Americans seem to be poorly equipped to engage in campaigns in the cognitive domain. Our culture is a material one; and this causes us to think in physical terms. Orders of Battle are relatively easy to tally. The inherent difficulty of tracking and asses-sing perceptions offends our fetish for the quantitative. In spite of W. Edwards Deming’s exhortation that “The most important numbers are unknown and unknowable”, many feel that “If it can’t be measured, it’s not worth knowing.” It is common for people and institutions to simply ignore that which is not intuitively obvious or readily quantifiable.
Being consciously pluralistic and multicultural, our society reflexively avoids matters of culture. Even thinking about or discussing culture and values is often viewed as vaguely impolite, or possibly even subversive (the question of subversive of what remains an
interesting paradox). We make a point of not noticing or acknowledging culture or values; and we are dutifully oblivious to them as they change around us, vigorously eschewing any efforts to consciously manipulate them. Our pluralism often results in abrupt shifts in foreign and military policies, which makes it difficult to maintain the consistency that is the necessary basis of successful strategy, most especially in the cognitive domain.
Americans, God love us, are a provincial people. As such, we tend to assume that that which we know is necessarily universal. Accordingly, we assume that other people are largely as we are, and largely share our values. Because of this, we generally seek to influence foreign peoples as we ourselves would be influenced. We see others through a “mirror image”; and we attempt to interact with them according to the rules that govern our paradigm. We routinely fail at this, or we ultimately succeed only at enormous and unnecessary expense. Trusting in faith and not in history, we do this again and again. Like any rational actor that finds themselves working on an unproductive path, but un-aware of the existence (or even possibility) of any alternative path, when we determine that our efforts are fruitless, we redouble them. Thus, we find ourselves disposing of the world’s largest economy and defense budget, striding the globe like a colossus, the world’s only
“hyperpower”, able to humble any armed force anywhere in the world, but unable to pacify occupied territories or persuade small groups of lightly armed people that we are not their enemies and that random killing
of innocent civilians is not a
legitimate expression of religious devotion.
Recently, advances in information technologies have enabled us to enhance our ability to transmit data; but here too, we do so in the almost total absence of consciousness of the cultural content or impact of that data, except at the lowest and most superficial levels (such as commercial product advertising). These facts have led us to focus on and dominate the physical and information domains; but to remain oblivious to actions in, and often even the existence of, the cognitive domain.
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