Ceding the Ideological Battlefield to Al Qaeda: The Absence of an Effective U.S. Information Warfare Strategy

摘要

The Bush administration ceded the ideological battlefield to Al Qaeda and affiliates in its Global War on Terror when it failed to clearly enunciate that the terrorist threat to the United States was based on the Wahhabi-Salafi-Deobandi ideological axis. The failure to define the threat by non-state, ideologically driven, actors led to an incorrect approach or strategy that relied more on conventional, kinetic, measures with limited success. The new Obama administration has a window of opportunity to rectify this and to challenge the legitimacy of this ideology in a multipronged strategy of which strategic communication would constitute a critical component.