Psychological warfare
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Psychological warfare (PSYWAR), or the basic aspects of modern psychological operations (PsyOp), has been known by many other names or terms, including Military Information Support Operations (MISO), Psy Ops, political warfare, "Hearts and Minds", and propaganda.[1] The term is used "to denote any action which is practiced mainly by psychological methods with the aim of evoking a planned psychological reaction in other people".[2]
Various techniques are used, and are aimed at influencing a target audience's
Target audiences can be
Mass communication such as radio allows for direct communication with an enemy populace, and therefore has been used in many efforts. Social media channels and the internet allow for campaigns of disinformation and misinformation performed by agents anywhere in the world.[6]
History
Early
Since prehistoric times, warlords and chiefs have recognized the importance of weakening the morale of their opponents. According to
Currying favor with supporters was the other side of psychological warfare, and an early practitioner of this was Alexander the Great, who successfully conquered large parts of Europe and the Middle East and held on to his territorial gains by co-opting local elites into the Greek administration and culture. Alexander left some of his men behind in each conquered city to introduce Greek culture and oppress dissident views. His soldiers were paid dowries to marry locals[7] in an effort to encourage assimilation.
Genghis Khan also employed tactics that made his numbers seem greater than they actually were. During night operations he ordered each soldier to light three torches at dusk to give the illusion of an overwhelming army and deceive and intimidate enemy scouts. He also sometimes had objects tied to the tails of his horses, so that riding on open and dry fields raised a cloud of dust that gave the enemy the impression of great numbers. His soldiers used arrows specially notched to whistle as they flew through the air, creating a terrifying noise.[9]
Another tactic favored by the Mongols was catapulting severed human heads over city walls to frighten the inhabitants and spread disease in the besieged city's closed confines. This was especially used by the later[
The Muslim caliph Omar, in his battles against the Byzantine Empire, sent small reinforcements in the form of a continuous stream, giving the impression that a large force would accumulate eventually if not swiftly dealt with.
During the early Qin dynasty and late Eastern Zhou dynasty in 1st century AD China, the Empty Fort Strategy was used to trick the enemy into believing that an empty location was an ambush, in order to prevent them from attacking it using reverse psychology. This tactic also relied on luck, should the enemy believe that the location is a threat to them.
In the 6th century BCE Greek
This ruse appears to have been well known in medieval Europe: defenders in castles or towns under siege would throw food from the walls to show besiegers that provisions were plentiful. A famous example occurs in the 8th-century legend of Lady Carcas, who supposedly persuaded the Franks to abandon a five-year siege by this means and gave her name to Carcassonne as a result.
During the Granada War, Spanish captain Hernán Pérez del Pulgar routinely employed psychological tactics as part of his guerrilla actions against the Emirate of Granada. In 1490, infiltrating the city by night with a small retinue of soldiers, he nailed a letter of challenge on the main mosque and set fire to the alcaicería before withdrawing.[11]
In 1574, having been informed about the pirate attacks previous to the Battle of Manila, Spanish captain Juan de Salcedo had his relief force return to the city by night while playing marching music and carrying torches in loose formations, so they would appear to be a much larger army to any nearby enemy. They reached the city unopposed.[12]
During the Attack on Marstrand in 1719, Peter Tordenskjold carried out military deception against the Swedes. Although probably apocryphal, he apparently succeeded in making his small force appear larger and feed disinformation to his opponents, similar to the Operations Fortitude and Titanic in World War II.
World War I
The start of modern psychological operations in war is generally dated to World War I. By that point, Western societies were increasingly educated and urbanized, and mass media was available in the form of large circulation newspapers and posters. It was also possible to transmit propaganda to the enemy via the use of airborne leaflets or through explosive delivery systems like modified artillery or mortar rounds.[13]
At the start of the war, the belligerents, especially the British and Germans, began distributing propaganda, both domestically and on the
The British also had a
In August 1914,
In 1917, the bureau was subsumed into the new
Aerial leaflets were dropped over German trenches containing postcards from
At the start of the war, the French government took control of the media to suppress negative coverage. Only in 1916, with the establishment of the Maison de la Presse, did they begin to use similar tactics for the purpose of psychological warfare. One of its sections was the "Service de la Propagande aérienne" (Aerial Propaganda Service), headed by Professor Tonnelat and
The
World War II
Germany's Fall Grün plan of invasion of Czechoslovakia had a large part dealing with psychological warfare aimed both at the Czechoslovak civilians and government as well as, crucially, at Czechoslovakia's allies.[18] It became successful to the point that Germany gained support of UK and France through appeasement to occupy Czechoslovakia without having to fight an all-out war, sustaining only minimum losses in covert war before the Munich Agreement.
