Transfer of Files on Psychological Operations

[Ed Jewett]

PsyClops: Blitzkrieg of the Mind?



“ … interpersonal relationships must be considered to properly understand the communication process and to conduct effective PsyOp. Interpersonal relationships seem to be anchor points for individual opinions, attitudes, habits and values.”

PsyOp Operations in the 21st Century
Gary Whitley, Department of the Navy
United States Army War College, Class of 2000
http://ics.leeds.ac.uk/papers/pmt/exhibi.../psyop.pdf


Pay special attention to the section on PsyOp and the Internet on page 17 of the paper, page 28 of the PDF, which discusses the use of the Internet as a base on which to construct a tool for coordination of psychological operations..

The paper says that “the bad guys of the world” are using the Internet and must be countered, but:

In what world can a US citizen arguing against the military-industrial-congressional complex, war and its destructions, bad governmental decisions, governmental deception and outrageous governmental expense and behavior be considered “bad”?

How and why is it that the US government and the US military (and the US business world, borrowing on Bernays) are waging “clickskrieg” on the citizens of the United States when the Constitution clearly asks and requires that the military be overseen by the civilian polity?

Why is the US military engaged in the purposeful reduction of media criticism when the American citizen clearly has a right (or at least used to have the right) in assembly, grievance, criticism, legal action, etc.?

“While the perpetrators of cyberwar (knowledge-related conflict at the military level) attacks may be formal military forces, netwar (societal struggles most often associated with low intensity conflict) attacks may not even be traditional military forces,26 but instead may “often involve non-state, paramilitary, and irregular forces.”27

War.com: The Internet and Psychological Operations
Angela Maria Lungu
Major, United States Army
February 2001
Naval War College, Newport, RI
http://ics.leeds.ac.uk/papers/pmt/exhibits...etandpsyops.pdf


Thoreau once quipped that ‘they have constructed a telegraph connecting Maine and Texas; this presumes that the two have something to say to one another’.

Is it not permissible for the citizens of the United States to have something to say to the Executive and Congressional branches about war and defense policy?

How does an argument or discussion about who perpetrated or facilitated the 9/11 attacks lend aid and comfort to an enemy when the very people arguing the “inside job” angle are or were heavily involved in the intelligence, military, law enforcement and foreign policy branches of our own government?

What argument on behalf of PsyOps as a tool in the prevention or countering of the erosion of ‘popular support for the war within the enemy’s society [the US]’ is valid when the US popular support for the war in Iraq was weak and declining even before the war began? … when residual anti-war leanings were still left over from the Vietnam era? … when questions about the casus belli and the evidence for it were raised immediately and continuously within American civilian society?

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Isn’t it interesting that one of the early and influential papers on information warfare "The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation," Marine Corps Gazette (October 1989): 23 ] was written by one of the acolytes [William Lind et al] of a fellow named Boyd, the “author” of the OODA loop?

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Part of the role of perception management* is to deny access to information and includes deception, concealment and an effort to influence objective reasoning.

* See “Defining the Information Campaign” Lt. Col. Garry Beavers, United States Army (Retired) [a principal analyst for Electronic Warfare Associates’ Information and Infrastructure Technologies, Incorporated who received a B.S. and M.Ed. from North Georgia College and State University and is a graduate of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College and the Defense Intelligence Agency] at this link:
http://usacac.leavenworth.army.mil/CAC/m...eavers.pdf


That will certainly makes what follows of greater interest and intrigue.


Civilian Cyber Corp: Tired of waiting for the Bush Administration or The Government to mobilize you? Mobilize yourself.

The People's Information Support Team is a Civilian Irregular Information volunteer auxiliary on-line working group collaborating on electronic media engagement of oppositional, neutral and friendly blogs, forums, discussion groups and websites. Irregulars have no official Table of Organization and Equipment and are under no obligation to follow doctrine, but this particular PIST is a five-person element composed of a Team Chief, an Assistant Team Chief, two Civilian Irregular Counterpropagandists with photography, videography, journalism or editing skills; and an analyst with linguistic and area studies specialties.

Capabilities to be developed:

Disseminate selected public information to target audiences.
Counter enemy propaganda.
YouTube Smackdown
Counter enemy Morale Operations
Cheerleader
Attack anti-military arguments
Publicize heroes

Resist infantilization, victimization, marginalization and slander of American soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, and Coast Guardsmen

Engage Hostile Media
Relentless, destructive critique of MSM persons and publications
Expose media bias
Resurrect buried stories

The ultimate objective of PIST is to convince domestic audiences to take actions contributing to the defeat of Islamofascist terrorists and their supporters. PIST should promote resistance within the domestic civilian populace against hostile ideology or enhance the image and legitimacy of friendly ideologies.

