Document created: 29 March 04
Air University Review, March-April 1971
Lieutenant Colonel
Russell A. Turner II
Dr. Hamid Mowlana
The gunfighter rode into the small Texas town and reined up at its main saloon. He needed money and figured on winning a few dollars in a card game with some local cowboys. He rarely lost, since he was naturally lucky and skillful at bluffing. Besides that, he cheated and had a fast draw. Only twelve men had ever dared to call his game, and they could be counted by the notches on his gun.
He suddenly changed his mind, however, when the saloon’s bartender told him that the town’s sheriff had the fastest draw in the West and could shoot the head off a flying arrow. The gunfighter recalled hearing about this man, and although he doubted the truth of all the stories, he did not care to chance a showdown. He finished his drink and quietly left town. . .
Can this psychological effect be used on a larger scale to deter war? A basic premise of deterrence is to have the will and the capability to use force to punish an aggressor. But will and capability together will not deter aggression unless they are made known to the would-be aggressor and understood by him. Henry Kissinger has said that “a threat meant as a bluff but taken seriously is more useful for purposes of deterrence than a ‘genuine’ threat interpreted as a bluff.”1 Since this type of gamesmanship in the nuclear age can be catastrophic, communication and cross-cultural analysis should be major factors in the military decision-making process.
John Dewey wrote that communication is the most wonderful affair of man.2 It has also been remarked that almost every human tragedy represents a failure in communication. Communication is an art—the art of addressing humanity, the art of cooperation, the art of interpersonal and cross-cultural interactions.3 It is also the art of exercising power.
The word communication is derived from the Latin communis, meaning “common.” According to public relations authorities Scott Cutlip and Allen Center, the purpose of communication is to establish a commonness. In this article, we are concerned only with the human aspects of communication (as distinguished from technological and mechanical means) between individuals and nations to produce dialogue or to achieve desired objectives through persuasion.
Human communication is not so much a matter of heredity as of tradition and culture. The fact that communication is largely learned is evidenced in the history of deaf mutes, whether their deafness was inborn or acquired early. Before modern educational methods were perfected, the deaf remained retarded; since they could not hear speech, they could not develop this ability as a means of assimilating their cultural heritage. A most dramatic example is Helen Keller, whose early life was devoid of intelligent communication with her fellow humans. Only after she learned to communicate through a symbolic touch system was she able to absorb her culture and become a part of the world around her.
Human learning consists principally of a building up of symbol relations and integrating them with the stimuli received through the senses. In this way a huge depository of symbols is accumulated for everyday use in problem-solving situations and in deciding alternative courses of action.4 Out of these symbols man creates his own environment or “culture.”
All culture is communication. But because of the infinite combinations of local circumstances and environmental conditions, many diverse and exotic world cultures have developed, making cross-cultural communication extremely difficult. Anthropologists explain this by attributing to every culture what is called the “cultural mode of communication.” In this definition, every member of a culture is a complex communication system. The form that that communication system takes depends almost entirely upon the cultural conditioning which the individual undergoes within his culture.5
Human communication includes all those processes by which people influence one another, i.e., by the spoken word, by kinesics or nonverbal type communication, such as gestures and actions, and by signs and symbols. A sign is a concrete and categoric denoter or signal that relates mostly to the world of things. In contrast, a symbol is abstract, connotative, and contemplative and relates to the world of ideas. A sign is external; a symbol is internal. Although most animals use the sounds they utter as signs, only man can assign abstract meanings to symbols, and these abstract meanings differ among cultures.6 These cultural differences create the major problems in cross-cultural communication and explain why many interactions between national governments are misinterpreted and consequently misunderstood.
Communication is a dialogue between two parties using the same “vocabulary.” This means that there must be a common experience upon which to establish understanding. As the model shows, there are four basic elements in communication: the source or sender, the message or symbols, the channel or method of transmission, and the destination or receiver.
