Oh here's a real shock...."U.S. government's efforts to wage ideological warfare against Islamist extremism is failing"

We cannot argue LOGIC, economic success, increased trade, or any other reward in this world against this theology. You CANNOT argue faith.

What we can argue ‘ideologically’, on the tactical front, is that if you accept, protect, and hide the Taliban, Haqqani, Al Qaeda or any of these maroons who will attempt to kill US troops or plan to get at the american people somehow, you are probably going to end up KILLING THE ENTIRETY OF YOUR FAMILY AND PROBABLY A LOT OF YOUR VILLAGE AND IT WILL HAPPEN WITH NO WARNING FROM ABOVE.

Bill Gertz, Geostrategy Direct:

Pentagon official: U.S. woefully inadequate in critical information war

New indications surfaced last week that the U.S. government’s efforts to wage ideological warfare against Islamist extremism is failing.

A senior Pentagon official, Jake Schaffner, said during a security conference, that the Pentagon is not doing enough to train its leaders to wage ideological war.

Schaffner said the Pentagon has been unable to effectively integrate information operations into its military operations. “We’ve been fighting that fight for quite awhile now,” he said of the efforts to use more ideological warfare than kinetic warfare.

“My personal opinion is that so far my department has gotten the lanes thoroughly and completely f’d up when preparing to actually engage military operations and information operations,” Schaffner said.

Schaffner said a professional cadre of information warfare officers is needed who understand information warfare and how it is used. He said the function should not simply be added on to combat arms but must more closely be integrated with how the military fights.

“When the combatant commander goes out there now, I think the actual dominant environment in which they are operating is an information environment,” Schaffner said.

Schaffner said better training of military leaders is needed to stress the use of information as a key strategic weapons.

“This is a game where our commanders are trying to defeat the thought processes of foreign commanders,” Schaffner said. “We’re not trying to defeat their tank battalions or air squadrons. This is a leader-on-leader fight. And we’re not training our leaders to fight in this realm right now. We re training them how to defeat other peoples’ tools, not how to defeat their minds.”

Critics of the Pentagon’s military strategy have said the U.S. military, especially in the war on terrorism, has failed to develop a counter ideology to Islamist extremism.

Schaffner, an official in the office of the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, also said the Pentagon is more successful in using deception operations against closed societies like China and Iran and is careful to avoid “blowback” disinformation that reaches U.S. society.

“Yes, we do deception,” he said, noting that deception operations seek to influence the actions of foreign states or leaders and are more successful in closed societies like China, Iran, Syria and Egypt where information is tightly controlled by the state in an effort to control populations.

No specifics of current deception operations were revealed, but public discussion of what Mr. Schaffner termed “the art of deception” is very unusual.

One past deception was the 1967 operation in Vietnam using F-4 jets disguised as F-105s to lure Vietnamese MiG-21s into combat.

Police states are more difficult places to set up deception programs but generally provide an easier environment for deception to succeed. “They’ve caused the population to expect information to be presented in a certain way, certain formats, that certain words be used, certain types of presentations and so it s very easy to follow along with that,” Schaffner said.

If an operation can be set up, “then the police state that is trying to protect itself is actually setting up many of its people to be deceived by you,” Mr. Schaffner said.

In cyberspace, Schaffner said, networks can be defended better using deception. He recalled meeting a group of 30 computer hackers who revealed about 20 types of online responses from targeted Web sites that would prompt them to “simply just turn around and go away” because the system would not respond.

He implied that by deceptively using such signs on networks, defenders can dissuade hackers from attacks.

Another deception specialist, Neil Rowe, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, told the conference sponsored by the Association of the Old Crows, an electronic warfare group, that false-error messages can be programmed on computers to pop up in response to outside intruders as a way deception can enhance network defenses. Another way is to “wrap” software applications in security software so that targeted computers slow down when an outsider gets inside or improperly tries to access a network through it.