Revision as of 06:34, 4 June 2015

‘Psychological Operations: Planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organisations, groups, and individuals. The purpose of psychological operations is to induce or reinforce foreign attitudes and behavior favorable to the originator’s objectives. Also called PSYOP. See also consolidation psychological operations; overt peacetime psychological operations programs; perception management. ‘ US Department of Defense ^[1]

Propaganda of some sort has been used in warfare for centuries, but all the social, economic, industrial, and military factors that make propaganda a large-scale part of war, first made themselves seriously felt in World War I when it became a formal branch of many governments in the form of institutions such as the British Ministry of Information, the German Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, the American Committee on Public Information (in World War I), the Office of War Information (in World War II), and their counterparts in many other countries.

The function of war propaganda is to picture military successes on the propagandist’s side, project armed might and economic power the adversary has to face, and the moral superiority of the cause against which the adversary is fighting. And to inform the people back home with a free flow of information that stimulates the war effort, strengthens the nation to hold steadfast through a long conflict, to take losses courageously, to make sacrifices bravely, to buy (war) bonds generously, and to cooperate in every way possible in the great national effort for victory. Give us your children ...

Human vulnerabilities

PSYOPS, as the military calls it, seek to exploit human vulnerabilities in enemy governments, militaries and populations to pursue national and battlefield objectives.

Fear

Bonding

Known tricks

Rewriting history

Most (if not all) of the techniques used in rewriting history (revisionism) are for deception or denial and vary from using forged documents (the fog) as genuine sources (or inventing reasons to distrust genuine documents), to exploiting opinions by taking them out of their historical context.

Disinformation

Unlike traditional propaganda techniques designed to engage emotional support, disinformation is designed to manipulate the audience at the rational level by either discrediting conflicting information or supporting false conclusions.

Perception management

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration pioneered “perception management” to get the American people to “kick the Vietnam Syndrome” and accept more U.S. interventionism, but that propaganda structure continues to this day getting the public to buy into endless war …

Digital morphing

Digital morphing — voice, video, and photo — has come of age and is in use in psychological operations.

Countermoves

News and watchdogs

Public Intelligence https://publicintelligence.net/

Books

Documentaries

War made easy

• War Made Easy - How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us To Death https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9DjSg6l9Vs

Psychological warfare

• Psywar https://vimeo.com/14772678
• A Virus Called Fear https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-VLHNpwju0

Who owns the future?

• A series of YouTube videos that feature actors performing melodramatic readings of Yelp reviews http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEdXhH97Z7E

Related

• Propaganda
• Covert operations
• Surveillance
• Game of drones
• Censorship
• Petty tyrants

References

1. ↑ The information warfare site http://www.iwar.org.uk/psyops/