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A fifth element that has been added to the model is the key to communication, and that is how the receiver interprets the communicator’s message or intent. It is important that the communicator present his message to the receiver in symbols the receiver will understand, using appropriate channels to transmit the message.7 The message must be within the receiver’s capacity to comprehend it and must motivate his self-interest. When there has been no common experience upon which to establish commonness, communication becomes impossible. A communicator can encode his message and a receiver decode it only in terms of their respective experience and knowledge.8
Studies in word-perception by Postman, Bruner, and McGinnies (1948) illustrate the importance of encoding messages in a language familiar to the receiver. In dealing with common words, the receiver perceives with a minimum of surprise. When the words become rare, he gives up trying to predict what they are, and his values take over to make “his” words—words relating to his values—more readily perceptible.9
An experiment in 1947 by Bruner and Goodman reflects the relation between value and need on one hand and perception on the other. Two groups of ten- and eleven-year-old rich and poor children were asked to adjust the size of a controllable opening to the size of various coins. Predictably, the psychological value of the coins was greater for the poorer boys, indicating that perceived size is related to perceived value.10 This experiment demonstrates the part an individual’s relative values play in his perception of reality.11
In the communication process, the receiver rarely responds to information in a direct and naïve way. Rather, response is conditioned by past experience, personal and cultural value systems, attitudes, position in social structure, personal and social needs, beliefs, norms, premises, and all the other factors that guide perception.
Human history is marked by many serious instances of the failure of communication because of cultural differences. Sometimes even one word can weigh heavily in the balance. This appears to have happened when the Japanese were given an ultimatum to surrender prior to the use of the atomic bomb in 1945. The erroneous translation of the Japanese word mokusatsu so that it was understood to mean “to ignore” instead of “to withhold comment” led to a failure in communication at a time when negotiations were under way to end the war. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the entry of the Soviet Union into the war against Japan, and a train of serious consequences followed that might have been avoided had the message been understood as intended.12
The same factors that influence the receiver’s perception of a message also influence his perception of the communicator. This holds true for nations as well as for individuals and depends upon national character. In all international affairs the national cultures, which mold character on both sides, must be considered. Quite often the measures that may be best for one nation—and ultimately for the world—may be quite unfeasible because of deeply ingrained attitudes of other nations or men involved.13 This cultural relativism causes conflict and a breakdown in communication.
Excellent examples of cultural relativism can be found in the clashes between the various national delegations to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). These clashes can be traced to the different cultural orientations of the delegates. One of the most deeply rooted and largely unconscious features of any culture is the “time perspective.” Within the United Nations at least three different time perspectives operate. For instance, the Anglo-Saxon believes that the duration of meetings should be fixed in advance and meals taken on schedule; the Eastern European delegate is less rigid about fixed timetables and believes that people should eat when the inclination moves them; and the Far Eastern delegate comes from an area where life is considered to be a “continuous stream,” where people can quietly come and go in meetings as they see fit, going out to eat when necessary.14
A national character, like a personality, has both content and pattern. But just as the mere listing of an individual’s traits does not describe his personality, so the mere listing of the separate institutionalized ways of a society does not describe its national character. Two cultures, like two personalities, may contain highly similar elements and still be extremely unlike in pattern. Other data are needed.
Successful analysis of another culture depends upon correct interpretations of the motives, needs, and anticipated actions of the recipients in that culture by the communicator. Presuppositions derived from assuming that conditions taken for granted at home also exist in the foreign situation must be avoided.
The value and need for reliable cross-cultural character analysis was demonstrated during World War II by a group of anthropologists in support of the American war effort. This group, which included, among others, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Geoffrey Gorer, Elliot Chapple, D. W. Lockhard, Clyde Kluckhohn, and Rhoda Metraux, explored those aspects of national behavior that could be assumed to be relevant because they were related to national institutions.15 The work has become controversial, however, because the methods used in the research could neither be codified nor taught, and the need to consider peoples as a whole did not allow for the complex historical differences between local groups, geographical areas, and other variables. Nevertheless, the studies proved remarkably valid in explaining and predicting the behavior of the German and Japanese people. The outstanding example was the recommendation by the anthropologists that the Americans refrain from attacking the Japanese Emperor, as he was needed at the end of the war to insure the complete surrender of a still militant Japan.16
Of all the actions by the Japanese during the war, the most difficult for Americans to comprehend were the kamikaze raids on American warships. The Japanese kamikaze pilot typifies the axiom that each culture shapes and focuses the feelings of its people relative to that society. Margaret Mead was one of the anthropologists who diagnosed this Japanese cultural phenomenon before the kamikaze raids became known. According to her, the raids were possible because of a very different Japanese attitude toward war and the chances of return.
