Psychological Warfare and Operations in U.S. Public Diplomacy

It may seem controversial when Psychological Warfare is being discussed in relation with public diplomacy. Such controversy is a result of the misunderstood realities these two terms connote. What adds up to more controversy regarding this relationship is misunderstanding of Soft Power as simply being an idealist term. Soft power “is the use of the attractiveness of a country’s culture, political ideals, and policies to get others to admire those ideals and then follow one’s lead” (Pratkanis, 2009). Public diplomacy is the means through which a country exercises its soft power to promote its own interests (Nye, 2008). In public diplomacy, states may employ various means to enhance their status in the international arena; they may exercise cultural diplomacy to present a better image of their countries, or they may employ broadcasting technologies as to disseminate their own narrative to gain legitimacy for their actions, such means show results in the long-run only. The problem with these means is that they are not feasible in conflict situations. Psychological warfare, on the other hand, is no less similar in aim to these means, though the environment where it is employed may draw some controversy as to whether it can be regarded as a tool of soft power or not, however, in contrast to the other means that may be employed during peace times, psychological warfare is mostly crucial during conflict situations, for example, it was not the Hollywood movies that made 70 thousand of Saddam’s soldiers to surrender during the 1991 Gulf war, but it was due to psychological operations that were conducted that brought such results. (Kilbane, 2009) (Smyczek, 2005) Nonetheless, recently it proved its importance in peace times as well.

In the following, this article will first review the academic literature on psychological warfare, then examine its evolution and development in the United States and finally will propose some policy recommendations for recent challenges that the United States (U.S.) face in psychological warfare; particularly the article will draw an emphasis on terrorism as psychological warfare and how to counter it.

Literature Review

Public diplomacy, is “the promotion of the national interest by informing and influencing the citizens of other states” (Pratkanis, 2009, p. 112). In public diplomacy, influencing the behaviour of others does not correspond to using violent means to reach the desired outcomes. In Pratkanis’ definition of Public Diplomacy, the emphasis on ‘informing and influencing’ emphasis the role soft power plays in public diplomacy. Soft power is the ability of an actor to change the behaviour of the targeted actor in a way favourable to the formal actor’s interests (Nye, 2008). Unlike hard power, soft power relies entirely on the willingness of the targeted actor to change their behaviour and does not employ violent means such as coercion, instead, it relies on attracting the targets to do something otherwise they are unwilling to do. From what preceded, a question prompts which is: If soft power means influencing the behaviour of others through non-violent non-military means, what does it have to do with psychological warfare?

One part of the answer lies in the history of psychological warfare when neither public diplomacy nor soft power enjoyed much importance as they do today. The other part of the answer lies in the misperception of psychological warfare as being associated with war and the military. This misperception lies, furthermore, in the misperception of psychological warfare and psychological operations as being synonymous. To the contrary, these two terms, though they are inextricably related, are still not the same. psychological warfare as Padover (1951) states is “neither psychology nor war … it means the use of all available media of communication for the purpose of destroying the enemy’s will to fight” (p. 151). Therefore, psychological warfare’s objectives are “to demoralize the enemy … to ex-doctrinate him … and to begin a process of indoctrination” (Crossman, 1952, p. 320).

psychological operations, on the other hand, are conducted within the scope of military operations and defined as the “Planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence the emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behaviour of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals” (Kilbane, 2009, p. 187), or  “the planned use of communications to influence human attitudes and behaviour” (Paddock, 1989). As a result, psychological warfare could be understood as the environment under which psychological operations are being conducted, yet psychological warfare is not necessarily meant to be associated with military operations, in contrary to psychological operations where these operations are conducted within the scope of military operations (Kilbane, 2009), in the example of the U.S., psychological warfare constituted part of foreign policy and “most of its activities are centred in the State Department under an Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs” (Padover, 1951, p. 152), as for psychological operations “most of the activity in military psychological operations centered in the Army” (Paddock, 1989, p. 45).

psychological operations activities can be divided into three activities with two forms, they can be divided as ‘white’, ‘black’ or ‘grey’ activities, and these activities could be ‘tactical’ or ‘strategic’ (Crossman, 1952). White activities correspond to activities that are openly sponsored by the government, Black activities correspond to activities that are not known by whom they are carried out, as for Grey activities it is activities that are somewhere in between the preceding two types of activities (Crossman, 1952). Psychological Operations can be identified as either strategic or tactical; the purpose of strategic psychological operations is to spread influence to the whole of the enemy, while tactical psychological operations target only a specific group (Narula, 2004; Crossman, 1952).

