of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law. NATO is also the most powerful and successful military alliance in history precisely because of a credible story of deterrence and defense by nations standing together. Through this, NATO persists in peace, crisis and war against any adversary.

Strategy is the Narrative

What makes us human? It is the way we communicate, both verbally and non-verbally. The human way of communication is storytelling. We function as individuals and organize ourselves in groups mainly based on these stories, which provide meaning and determine the rules of co-existence. Our institutions and attributed symbols are embedded in stories allowing us to carry out values, norms and visions of a desirable future. A story informing perception and behaviour is what is called a narrative.

Like any other institution, armed forces rely on a narrative establishing them as a potent symbol and instrument of power for any nation or alliance in order to express and pursue interests. But they also need to have narratives specifically informing their posture and activities. Nowadays, for liberal democracies, the strategic focus is to deter, and if that fails, to defend freedom and sovereignty by maintaining assertive militaries, while competing autocratic regimes use their armies to coerce or sometimes to conquer nations they identify as adversaries. Armed forces are and always have been used by nations to display persuasive capabilities towards a potential enemy and emphasize the futility of an attack. Or, for that matter, to impress upon an adversary the futility of defense or to take a stand in combat in the first place. It is what the ancient theorist of war Sun Tzu called “to subdue the enemy without fighting”, meaning to dissuade them from pursuing their interests which are in conflict with one’s own, be it on the highest strategic level or on the battlefield. Thinking in terms of audiences, what is called today “Strategic Communications”, i.e. developing narratives of legitimacy and purpose and defining effects one wants to have on people’s behavior, lies at the heart of every leader’s approach in the history of organized human warfare.

“One cannot not communicate” is the Paul Watzlawick quote without which a text on Strategic Communications is rarely published. However, if the argument here is that this has been done since the beginning of history, why now have a relatively recent method and mindset which runs under the term Strategic Communications in NATO? Simply the changes in structure, scope, complexity and dynamic in what today is called the information space has outgrown the ability of comprehension even of the most gifted individual human beings.

While up until the middle of the last century leaders were probably able to identify and analyze audiences, plan and execute activities for effect and ultimately make the necessary impact analysis all by themselves, nowadays they cannot do so without support.

What equipment you have and how you use it sends a message. The efp battlegroup practiced a variety of defensive scenarios for a full-scale, high-intensity operation, making the most of their heavy equipment, incl. the German Army's Leopard-2 main battle tanks. Photo by eFP LTU PAO

Constant Competition

Due to certain human-made technological and political changes in the way we communicate, individuals can experience the following: everybody can reach everyone everywhere in real-time with tailored information, given that access to communication technologies is possible. A person with a smartphone might have a broader reach and thus generate more attention and influence than any media mogul or person of political and/or economic power before the last turn of the century. At the same time, as more precise data on individuals and groups is available, stored and analyzed, new technological and social vulnerabilities (or opportunities, depending on perspective) unfold.

Such opportunities to influence people and to exploit vulnerabilities have been widely taken advantage of by malicious actors targeting open societies to undermine internal trust relationships, confuse decision-makers and erode the legitimacy of public democratic institutions and their actions. The desired outcome – to keep these societies and their institutions from being able to act or react adequately to external actions against their interests. These measures can be undertaken below the threshold of open interstate or terrorist aggression, but might have equally devastating effects on a state’s ability to make sound decisions and even protect its citizens.

This “hybrid” form of strategic struggle encompassing cultural and economic competition, mutual influence activities and confrontations, as the Law of Armed Conflict defines them, gained notoriety in 2014 when Russia occupied parts of Ukraine by force. Some NATO countries were confused whether these were local separatists’ actions or external aggressors and whether they had any support among their population to act against Russian activities. Russia tried to frame these actions as “the Motherland supporting suppressed Russians in the near abroad” by staging a massive disinformation campaign in the information space, targeting selected NATO and European Union countries. The resulting information overflow, confusion and lack of imagination rendered the West indecisive: the situation on the ground became a fait accompli before anybody realized what had actually happened. Since then, NATO has learned. One of the tools applied to make sure that the most powerful military alliance of democracies in history is not caught off guard and unable to act decisively again, is Strategic Communications.

Reassure to Deter

Detecting malign activities in the information space, anticipating effects, building resilience in our own camp, planning own campaigns to counter adversary narratives and messaging, pre- and debunking mis- and disinformation are all means through which NATO nations and their partners deflect the effects adversaries want to achieve. Also, by taking care of its own credibility and cohesion, since 2014 NATO has been stronger together through substantive reassurance for nations at the eastern flank in word and deed. This is exemplified by the eFP battlegroups being the physical manifestation of a Strategic Communications campaign: presence, posture and profile of high-capability, high-readiness forces of many different Allies ensure successful reassurance, which translates into more credible and assertive deterrence. Reassurance and deterrence are of course cognitive qualities by nature. Only if an adversary believes that we are credible in having not only the means, but also the will to defend ourselves as an Alliance, deterrence will be successful.

Thus, every commander of an eFP battlegroup is aware that they are part of a NATO Strategic Communications effort by contributing to deterrence of an adversary audience. This is achieved primarily by reassuring the population of the respective host nation while at the same time ensuring identification of and support from the domestic audiences of the troop-contributing nations with regard to this crucial Alliance effort. STRATCOM thus provides the framework by which NATO-assigned and national forces know how to act to communicate consistently on all levels, so that the desired effects on different audiences are achieved. Armed forces are part of Strategic Communications. And Strategic Communications depend on the credibility of the armed forces’ will and ability to fight.