It's clown time at the Pentagon We should raise a comedy brigade to help Washington shoulder its soft-power burdens I'm not a military man, so I try to avoid telling our generals what to do. But the US armed forces have been treading on my turf lately and I can no longer hold my peace. Our military, I learnt on National Public Radio, is pushing so deeply into the media world it is trying to make radio soap operas in Colombia aimed at discouraging the people from serving as rebel soldiers. Gary Silverman I have no argument with the goal. If we are trying to win over Colombians, it makes more sense to treat them to dramas about former guerrillas at play than to dispatch drone missiles to their villages. But I worry about whether our armed forces are properly prepared for these exercises in "soft power," known as military information support operations, or Miso. The problem is that the brave men and women of the US military have been trained - in the words of Theodore Roosevelt - to "carry a big stick." But what they need now - as they say in the show business world - is to have a good shtick. My suggestion is that we send in the clowns. We should raise a comedy brigade - a force for frivolity - that could help the Pentagon lighten up sufficiently to shoulder its heavy soft-power burdens. Read the 48-page solicitation for a soap opera "contractor" issued last month by the US embassy in Bogotá and you'll see where I'm coming from. It is written with all the warmth and wit of a weapons manual - abounding with the kind of bureaucratic acronyms you might expect from the folks who introduced the world to the word "snafu" (situation normal, all fouled up). There are TAs, for target audiences; IAGs, for illegal armed groups; Mist, for a military information support team (you need a Mist for a Miso, in other words); and Gahd, derived from the Spanish for guerrilla demobilisation centres. The winning bidder would keep TAs away from IAGs through the use of dramatic themes provided by a Mist representative and derived from statements made by former guerrillas at Gahd centres. "The contractor must allow the Mist and Gahd representatives to preview the episodes," the US government's marching orders say. Any and all changes recommended by the Mist and Gahd representatives must be taken into account, barring technical or safety issues. To which, I say: Oh my Gahd! Anyone who has ever written anything for a living will quickly recognise how much fun is in store for the lucky contractor who gets to produce 20 episodes of 15 minutes each under these circumstances. We can do better, and I'm not the only one who thinks so. A recent Government Accountability Office report obtained by USA Today said that, while some Miso teams had succeeded, "it is unclear whether Miso activities are effective overall." Sending comedians to help would make sense because they tend to talk like soldiers. Both groups look to "kill," for example. But when funny people use that word they mean it in the sense of grabbing an audience by the throat and never letting go - the kind of behaviour we are seeking to encourage in our military as we wind down our wars and try to find nicer ways to get people in other lands to see things our way. I don't think there would be any problems finding the appropriate human assets for this mission because we have more funny people in this country than we know what to do with. The excess capacity is evident in Hollywood, where the film studios appear determined to waste an entire generation of comic actors by having them make the same pictures over and over again. As a result - at the same time that our Mists are struggling with our Misos - Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis and Ken Jeong are appearing again in The Hangover Part III, and Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Chris Rock and David Spade are only weeks away from inflicting Grown Ups 2 on us all. I realise that it would be impractical to send high-priced comic talents of this sort into an international trouble spot. But I suspect that for every well-paid Hollywood actor wasting away in a sequel, there are countless more class clowns, local characters and village idiots who could be of assistance to our military. These funny people are our secret weapon. They can do something the other side - whether it is made up of leftist rebels, random separatists or religious fundamentalists - will probably never match. They can turn scowls into smiles and, from a geopolitical perspective, that's a serious advantage for us.