At the start of the
During World War II, the British made extensive use of deception – developing many new techniques and theories. The main protagonists at this time were 'A' Force, set up in 1940 under Dudley Clarke, and the London Controlling Section, chartered in 1942 under the control of John Bevan.[20][21] Clarke pioneered many of the strategies of military deception. His ideas for combining fictional orders of battle, visual deception and double agents helped define Allied deception strategy during the war, for which he has been referred to as "the greatest British deceiver of WW2".[22]
During the lead-up to the Allied
Elaborate
The deceptions were implemented with the use of double agents, radio traffic and visual deception. The British "
The Operation was a strategic success and the Normandy landings caught German defences unawares. Continuing deception, portraying the landings as a diversion from a forthcoming main invasion in the Calais region, led Hitler into delaying transferring forces from Calais to the real battleground for nearly seven weeks.[27]
Vietnam War
The United States ran an extensive program of psychological warfare during the Vietnam War. The Phoenix Program had the dual aim of assassinating National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF or Viet Cong) personnel and terrorizing any potential sympathizers or passive supporters. During the Phoenix Program, over 19,000 NLF supporters were killed.[28] In Operation Wandering Soul, the United States also used tapes of distorted human sounds and played them during the night making the Vietnamese soldiers think that the dead were back for revenge.
The Vietcong and their forces also used a program of psychological warfare during this war. Trịnh Thị Ngọ, also known as Thu Hương and Hanoi Hannah, was a Vietnamese radio personality. She made English-language broadcasts for North Vietnam directed at United States troops. During the Vietnam War, Ngọ became famous among US soldiers for her propaganda broadcasts on Radio Hanoi. Her scripts were written by the North Vietnamese Army and were intended to frighten and shame the soldiers into leaving their posts. She made three broadcasts a day, reading a list of newly killed or imprisoned Americans, and playing popular US anti-war songs in an effort to incite feelings of nostalgia and homesickness, attempting to persuade US GIs that the US involvement in the Vietnam War was unjust and immoral.[29] A typical broadcast began as follows:
How are you, GI Joe? It seems to me that most of you are poorly informed about the going of the war, to say nothing about a correct explanation of your presence over here. Nothing is more confused than to be ordered into a war to die or to be maimed for life without the faintest idea of what's going on.[30]
21st century
The
In the
In cyberspace,
In 2022,
In operations in the South and East China Seas, both the United States and China have been engaged in "cognitive warfare", which involves displays of force, staged photographs and sharing disinformation.[37][38][39] The start of the public use of "cognitive warfare" as a clear movement occurred in 2013 with China's political rhetoric.[40]
Methods
This section needs additional citations for verification. (February 2011) |
Most modern uses of the term psychological warfare refer to the following military methods:
- Demoralization:
- Distributing pamphlets that encourage desertion or supply instructions on how to surrender.
- Shock and awe military strategy.
- Projecting repetitive and disturbing noises and music for long periods at high volume towards groups under siege like during Operation Nifty Package.
- Propaganda radio stations, such as Lord Haw-Haw in World War II on the "Germany calling" station.
- Renaming cities and other places when captured, such as the renaming of Saigon to Ho Chi Minh City after Communist victory in the Vietnam War.
- False flag events.
- Terrorism[41]
- The threat of chemical weapons.[42]
- Information warfare.
Most of these techniques were developed during World War II or earlier, and have been used to some degree in every conflict since. Daniel Lerner was in the OSS (the predecessor to the American CIA) and in his book, attempts to analyze how effective the various strategies were. He concludes that there is little evidence that any of them were dramatically successful, except perhaps surrender instructions over loudspeakers when victory was imminent. Measuring the success or failure of psychological warfare is very hard, as the conditions are very far from being a controlled experiment.
Lerner also divides psychological warfare operations into three categories:[43][page needed]
- White propaganda (omissions and emphasis): Truthful and not strongly biased, where the source of information is acknowledged.
- Grey propaganda(omissions, emphasis and racial/ethnic/religious bias): Largely truthful, containing no information that can be proven wrong; the source is not identified.
- Black propaganda (commissions of falsification): Inherently deceitful, information given in the product is attributed to a source that was not responsible for its creation.
Lerner says grey and black operations ultimately have a heavy cost, in that the target population sooner or later recognizes them as propaganda and discredits the source. He writes, "This is one of the few dogmas advanced by Sykewarriors that is likely to endure as an axiom of propaganda: Credibility is a condition of persuasion. Before you can make a man do as you say, you must make him believe what you say."[43]: 28 Consistent with this idea, the Allied strategy in World War II was predominantly one of truth (with certain exceptions).[citation needed]
In Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes, Jacques Ellul discusses psychological warfare as a common peace policy practice between nations as a form of indirect aggression. This type of propaganda drains the public opinion of an opposing regime by stripping away its power on public opinion. This form of aggression is hard to defend against because no international court of justice is capable of protecting against psychological aggression since it cannot be legally adjudicated.