Whereas Americans regarded death in war as bad luck, the Japanese treated a soldier leaving for war as already dead; his return was a piece of tremendous and unexpected good luck. This difference in attitude accounted for many miscalculations on the part of the Americans, until a better understanding of the Japanese could be built into our expectations.17
Another anthropologist who helped give us a better understanding of the Japanese philosophy was Ruth Benedict. Her outstanding success in this endeavor has been attributed to several important factors:
(1) She already possessed broad competence and experience in her profession. (2) She approached her problem with an open mind, being quite prepared to accept beliefs widely different from her own. (3) She made a concerted effort to acquire an empathy with the Japanese people and, as far as possible, to “think like a Japanese.” (4) She attacked every line of approach to the problem including all aspects of the Japanese culture and the interviewing of Japanese living in America and Western travelers who had lived in Japan.18
By divorcing herself from the ethnocentrism of her own cultural mode of communication, she was better able to analyze Japanese customs and cultural value systems in their relative and proper context.
The study of national character by anthropologists has declined since World War II.19 This may be due to the many new complications in the use of cultural anthropology policy-making since the early 1940s. The increased mobility of today’s peoples has cause significant fissures in old cultures, and many new nations are so young that they cannot be said to have either a national culture a national character. Fortunately, however the decreased interest in national character anthropologists has been offset by an increased interest in the subject among other social scientists.
A recent sociological report by Howard L. Boorman and Scott A. Boorman on the conceptual foundations of the Chinese character is an example. The report pays particular attention to the Chinese concept of “face” a national characteristic of Chinese strategic psychology. According to the Boormans, “Chinese face is gained or lost by acts which may have no relation whatsoever to the counterpart determents of psychological utility generally considered significant in the West. . . ”20 They state:
Chinese strategy is pre-eminently manipulative. Western strategy is chiefly mechanistic. Although oversimplified, this dichotomy symbolizes a fundamental defining characteristic of Chinese national character: the contrast between the direct and the indirect approach to conflict resolution. Chinese military strategy, for example, seeks to manipulate an entire set of variables left almost untouched by its Western counterpart: the enemy commander’s mind, his self-image, his face; the view of the situation and of its objective potentialities; the psychology of the opposing army; and so on. By contrast, Western strategic thought is far more oriented to the objective situation: given such and such troops, such and such road conditions, and such and such deployments, we can concentrate our forces at point P to annihilate enemy unit Q and break through the position.21
This variance between Eastern and Western philosophies can be illustrated by the time-spatial concept. Regarding time, the Boormans state that the Chinese have demonstrated in countless military engagements an ability to maintain an objective over an unusually long period of time without any seeming frustration or impatience resulting from long delays or setbacks. The Chinese and Western concepts of space are also polarized. While Western strategy of conflict means directing all efforts toward a decisive obtainable goal with definite fruit lines between opposing forces, Chinese strategy relies heavily upon encirclement and moving against an opponent in all directions rather than on a continuous front.22
Although all human beings have the same physiological equipment for the common human emotions (i.e., they can love, hate, weep, caress, and feel anger), the emotional reactions of different peoples are largely determined by their cultural value systems. What is considered normal in one society may be considered abnormal in another. While this makes any overall theory of human nature unreliable, generalizations about national character do have a heuristic role in interpreting and predicting the behavior of a people. An understanding of an enemy nation’s behavior, even if it is probabilistic in nature but based on sound analysis, can, in the long run, be more important to the strategic planner than technological superiority. As an illustration, United States policy in Southeast Asia might have been considerably different if our government had constructed a conceptual portrait of the Vietnamese national character in the manner that Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict did with the Japanese. This means a systematic application of cross-cultural analysis leading to the development of a practical and usable body of knowledge for the strategic planner and deterrent theorist. This, and not statistics, must be the basis of the decision-making process, with emphasis on recognizing a people’s cultural motives and symbolic derivatives. This is critical in a milieu such as Southeast Asia if there is to be a steady amelioration of the problem rather than a venture in utopianization.