The case of the U.S. regarding its inclusion of the military in its public diplomacy effort presents a distinct example of the development of psychological warfare from hard power into soft power through the means of public diplomacy.

The United States Case

The U.S.’s employment of psychological warfare in its public diplomacy only came in the mid-1980s when the Secretary of defence revitalized the U.S. Army psychological operations to go hand in hand with the national objectives of the U.S. (Paddock, 1989). With technological development, the means through which psychological warfare was carried out has changed. Prior to WWI, the main media which was used during the war was ‘leaflets’ (Paddock, 1989), during WWII leaflets were accompanied with the radio (Crossman, 1952), the main activity was to disseminate propaganda in favour of the national objectives and counter those that are not.  With the U.S. revitalization of the Army’s psychological operations, its nature moved beyond aiding the military to its implementation in strategies aiding public diplomacy.

In the twentieth century, the application of psychological operations proved crucial to the success of waging war (Narula, 2004). However, the interest of the U.S. in psychological operations rose and fell with every conflict (Paddock, 1989) a pattern illustrated with historical examples by Paddock, who is himself a Major General in the U.S. Army, in his paper evaluating the history of the U.S. interest in psychological operations. For example, during WWI the U.S. Army established the Psychological Warfare Sub-Section in the War Department and also the Propaganda Section, these two section’s activities, respectively, were centred around producing leaflets, and producing surrender appeals, however, during the inter-war period there was no psychological warfare office in the War Department (Paddock, 1989).

The same pattern appeared during and after the end of WWII, and so was the case in the 1960s during the Vietnam war where the 6^th U.S. psychological operations battalion lacked psychological operations-trained officers, it was expanded in the late 1960s to a group with four battalions. However, by mid-1970s, all that was left of this group was an understrength group (Paddock, 1989).

A further example which will be examined here is the application of psychological operations during the Korean War.  After the dissemination of the Army psychological warfare staff in 1946, a sense of need for psychological warfare emerged in the U.S. at the start of the Korean war, therefore an inefficient unit known as the Tactical Information Detachment was the only available solution as a psychological warfare unit, the unit was organized as the 1^st Radio and Broadcasting and Leaflet Group (RB&L) and designed to “conduction strategic propaganda in direct support of military operations” (Paddock, 1989, p. 47).

No matter how organized it was, the group was not very successful in its activities because it lacked former preparation. By comparing the performance of the U.S. Army in the Korean war with its activities during the world wars, Collins & Pritchard (2016) concluded that “the Army in Korea scrambled to grow a psychological operations division that had been neglected since 1945”  (p. 211).

A psychological operations unit has two activities; one of them is research and analysis and the other is operations. These two activities require constant monitoring and researching of the targeted environment so that the operations that it carries out be successful (Paddock, 1989), as a result of this the U.S. Army psychological operations during the Korean War encountered many problems because of its weakness in the research and analysis phase of psychological operations. For example, there was a cultural gap between the East and West which made psychological operations activities difficult to implement, another problem was translating the leaflets into a language that is effective and understandable and native translators were hired, but the translators had little background in psychological operations, furthermore those translators were racially discriminated in the Army (Collins & Pritchard, 2016). 

The impact that leaflets had on the enemy soldiers to surrender is extremely difficult to assess, Collins & Pritchard (2016) stress this throughout their paper, however, the attempts to prove the success of leaflet campaigns were an essential public relations move “for the purpose of satisfying one’s sense of importance…” (2016, p. 219).

Nonetheless, during the Gulf War in 1991 where leaflets were used bear fruit; it was estimated that 88% of the Iraqi prisoners of war believed in the messages contained in the leaflets and 70% were affected by leaflets to surrender (Smyczek, 2005). This success of the U.S. Army psychological operations unit could be attributed mostly to the revitalization process that the secretary of defence initiated. Under this process, the U.S. sought to develop a comprehensive doctrine for the coordination of psychological operations during peace and conflict situations (Paddock, 1989). As a result of this process, the U.S. understood that words alone are not enough to make people change their behaviour. Instead, its words must be coupled with actions, therefore, credibility is essential in psychological operations, leaflets alone were not the reason behind the surrender of the Iraqi soldiers, but it was the threat of being bombed, the next day after disseminating the leaflets, becoming a reality that caused those soldiers to surrendered (Kilbane, 2009). in spite of this, it was no more than credibility that costed the U.S. its image in the 2003 Iraq war (Gass & Seiter, 2009).