"Here the propagandists is [sic] dealing with a foreign adversary whose morale he seeks to destroy by psychological means so that the opponent begins to doubt the validity of his beliefs and actions."[44][45]
By country
China
According to
France
The Centre interarmées des actions sur l'environnement is an organization made up of 300 soldiers whose mission is to assure to the four service arm of the French Armed Forces psychological warfare capacities. Deployed in particular to Mali and Afghanistan, its missions "consist in better explaining and accepting the action of French forces in operation with local actors and thus gaining their trust: direct aid to the populations, management of reconstruction sites, actions of communication of influence with the population, elites and local elected officials". The center has capacities for analysis, influence, expertise and instruction.[50]
Germany
In the German Bundeswehr, the Zentrum Operative Kommunikation is responsible for PSYOP efforts. The center is subordinate to the Cyber and Information Domain Service branch alongside multiple IT and Electronic Warfare battalions and consists of around 1000 soldiers. One project of the German PSYOP forces is the radio station Stimme der Freiheit (Sada-e Azadi, Voice of Freedom),[51] heard by thousands of Afghans. Another is the publication of various newspapers and magazines in Kosovo and Afghanistan, where German soldiers serve with NATO.
Iran
The Iranian government had an operation program to use the 2022 FIFA World Cup as a psyop against concurrent people's protests.[52][53][54][55][56]
Israel
The Israeli government and its military make use of psychological warfare. In 2021, Israeli newspaper Haaretz revealed that "Abu Ali Express", a popular news page on Telegram and Twitter purportedly dedicated to "Arab affairs", was actually run by a Jewish Israeli paid consultant to the Israel Defense Forces. The IDF's psyops account had been the source of a number of noteworthy reports that were afterwards cited by the Israeli and international media. Abu Ali Express was, for example, the source for the report that Qatari funds were entering the Gaza Strip in suitcases.[57]
Russia
Soviet Union
United Kingdom
The British were one of the first major military powers to use psychological warfare in the First and Second World Wars. In the current
The Group was established immediately after the 1991 Gulf War,[60] has since grown significantly in size to meet operational requirements,[61] and since 2015 has been one of the sub-units of the 77th Brigade, formerly called the Security Assistance Group.[62]
In June 2015, NSA files published by
In March 2019, it emerged that the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) of the UK's Ministry of Defence (MoD) is tendering to arms companies and universities for £70M worth of assistance under a project to develop new methods of psychological warfare. The project is known as the human and social sciences research capability (HSSRC).[65]
United States
The term psychological warfare is believed to have migrated from Germany to the United States in 1941.
"The planned use of propaganda and other
psychological actions having the primary purpose of influencing the opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior of hostile foreign groups in such a way as to support the achievement of national objectives."[68]
This definition indicates that a critical element of the U.S. psychological operations capabilities includes propaganda and by extension counterpropaganda. Joint Publication 3–53 establishes specific policy to use public affairs mediums to counter propaganda from foreign origins.[69]
The purpose of
Dedicated psychological operations units exist in the United States Army and United States Marine Corps. The United States Navy and the 193rd Special Operations Wing of the United States Air Force also plans and executes limited PSYOP missions. United States PSYOP units and soldiers of all branches of the military are prohibited by law from targeting U.S. citizens with PSYOP within the borders of the United States (Executive Order S-1233, DOD Directive S-3321.1, and National Security Decision Directive 130). While United States Army PSYOP units may offer non-PSYOP support to domestic military missions, they can only target foreign audiences.
A U.S. Army field manual released in January 2013 states that "Inform and Influence Activities" are critical for describing, directing, and leading military operations. Several Army Division leadership staff are assigned to “planning, integration and synchronization of designated information-related capabilities."[71]
In September 2022, an audit of covert information warfare took place after social media companies identified a suspected U.S. military operation.[72]
See also
- Active measures
- Character assassination
- Charles Douglas Jackson
- Cognitive dissonance
- Demonizing the enemy
- Directed-energy weapon
- Fear mongering
- Information warfare
- Lawfare
- Media manipulation
- Military psychology
- Mind games
- Minor sabotage
- Moral panic
- Noisy investigation
- Psychological manipulation
- Special Operations
- Strategy of tension
- Taliban propaganda
- The Shock Doctrine
- Unconventional Warfare
- Peter Watson (intellectual historian)
- Zersetzung
- Fear § Manipulation
NATO
UK
US specific:
- Information Operations Roadmap
- NLF and PAVN battle tactics
- Zarqawi PSYOP program
World War II:
USSR
Related:
- Asymmetric warfare
- Fourth generation warfare
- The Gospel of Afranius
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External links
- Movie: Psywar: The Real Battlefield is the Mind by Metanoia films
- Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger. Psychological Warfare at Project Gutenberg
- The history of psychological warfare
- IWS Psychological Operations (PsyOps) / Influence Operations Archived 8 December 2010 at the Wayback Machine
- "Pentagon psychological warfare operation", USA Today, 15 December 2005
- "U.S. Adapts Cold-War Idea to Fight Terrorists", New York Times, 18 March 2008
- US Army PSYOPS Info – Detailed information about the US Army Psychological Operation Soldiers
- IWS — The Information Warfare Site Archived 8 December 2010 at the Wayback Machine
- U.S. — PSYOP producing mid-eastern kids comic book
- The Institute of Heraldry — Psychological Operations
- Psychological warfare
- The Nature of Psychological Warfare (CIA 1958) Original