War and politics should never be considered as separate entities. While pent-up aggressive drives and territorial imperatives influence man’s behavior, it is his need to identify with some ideology, cause, or group that plays the major role in conflict.23 This means that military power cannot be used as a panacea for solving the world’s sociological ills. What makes the use of military power so difficult to apply today is the Januslike quality of modern warfare. Peter Paret of Stanford University describes war as demanding both the most extreme forms of violence of which man is capable and the coldest, most objective reasoning. Under these conditions, it is difficult to apply the Thomistic doctrine of a just war, particularly in wars involving guerrilla and counterinsurgency operations. “War, to be effective,” says Paret, “must be measured violence. The uncertainty about the right proportions of violence and control in limited wars such as Vietnam is one of the most perplexing problems.” 24
If the amount of force required in limited war is perplexing, the amount and type of force necessary to deter a nuclear war is a problem of the first magnitude. Luckily, the fear of escalation, whether it be in a limited war or in a nuclear arms race, is an inhibiting factor in the exercise of power. But it is not a great enough inhibitor to lessen the danger to an acceptable degree. The problem of communicating one’s intent remains.
Defining the concept of deterrence is a major problem in communicating intent to an aggressor. Deterrence is, as we have said, the ability to prevent threats or actions from being carried out by posing an equivalent or greater threat. But a threat is not an absolute, it is relative. The deterrent effect of the town sheriff in our earlier illustration was built upon his reputation. This, plus his role as sheriff, inferred his intent to prevent aggression or violence in the town. When the bartender communicated this information to the gunfighter, it created enough doubt in the gunfighter’s mind to convince him that a showdown was not worth the risk. Thus, as Kissinger has observed, deterrence is as much a psychological as a physical problem, for it depends on the aggressor’s assessment of risks, not the defender’s.
The concept of deterrence on a national scale is relatively new. Before 1939, national governments thought of their armed forces in terms of national defense. The impact of the atomic bomb and more sophisticated weapons gradually persuaded some policy-makers that modern war could not be won and that defenders would be virtually helpless against nuclear attack. If there was to be no victor, and defense was ineffective, what were the alternatives? American policy-makers decided that our military power should be structured to prevent wars from ever beginning. The word “deterrence” was applied to this new policy.25
The question then arose as to what type of deterrence was best. Actually, if aggression does not occur, it can never be proved why it did not happen. The argument could then be made that the enemy never intended to attack in the first place. But this argument is academic, and the question remains as to what is the best deterrence. Numerous answers have been proposed. During the late 1950s United States strategy emphasized a single all-out response or “massive retaliation” to an attack. In a general or nuclear war, the objective was to destroy the enemy’s society in a single blow. The Kennedy Administration replaced this strategy with an approach that offered more alternatives by attempting develop the maximum number of options even for the contingency of general nuclear war.26 This strategy was called “flexible response.” Variations of this strategy have since be developed, e.g., multiple options, counterforce, damage-limiting, and others.