A new trend emerged in the field of psychological warfare, which poses a great challenge to the U.S. which is terrorism. Terrorism is far more than just the indiscriminate killing of civilians, terrorism in essence is far beyond then this, it aims at delivering a message to the targeted population, its aim is “to undermine the government, to spread panic and anxiety among the targeted population and demoralize the public” (Ganor, 2008, p. 34). Terrorists are like water, they can slip into their targeted population and inflict grave damage, and just like water they are hard to hit because their networks are loose and therefore difficult to stop. With recent technological developments, they do not have to worry about how to spread their message to the widest audience possible, all they have to do is to commit a heinous act of violence and the media will take care of the rest. By disseminating the news of the actions that the terrorists did, the aim of the terrorists thus is to instill fear in the hearts of the people as to make them think that it could have been them upon whom the damage was inflicted (Ganor, 2008; Schmid, 2005). That is why they indiscriminately target civilians as to create fear and sense of insecurity which would translate into a legitimation crisis to the state for not being able to protect its citizens (Schmid, 2005). Terrorists understand that their actions solely are worthless, yet what makes them effective is propaganda (Schmid, 2005). Therefore, as Hanser (2007) states, “terrorist use psychological leverage” by instilling fear in people by indiscriminately killing civilians “to gain their attention” by appearing on the media (p. 1). The event of 9/11 is considered to be one of the first and great tragedies of the twenty-first century. With that event, terrorists wanted to assert that no place is safe any longer (Ganor, 2008), even the greatest power that have ever existed.

Policy Recommendations

One of the main points that must be taken into consideration is that in psychological warfare credibility is essential and telling the truth is of higher importance than just having information, (Gass & Seiter, 2009; Zaharna, 2004), this is because when the information is being diffused its effectiveness relies on the how people perceive it (Zeynalyan, 2016). After a research done at Syracuse University (Allport & Simpson, 1946) on university students, one of the policy recommendations that were included in the research was to provide the truth, the example of how the Iraqi soldiers during the Gulf War already stated above points to this fact.

Another recommendation further advocated by earlier academic research (Copeland & Potter, 2008) which sheds light on the asymmetric nature of modern conflicts, is that dialogue is important in resolving modern conflicts, where previously such thought was dismissed entirely. What nurtured the importance of dialogue is the shifting in the nature of the centre of gravity away from the state in the age of globalization where non-state actors such as insurgencies emerged on the scene. As a result, rather than deploy force and use of armed intervention, states are better off with “two-way dialogic, persuasive and collaborative forms of communication” (Copeland & Potter, 2008, p. 283).

As in regards to Terrorism, exploiting group divisions and infighting inside terrorists organizations is one way to counter their propaganda (Garner, 2011). Garner (2011), points out to the importance of countering enemy propaganda  by conducting “operations seeking to counter the adverse effects of a terrorist act, decrease popular support for the terrorist cause, or publicise incentives to the local populace to provide information on terrorist groups” (p. 3).  One way to do so is to employ divisive propaganda be exploiting the power struggle inside the terrorist groups which in turn would lead to separate the groups and in turn disintegrate them and make them vulnerable. In the context of countering terrorism, Garner points out to the importance of black propaganda because if it ever were to be initiated by the U.S. it will be counter-productive as it will be easily used for manipulation by those terrorist groups, but when black propaganda is employed the source of the information/disinformation disseminated is unknown. Another point  would be to infiltrate organizations with informers; a simple example was the infiltration of Russian agents inside the Chechenyan guerilla and successeded in posiening the leader of the guerilla movement known as Khattab (Traynor, 2002).

Conclusion

In conclusion, psychological warfare is of crucial importance for states in modern day conflicts. The importance lies not on its emphasis to being associated with the military, but on its ability to influence the minds and hearts of people, who in turn, without paying much effort as would be the case in physical warfare,  would surrender to one’s will, yet this surrender cannot be attained easily as it requires much more effort than physical warfare; from credibility, honesty, transparency and truth terms that have no place in the traditional understanding of war, but which are crucial for a psychological operation to be successful.

References

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