A Critical Analysis Of The Duncan Hunter Defense Act

The Duncan Hunter National Defense ACT: A critical review

Tensa Rwegasira

The Duncan Hunter National Defence Act, Is from Biden (US Vice President) and Pelosi (Speaker) to Obama (USA President). In it they discuss the best means of improving America’s public and cultural diplomacy.

The Duncan Hunter National Defence Act is a report on a comprehensive interagency strategy for public diplomacy and strategic communication. This is done by two means, synchronization and deliberate communication and engagement.

Synchronization

Synchronization here means coordinating words and deeds including the active consideration of how American actions and policies will be interpreted by public audiences as an organic part of decision making which is seen as important task. America’s notion is that what we do is more important than what we say because actions have communicative value and send messages. How this will be obtained? By means of fostering a culture of communication that values this type of synchronization and encourages decision – makers to take the communicative value of actions into account during their decision making.

Deliberate Communication and Engagement

America has put up programmes focused on understanding, engaging, informing, influencing, and communicating with people through public affairs, public diplomacy, information operations and other efforts. This will improve America’s government’s ability to deliberately communicate and engage with intended audiences.

This is intended to bolster communication, data collection and help with security threats and strategic planning. It is also to avoid the past incidents during the cold war, where congress fought with developmental agencies for example USAID. Also to improve the notion of the American foreign policy neo – conservative paradigm in which America tends to focus on the elites rather than the people being ruled by the elites. The need for legitimacy is key for American foreign policy because you can only flex your muscle power so much. With legitimacy comes international support and assistance. The revival of soft power and cultural diplomacy is seen as important for American foreign policy.

This report has some strength; but it also has some weaknesses. First the strengths.
 The major positive aspect of this report is the focus on interagency coordination and collaboration, which are seen as key to American foreign policy. This is intended not only to foster interagency collaboration but also to minimize interagency friction and wasteful rivalry. Emphasis has also been put on communication and engagement to avoid explicit propaganda and one way communication. This was a lesson learned during the cold war era of public and cultural diplomacy. 

However the same report has some weak aspects. It is silent about the vision, which is supposed to give overall guidance to the strategy formulation. What type of public and cultural diplomacy is envisioned by the USA in this post-cold war era? This should have been given first. The lack of a shared vision can undermine the effectiveness of the public and cultural diplomacy programs to be undertaken in the future. A common vision would also be a coordinative mechanism not only among different programs but also among various governments departments and agencies. This is one lesson, which should have been learnt from the cold war era public and cultural diplomacy. Vision in terms of guiding the strategy is not clarified well. Also goals and objectives are not categorically outlined. On top of that, strategy success indicators are not discussed.

The outcome is that, with the goals and objectives not thoroughly discussed, the suggested measures of performance and measures of effectiveness as milestones of performance in the implementation of the suggested strategy may not be well designed or talked about.