Some deterrent theorists treat deterrence an integral part of an overall grand soldier-statesman strategy, making deterrence a means to an end, not an end in itself. They speak of a four-tier strategy of peace, cold war, conventional war, and nuclear war. Cold war the most important level because it is at this level that the Soviet Union and the United States are involved in a “tough form of negotiation,” with both nations “employing simultaneously violence at a low level together with the dissuasive or persuasive pressure exerted by threats of conventional or nuclear war.”27 The objective of these threats is deterrence, producing a certain psychological effect in the other which prevents the enemy from using his armed forces. Threat is also treated as the basic dynamic of deterrence: “the threat is no more than a communication of one’s own incentives, designed to impress on the other the automatic consequences of his act.”28
One of the many criticisms made of deterrence theorists is that not one of them has yet produced an analysis of American and Soviet national character which shows deterrence behavior to be a cultural norm in either society. This has created a cultural gap that is quite relevant to our treatment of deterrence as a type of cross-cultural persuasion. For example, we do not know nor can we really determine the strength of Soviet perceptions. We have made the assumption that most perceptions relevant to short-term policies are changeable and amenable to influence in a crisis situation. While attitude change depends on communications, the extent and quality of the change depend upon the many biases and other influencing factors (already discussed) that affect the receiver. It has not been possible, for instance, to examine extensively Soviet reactions to different Western communications sources and to study whether and to what extent these crisis communications have been consistent with previous Soviet perceptions.29
Deterrence theory is a social-psychological theory based on the beliefs that we can correctly generalize about the perceptions of our national leaders and that we can make assumptions that are accurate enough to generalize about the perceptions of the leaders of another culture. So sure are we of these generalizations that we go so far as to apply them in situations of extreme crisis.
The 1962 Cuban missile crisis is an excellent example of the perceptive dangers of nuclear machinations. Evidence of this can be found in Nikita Khrushchev’s memoirs, which, while they should not be taken as the verbatim truth, illustrate the wide gap that exists between the American and the Soviet mind, between the way Washington and Moscow view any given international event in this nuclear age.30
From the beginning of the Cuban crisis, the fear of further escalation prompted each side to continually probe and estimate the other’s degree of commitment and fears. These estimates of the opponent’s psychological mood in turn affected the other’s estimates.31 Throughout the crisis, the United States was careful to avoid direct confrontation with the Soviets. At the same time, President Kennedy communicated the American intent to use conventional forces in Cuba if necessary by publicizing our military buildup in Florida. It has been postulated that Kennedy’s willingness to escalate this far may have sharply decreased the probability of a more serious escalation later.32 Since world peace depended upon each side correctly interpreting the other’s intent, every word and action was carefully studied for its obvious or implied meaning. This difficult task was further complicated by the fact that there had never been a nuclear war and, therefore, no common precedents upon which the opponents could judge each other’s intent in a nuclear crisis situation.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, communication of intent was conveyed to the opponent in simple, precise format. The wording of such communications gave the receiver a pretty good indication of the level of escalation the communicator intended. When such statements were made, all sides recognized that war was actually possible because there were precedents to make clear the implications of the language.33
The precedents today are less clear, and each opponent may be climbing a different escalation ladder in accordance with his own peculiar cultural and ideological self-interests. Again, the war in Southeast Asia serves as an example. Two principals of radically different cultural backgrounds are locked in combat. On one side, the United States is fighting a limited war; its strategy is based upon its technological superiority. From the American point of view, the war’s progress is often judged by the number of enemy shellings, the flow of men and material coming down from the North, the number of enemy killed, and the amount of enemy supplies destroyed or captured. On the other side, North Vietnam is fighting a total war; it is employing Chinese “strategy by stratagem.” This strategy calls for the conscious deception or manipulation of the enemy, as regards his perceptions either of the objective payoff in the situation or of the probabilities of those payoffs. Western strategy, to paraphrase one sinologist, attacks the enemy’s body while Chinese strategy is the black art of attacking the enemy’s mind.34 The observations expressed in this example raise an ominous and serious question: Can two nations with totally different concepts of war find common ground upon which to negotiate peace?
De-escalation is even more sensitive to accurate communication and shared understanding than escalation is. The opponent may have a different conception of escalation and still understand well enough the pressures being applied to him; but typically, in order to coordinate de-escalation moves by easing pressure, both sides must have a shared understanding (commonness) of what is happening. As we learned in the Cuban missile crisis, and as we are learning in Vietnam, opponents may not have a sufficient shared understanding if one side’s paradigm of the world differs in important ways from the other’s.35
In any study of national character, the present political ideology and other contemporary influences must be considered. For example, how much has the Japanese attitude toward war, as defined by Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, changed as the result of Japan’s defeat in World War II and the subsequent influence of Western culture upon Japanese society?
