Strategic Communication Design

Since President Bush's announcement establishing AFRICOM, the Office of Secretary of Defense, the State Department, and European Command (EUCOM) began the initial planning of Africa Command (AFRICOM). As of October 1, 2007, the United States Government (USG) officially stood up AFRICOM as a sub-unified command of EUCOM and headquartered it in Stuttgart, Germany. By October 2008, AFRICOM is expected to be fully operational and will not locate its headquarters on the continent for the time being. AFRICOM symbolizes a change in the DoD as far as how to structure its organizations. AFRICOM has the responsibilities of U.S. traditional COCOMs, but has additional staff and resources to provide more civil-military capabilities in Africa. This is a significant change in the way the USG conducts business that should be viewed as a transformation within the DoD and its efforts to improve interagency relations. Because AFRICOM is a new combatant command and has been publicized as a command-plus, there has been a lot of suspicion concerning the motives behind the command from both on the continent of Africa itself, and throughout the world. In order promote AFRICOM, DoD began its strategic communication plan back in 2006, with little success. AFRICOM's commander, General William "Kipp" Ward and his staff have campaigned in Africa and the U.S. to explain AFRICOM's mission and garner support for the command. This monograph introduces an approach called strategic communication design that focuses on a detailed analysis and comprehensive understanding of the information environment. The problem facing the USG is that strategic communication is poorly defined and has not been effective in communicating a synchronized message amongst DoD, the State Department and other government agencies. In order to be effective in communicating, the USG (specifically DoD and the State Department), needs to share a common understanding of what strategic communication is. In this monograph, strategi