YouTube War: Fighting in a World of Cameras in Every Cell Phone and Photoshop on Every Computer. Cori E. Dauber

..modern wars are won on television screens and Internet websites. These are the battlefields that really matter, the arenas that frame the war and the scoreboards that determine the losers and the winners.

Gabriel Weimann

Foreward

About the Author

Summary

Introduction

The New Information Environment

Terrorist Home Videos: The Power of the Image

Iraqi Innovation: Individual Video Segments

The Uncovered Body: What Makes Insurgent Videos "Propaganda"

Other Videos, Other Image - Difference Choices

Conclusions and Recommendations

Endnotes

Foreward

Table of Contents

Insurgents making use of terrorist techniques are fighting to shape the attitudes and perceptions of the public to undermine the public will to fight. In a modern age, this is done by shaping media coverage. It is not going too far to say that terrorist attacks are, in fact, media events, designed to draw the attention of the press since, without a larger audience, a terrorist attack will have accomplished very little.

This monograph, by Dr. Cori E. Dauber, argues that terrorist attacks today are often media events in a second sense: information and communication technologies have developed to such a point that these groups can film, edit, and upload their own attacks within minutes of staging them, whether the Western media are present or not. In this radically new information environment, the enemy is no longer dependent upon the traditional media. This is, she argues, the “YouTube War.”

The Strategic Studies Institute is pleased to offer this monograph, which methodically lays out the nature of this new environment in terms of its implications for a war against media-savvy insurgents, and then considers possible courses of action for the Army and the U.S. military as they seek to respond to an enemy that has proven enormously adaptive to this new environment and the new type of warfare it enables.

Douglas C. Lovelace, Jr.

DirectorStrategic Studies Institute

About the Author

Table of Contents

CORI E. DAUBER is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies and of Peace, War, and Defense at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and is the 2008–09 Visiting Research Professor at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College. Her current work focuses on terrorist and insurgent efforts to manipulate Western press coverage. Dr. Dauber’s work has been published in Military Review and briefed to the John F. Kennedy School for Special Warfare, the Canadian Forces College, and to NATO Public Affairs Officers. Her work has appeared in a collection of essays from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point (Influence Warfare: How Terrorists and Governments Fight to Shape Perceptions in a War of Ideas, James Forest, ed.). The larger research project from which this work is drawn will appear in book form as True Lies: Terrorist and Insurgent Efforts to Manipulate the Western Press. She has also published in journals such as Armed Forces and Society, Security Studies, Comparative Security Policy and Rhetoric and Public Affairs. Dr. Dauber holds a B.S. from Northwestern University, an M.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a PhD. from Northwestern, all in Communication Studies.

Summary

Table of Contents

There is a vast literature on the potential for new technologies to create a Revolution in Military Affairs or “networked warfare,” but that is a discussion of the impact of military technology on the way the force itself can be used. Today there is a question regarding the impact of new communication and information technologies in the hands of civilians—some of whom are combatants—on the environment in which the force will be used. This monograph argues that the impact of these technologies has been, and will be, great enough that the way they are shaping the battlefield needs to be understood. Waging war against terrorists (or insurgents using a terrorist playbook) is a qualitatively different enterprise from earlier wars. By definition, terrorists are too weak to fight successful conventional battles. They fight to shape the perceptions and attitudes of the public—a battle over the public's will to continue fighting, whether that is the indigenous public insurgents seek to intimidate or the domestic American

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