The plasticity of man makes any definite statement about his national character suspect. Nevertheless, the study of national character is of great importance to the military strategist and deterrent theorist. The key to many international problems lies in the insight to be gained from achieving empathy with a foreign people. The enlightened communicator and cross-cultural analyst can thus make valuable contributions to the military decision-making process.
The Chinese have a saying that before a man can begin to learn he must first admit how little he knows. Successful cross-cultural communication starts with the realization that the character of other peoples is not what we think it is; it is different from our own. The communicator must gain a broad and comprehensive understanding of the receiver, for it is not enough to be strong and ready to fight aggression. Deterrence, to be successful, must prevent aggression by communicating this intent to a potential aggressor in a way he can readily understand. If war comes, communicating with the enemy is even more important to prevent further escalation of the conflict. In negotiating the peace, communication is paramount to reach agreement at the peace table.
To help accomplish these things, the Air Force (and the Department of Defense) should establish an office for the study of national character as it relates to cross-cultural and persuasive communication. This office should be manned by officers and civilians who have professional experience and academic training in anthropology, sociology, psychology, communication, and international affairs. Their roles would be those of international communicators and communication analysts. These professions have already been identified by Bryant Wedge of the Institute for the Study of National Behavior. He defines the international communicator as one who
would render services to the “practice” of cross-cultural communication; these include the refinement of useful theory and techniques, and problem-solving study in specific cases of communication difficulty . . . The analyst of cross-cultural communication is professionally concerned with the communication process itself; he has no role or responsibility other than to practice of his specialty. He is specifically not a communicator nor a policy maker, but a technical expert and advisor.36
The importance of communication and cross-cultural analysis in the military decision-making process is echoed by Dr. Don Martindale, Professor of Sociology, University of Minnesota, who says:
Since national character refers to properties that pluralities display in national communities, the sociology of national character has significance for anyone dealing with the conflict situations of our age: national uprisings, the formation of international blocs, and cold and hot wars in which nation-states are the ultimate antagonists.37
The fact that present research methodology and the application of the knowledge thus gained need further refinement should not deter our accepting communication and cross-cultural analysis as major factors in the military decision-making process. We can ill afford to underestimate their importance.
Washington, D.C.
Notes
1. Henry A. Kissinger, ed., Problems of National Strategy (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1965), p. 6.
2. John Dewey, “Nature, Communication and Meaning,” in The Human Dialogue: Perspectives on Communication, ed. Floyd W. Matson and Ashley Montagu (New York: The Free Press, 1967), p. 509.
3. Ashley Montagu, “Communication, Evolution, and Education,” in The Human Dialogue: Perspectives on Communication, ed. Floyd W. Matson and Ashley Montagu (New York: The Free Press, 1967), p. 445.
4. Ibid., p. 446.
5. Ibid., p. 447.
6. Ibid., p. 446.
7. Channels of communication between national governments take many forms, including official messages and visits by government officials, normal diplomatic actions, open and secret talks, speeches by government leaders, overt and covert acts, “off-the-record” remarks, background briefings to newsmen, calculated “leaks” to the news media, press releases and statements, military maneuvers and actions, propaganda agencies, etc.
8. Scott M. Cutlip and Allen H. Center, Effective Public Relations (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1964), p. 147.
9. Fillmore H. Sanford, Psychology: A Scientific Study of Man (San Francisco: Wadsworth Publishing Company, Inc., 1961), pp. 294-95.
10. Ibid., p. 296.
11. According to Richard L. Gregory, “perception is a continual series of simple hypotheses about the external world, built up and selected by sensory experience.” Richard L. Gregory, The Intelligent Eye (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970).
