Obama’s Whac-A-Mole Strategy by Fareed Zakaria, Washington Post

It has become conventional wisdom to note that President Obama has failed in his efforts to extricate the United States from military conflicts in the Middle East. Having promised to end these wars, he has in the past year expanded U.S. interventions in Iraq, Syria and other countries. The troop drawdown in Afghanistan has slowed to a trickle. “Obama’s legacy,” says Gene Healy of the Cato Institute, is clear: “endless war.” The New York Times’ Mark Landler noted in May that Obama had just “passed a somber, little-noticed milestone: He has now been at war longer than Mr. Bush, or any other American president.”

But these characterizations treat all military activity as alike, in a way that blurs rather than sharpens the picture. When Obama entered the White House, about 180,000 U.S. troops were engaged in active military combat in two theaters, Iraq and Afghanistan. The goal of both wars was to establish political order in these countries — to create functioning liberal democracies.

U.S. military policy under Obama has been different, narrower in its scope and more modest in its goals. The United States is actively engaged in efforts to defeat terrorist groups, deny them territory and work with local allies to keep militants on the run. But these policies mostly involve small numbers of Special Operations forces and trainers, air power and drones.

It would be fair to conclude that Obama has come to his policy of intervention-lite through trial and error. In his first term, he remarked that “the tide of war is receding,” and he undoubtedly hoped to have fewer active military missions in the last year of his presidency. But political chaos in the Middle East and the rise of the Islamic State have forced him to settle on a strategy for the region: attacking terrorist groups without expanding the mission into nation-building…

Read on.

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RAND Report: The Russian "Firehose of Falsehood" Propaganda Model by Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews, RAND Corporation

Since its 2008 incursion into Georgia (if not before), there has been a remarkable evolution in Russia's approach to propaganda. The country has effectively employed new dissemination channels and messages in support of its 2014 annexation of the Crimean peninsula, its ongoing involvement in the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria, and its antagonism of NATO allies. The Russian propaganda model is high-volume and multichannel, and it disseminates messages without regard for the truth. It is also rapid, continuous, and repetitive, and it lacks commitment to consistency. Although these techniques would seem to run counter to the received wisdom for successful information campaigns, research in psychology supports many of the most successful aspects of the model. Furthermore, the very factors that make the firehose of falsehood effective also make it difficult to counter. Traditional counterpropaganda approaches will likely be inadequate in this context. More effective solutions can be found in the same psychology literature that explains the surprising success of the Russian propaganda model and its messages.

Recommendations

• Forewarn audiences of misinformation, or merely reach them first with the truth, rather than retracting or refuting false "facts."
• Prioritize efforts to counter the effects of Russian propaganda, and focus on guiding the propaganda's target audience in more productive directions.
• Compete with Russian propaganda. Both the United States and NATO have the potential to prevent Russia from dominating the information environment.
• Increase the flow of information that diminishes the effectiveness of propaganda, and, in the context of active hostilities, attack the means of dissemination.

Download the entire report.