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http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/000/691yjwkt.asp
Psyching Out the Taliban
The Army plans mind games at Fort Bragg.
by Matt Labash
12/24/2001, Volume 007, Issue 15
FORT BRAGG, N.C.
Despite the low-rent ambiance of Bragg Blvd.--the land of Park'n'Pawns and
$1.99 fried chicken plates--Fort Bragg has always been synonymous with the
Army's elite. Arriving at the home of the 82nd Airborne and Special
Forces, visitors often experience the contact-buzz that comes from
occupying the same ground as the Green Berets and Delta Force. But in a
complex of ugly low-slung buildings resides another group of warriors,
these mostly unsung--the soldiers and civilians of the 4th Psychological
Operations Group.
After American bombs and Northern Alliance fighters, perhaps no one has
had a greater effect on the rapid demise of the Taliban than the Army's
psychological operations (PSYOPs) team. But you wouldn't know it from the
way they act. Calling themselves "force multipliers" who deal in
"perceptions management," they don't even have a blood-curdling nickname
like the "Night Stalkers" or "Snake Eaters." While some Army regulars call
them the "bullshit bombers" (for their propaganda dissemination), Maj. Ric
Rohm, executive officer of the 8th PSYOP battalion, when pressed for a
nickname, comes up stumped: "Umm, I guess it's just 'PSYOPer.'"
If PSYOPers themselves are an understated lot, the very term
"psychological operations" tends to conjure images of black-bag
artists--camouflaged Freudians practiced in the dark art of winning hearts
by warping minds. But operating under the regimental motto "Persuade,
Change, Influence," the brass works overtime to stand a group of visiting
reporters' stereotypes on end.
Despite a John Wayne "Green Berets" poster on the wall with the dialogue
bubble "Better get Psywar on that," the conference room where we are
briefed is littered with mission statements, corny successories--even the
serenity prayer.
Over in the nearby printing plant, the air is choked with the smell of
printer cleaning solvent, as the presses have now rolled off 15 million
leaflets that have been dropped in fiberglass bombs over Afghanistan.
Here, Dr. David Champagne, the 4th PSYOP Group's civilian Afghanistan
expert, who says he fell in love with the country as a Peace Corps
"hippie," translates the latest effort: a leaflet wishing Afghans "Happy
Eid" (the feast in which Muslims break their Ramadan fast). "We want them
to know that we care about them as human beings," says Champagne. "They
probably haven't had many happy greetings for the last six years."
With all this peace'n'love, a naive civilian--convincingly played by yours
truly--might start suspecting that the real psychological operation is the
one the 4th PSYOP Group is performing on the press. When my public affairs
escort tells me that everything they put out has to be truthful, I finally
snap: "Who cares if it is? This is war." ("Hey, I don't make the rules,"
he counters.) But my initial reaction is a poorly informed one. As Col.
James Treadwell, the 4th PSYOP Group commander, says, "Truth is the best
propaganda. If you ever get caught in a lie, you lose your credibility.
That doesn't mean we have to tell the whole truth. I guess that's one
difference between public affairs and psychological operations."
Obviously Col. Treadwell has never sat through a Pentagon briefing. But
he's wise to uphold this time-honored propaganda tenet. PSYOPers, after
all, are in the perception business. For this reason, 9th PSYOP battalion
commander Lt. Col. Glenn Ayers goes so far as to say, "I do not like that
'P' word. Propaganda elicits the vision of Goebbels, who used it for
nefarious reasons." Though military historian Daniel Lerner has written
that the mark of a first-rate propagandist is one who "conceals his skill
from the public" appearing to be "a simple man, telling the simple truth,"
Joseph Goebbels had no appetite for subtlety. He gave the game away with
his title, "Minister of Propaganda."
With as brutal a regime as the Taliban, of course, there is no need to
shade the truth. Consequently, American propaganda, in the form of
leaflets and radio broadcasts beamed in from the EC-130 Commando Solo
aircraft (television's not an option--since the Taliban destroyed
everyone's sets), has come in four varieties:
-Informational--giving listings of American radio broadcasts, and
cautioning civilians to stay clear of humanitarian food drops, since
nothing spoils goodwill like killing someone with a crate of peanut
butter.
-The Friendly Neighbor--smiling American family shakes hands with smiling
Afghan family.
-Appeals to the Taliban Swing Voter: One leaflet shows Mullah Omar as a
dog whose leash is held by Osama bin Laden, while another shows fleeing
Taliban fighters running from an incinerated truck with the gentle
admonition "Stop fighting for the Taliban and live."
-Sugar Daddy Appeals: $25 million to whoever assists in bin Laden's
capture.
