Strategic Communication, Pre-Stage of Military Strategy Formulation. Collective Irrationality, A Factor in Making Strategic Decisions Cover Image

Strategic Communication, Pre-Stage of Military Strategy Formulation. Collective Irrationality, A Factor in Making Strategic Decisions
Strategic Communication, Pre-Stage of Military Strategy Formulation. Collective Irrationality, A Factor in Making Strategic Decisions

Author(s): Dan Crisan
Subject(s): Security and defense, Military policy
Published by: Centrul tehnic-editorial al armatei
Keywords: strategic communication; rational-irrational; strategy; planning; public communication;
Summary/Abstract: Over the last three centuries, on a historical scale, there has been an increase in thedynamics of social transformation events, sometimes even through the development of majorconflicts, as well as a progressive increase in the number of these periods of re-balancingof social systems, in a fine-tuning with the intensification of human evolution as a result ofthe increasingly large application of the results of the development of science. Althoughconflicts on the planetary scale were absent in the years after the Second World Conflagration,reducing the statistical totals regarding the number of victims associated with wars, actions ofa conflictual nature, including military, from the last quarter of a century, and the increasinglyclear sedimentation of a competitive multipolar world lead to the idea that these deep tectonicmovements, without major effects on the plane of humanity, can be transformed into a largesurface earthquake, definitive for the human nature.The two World Wars have unequivocally shown two sides of human irrationality thatpre-existed as arguments for fighting them: leaders with irrational visions and communitieswho believed and supported irrationally the implementation of those visions through wars.After all, there were vast communication processes that prepared and threw the world into thetwo disasters of the first half of the 20th century. We appreciate that, despite the exceptionallevel of scientific rationality and the exponential tendency of this rationality from the presentstage, we find ourselves again, as humanity, in a social environment increasingly prone to thecrystallisation of irrational collective options.Society, enclosed through many of its elements in a multidimensional global network, has,more than ever, possibilities of social communication that tend towards infinity. Who shouldbe the actors and how could they, given that there are several centres, carry out a possibleprocess, which we define conceptually as “strategic communication”, a process that willlead, in fact, to diminishing the irrationality of some leaders and/or communities and to thecounter-balancing of the destructive competition of the poles of power? Does society still havethe systemic immunity required to maintain its balance or to rebalance itself without reachingconflict?