12. William J. Coughlin, “The Great Mokusatsu Mistake,” Harper’s Magazine, March 1953, pp. 31-40.
13. Margaret Mead, “The Importance of National Culture,” in International Communication and the New Diplomacy, ed. Arthur S. Hoffman (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1968), p.100.
14. Ina Telberg, ‘‘They Don’t Do It Our Way,” Courier (UNESCO), 1950, III, No. 4.
15. Mead, p. 93. Also, national characteristics are “a category of traits that individuals come to display in national groups. Their importance derives from the place of the nation in the contemporary world.”—The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, March 1967, p. 35.
16. Mead, p. 99.
17. Ibid., p. 97.
18. Brigadier General Washington Platt, USA (Ret), National Character in Action: Intelligence Factors in Foreign Relations (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1961), p. 67.
19. For example, between 1942 and 1953 only ten books were published by anthropologists on the subject of national character, and there were no articles of any sort devoted to national character in the American Anthropologist during all of l965.—Adamson Hoebel, special ed., “Anthropological Perspectives on National Character,’’ The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, March 1967, p. 2.
20. Ibid. Since psychology studies human adjustments which are the complex relationships of organism and environment, the judgments and conclusions reached reflect the idiosyncrasies of each culture. Western philosophy is based upon Greek law and Judeo-Christian beliefs. Chinese philosophy is less systematic than that of the West. Its special genius lies in the profundity of its insights into the social relations which frequently exhibit subleties and nuances unknown to Western thought.
21. Howard L. Boorman and Scott A. Boorman, “Strategy and National Psychology in China,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, March 1967, p. 152.
22. Ibid.
23. Arthur Koestler calls this man’s ‘‘self-transcending tendency.” “Man Is an Aberrant Species; A Conversation with Arthur Koestler and Elizabeth Hall,’’ Psychology Today, Vol. 4, No. 1 (June 1970), pp. 63-65, 78-84.
24. Peter Paret, “Innovation and Reform in Warfare,” lecture at Air Force Academy, 1966.
25. Arthur I. Waskow, The Limits of Defense (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1962), pp. 9-l2.
26. Kissinger, p. 11,
27. André Beaufre et al., Strategy of Action (London: Faber & Faber, 1967).
28. Thomas C. Schelling, Strategy of Conflict (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963).
29. Philip Green, Deadly Logic: The Theory of Nuclear Deterrence (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1966).
30. Chalmers M. Roberts, “Soviet Views of U.S. Show a Frightening ‘Mind Gap,’ ” Washington Post, December 14, 1970, p.1.
31. Herman Kahn, On Escalation: Metaphors and Scenarios, (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1965), p. 248.
32. Ibid., p. 250.
33. Ibid., p. 222.
34. Boorman and Boorman, p. 152.
35. Herman Kahn, “Escalation as a Strategy,” in Problems of National Strategy, ed. Henry A. Kissinger (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1965), p. 31.
36. Bryant Wedge, “Communication Analysis and Comprehensive Diplomacy,” International Communication and the New Diplomacy, ed. Arthur S. Hoffman (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1968), pp. 44-45.
37. Don Martindale, special ed. abstract, “National Character in the Perceptive of the Social Science,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, March 1967, p. 30.
Lieutenant Colonel Russell A. Turner II (M.A., American University) is Chief of the Air Force Art Program, Secretary of the Air Force Office of Information. A former B-29, C-121, and C-130 pilot, he has been an information officer with Air Force Systems Command and with NATO forces in Iceland. Colonel Turner, a graduate of Squadron Officer School, USAF Communication Course at Boston University, and Armed Forces Staff College, was once a commercial and free-lance artist and has two paintings in the Air Force art collection.
Dr. Hamid Mowlana (Ph.D., Northwestern University) is Associate Professor and Director of International Communication, American University. He has taught at the Institute of Mass Communication in Teheran (Iran), University of Chicago, Cambridge University (England), and the University of Tennessee. Born in Iran, Dr. Mowlana is now a permanent resident of the United States. He is the author of numerous articles and books on communication, political science, and sociology.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.
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