While it may sound simple, it's not. Churning out these materials involves
a 17-step process from conception to dissemination. Themes are not only
thoroughly researched and vetted among the 4th PSYOP Group's 1,200
soldiers and 35 civilian analysts, but the final product has to be
approved by the U.S. Central Command chief. While PSYOPers say they are
part ad men, part ethnographers (all of them are proficient in at least
one foreign language), Army doctrine requires that they also be everything
from Strunk & White imitators ("the propaganda writer must be brief,
summarizing the theme by using short, forceful words") to Mary Kay
consultants ("Colors may be used to harmonize with the moods of the
illustrations....Red may be used to suggest violence, blue or green for
peaceful scenes, and black or white for death").
And like good ad men, they focus-group everything, pre-testing and
post-testing materials with natives, refugees, or prisoners of war.
Failing to focus-group a message might cause them to miss important
cultural nuances, which can jeopardize credibility, cause a piece to fall
flat, or even worse, insult the audience that it is intended to persuade.
A few years ago, Lt. Col. Ayers was overseeing a land-mine awareness
program in Cambodia. Ayers figured it was a fail-safe campaign, since "no
one out there wants to step on a landmine." But he pre-tested a T-shirt
anyway, one which depicted a boy squatting over a mine that he was poking
with a stick. "In our mind's eye, it said 'don't poke a landmine with a
stick,'" says Ayers. "But when we tested it, the Khmer villagers said,
'Why do you have this person defecating over a landmine?' The kid was in a
position that they typically use for a bowel movement. We had to pull the
boy back a little bit and make changes based upon what we found."
Such attention to detail has earned American PSYOPers a reputation as the
modern era's finest propagandists, which is saying something, since
psychological warfare is as old as war itself. As long ago as 500 B.C.,
the Persians exploited the Egyptians' sacred regard for cats, paralyzing
them by unleashing hundreds of panic-stricken felines on the battlefield.
(The Persians claimed victory without suffering any casualties.)
But after reviewing former PSYOPer Ed Rouse's psywarrior.com (the web's
most definitive repository of psychological operations history), it
becomes apparent that all propagandists are not created equal. The United
States has rarely resorted to sexual themes, though some reports have it
that covert operatives left foot-long condoms on the Ho Chi Minh trail,
presumably causing NVA soldiers to hide their women as well as themselves.
Other countries, however, have been less circumspect, often stumbling into
embarrassing gaffes.
During World War II, the Japanese leafleted American forces, trying to
demoralize the enemy with the hardy perennial: Your girl is getting
mounted by the strapping buck back home. To illustrate this theme,
however, the Japanese used graphic pornography--a relative scarcity on the
frontlines. The effect, says military historian Stanley Sandler: "It did
the opposite of what it was supposed to. It raised morale. Our guys loved
it. They'd trade them like baseball cards--five for a bottle of whisky."
In Iraq during the Gulf War, America ran a textbook PSYOP campaign, not
only scaring the tar out of Iraqis by truthfully advertising when our
B-52s would next bomb specific positions (causing mass surrenders), but
also by running brilliant deception maneuvers (floating leaflets in
bottles ashore in Kuwait to suggest an impending amphibious invasion that
never came). Iraq countered pathetically with radio propagandist Baghdad
Betty, the Gulf War equivalent of Tokyo Rose, who tried to break the
enemy's morale by telling Americans that their wives and girlfriends were
getting snatched up by Tom Cruise, Tom Selleck, and Bart Simpson.
While it's difficult to quantify PSYOP success, Sun Tzu, whom many
consider the original PSYOPer, wrote that "To capture the enemy's entire
army is better than to destroy it. . . . For to win one hundred victories
in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy
without fighting is the supreme excellence."
Score is often kept in conventional warfare by tallying how many are
killed, but in some measure, PSYOP success is based on how many are
allowed to live. In Iraq, Rouse writes, nearly 87,000 Iraqi soldiers
turned themselves over to coalition forces, and many of them were
clutching American leaflets, which offered "safe conduct passes." During
Vietnam, which wasn't even our best PSYOP effort because of organizational
problems and stateside dissent, it was still estimated that the average
cost of killing one Viet Cong guerrilla was $400,000 (the price of
artillery shells, cluster bombs, etc.), while the average cost of causing
one Viet Cong defection was only $125.
The 4th PSYOP Group has yet to post-test its products with Afghans to see
if they effectively employed "logic, fear, desire or other mental factors
to promote specific emotions, attitudes or behaviors" (as the press
release objectives state). But one is tempted to chalk the group's efforts
up as successful. After all, in what other conflict have we so readily
subdued the enemy? Then again, we have dropped over 12,000 bombs on
Afghanistan since October 7. When it comes to modifying emotions,
attitudes, and behavior, those tend to work wonders too.
Matt Labash is senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
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