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From Rethinking Insurgency by Steven Metz
http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army....iles/PUB790.pdf

p. 12 The most common evolutionary path for 21st century organizations—be they corporations, political organizations, or something else—is to become less rigidly hierarchical, taking the form of decentralized networks or webs of nodes (which may themselves be hierarchical). Such organizations are most effective in a rapidly changing, information saturated environment.20 Insurgent movements organized as “flat” networks or semi-networks are more flexible and adaptable than rigidly hierarchical ones. Resources, information, and decisionmaking authority are diffused. Such organizations are effective in environments where rapid adaptation is an advantage. In the contemporary era, polyglot organizations which combine a centralized, hierarchical dimension (which gives them task effectiveness) and a decentralized, networked dimension (which gives them flexibility and adaptability) can maximize mission effectiveness.

p.28-29 One other type of militia merits consideration. Some analysts contend that the Internet has made “virtual” militias (and insurgencies) possible and potentially dangerous.66 That runs counter to the definition of militias used here since “virtual” militias do not control territory or assume state functions. [But, of course, this is a false analogy coming from those who have defined the human mind as terrain to be won.] Perhaps, though, virtual militias and insurgents should be considered a separate category. Interestingly, just as the emergence of “real” insurgents sometimes spawn the creation of counterinsurgent militias the emergence of “virtual” insurgents has led to the formation of virtual counterinsurgent vigilantes. One example is the “Internet Haganah, part of a network of private anti-terrorist web monitoring services, which collects information on extremist websites, passes this on to state intelligence services, and attempts to convince Internet service providers not to host radical sites.67 The logic is that it takes a network to counter a network. As insurgents and terrorists become more networked and more “virtual,” states, with their inherently bureaucratic procedures and hierarchical organizations, will be ineffective. Vigilantes, without such constraints, may be [effective].

Quote: “We’re going to have to counter the propaganda ourselves.

Relentless, destructive critique of MSM persons and publications is among the most important tasks of bloggers, commenters, and tipsters of the Right. – Kralizec, in a comment at Hot Air.

We are going to have to blog swarm and harness the collective wisdom of Been There Done Thats … “

http://tbn0.google.com/images?q=tbn:CG1BBU.../Final%2B2A.jpg


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Civilian Irregular Information Defense Group
DISTRIBUTED, NON-HIERARCHICAL, LOOSE-CANNON CYBER ARBAKAI OF THE AMRIKI TRIBE

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The “Amazing Grim” describes Emergent Communities and show us this graphic




“…the military arc of the blogosphere has the potential to become an insurgency, by resisting the enemy propaganda disseminated by our own Main Stream Media and conducting counter propaganda for the domestic target audience. The leaders (yellow) are the bloggers with the largest readership. The TTLB Ecosystem tells us who the leaders are. Some could be IO Warlords, with a readership of contributors (red G’s), commenters (red or blue Auxiliaries), linkers and lurkers (blue or green Sympathizers) with varying degrees of committment and investment in the concept of Distributed IO by PSYOP Auxiliaries and Volunteer Counter Propagandists. Much of the blogosphere is in revolt against the Main Stream Media. It could be considered an insurgency in opposition to the traditional dead tree info monopoly. And like a real insurgency, it would benefit from the discrete advice and instruction of trained operators.

We need more blue nodes. We need counter propagandists. We need people’s time. We need people’s mental energy and communication skills.

Electronic Counter Media
http://tbn0.google.com/images?q=tbn:ivwSGo...org/new_pa4.jpg

Quote: 1-34. Joint doctrine defines the information environment as the aggregate of individuals, organizations, and systems that collect, process, disseminate, or act on information (JP 3-13). The environment shaped by information includes leaders, decisionmakers, individuals, and organizations. The global community’s access and use of data, media, and knowledge systems occurs in the information shaped by the operational environment. Commanders use information engagement to shape the operational environment as part of their operations. (Paragraphs 7-10 through 7-22 discuss information engagement.)

“Pictures of dead women and children, the “collateral damage” of war, carry more explosive weight than a B-52—a weight measured not in tons of explosives but in negative perception, which translates to reduced public support for government policies and initiatives.” [Aha! So our government is in favor of dead women and children!]

Ordnance = Content
Delivery Platforms = Global Media
Target = Public Opinion

Because we do not censor the Internet or transnational television, images of death and destruction from terror attacks speed unimpeded (like Germany’s tanks and aircraft) across the flat plains of the global media directly to our TV screens and computer monitors, delivering a mental blitzkrieg attack measured not in explosive weight but in the weight of perception.

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Today’s conflicts are not only won on the battlefield, but through the use of websites and blogs, over the airwaves and on the front pages of our newspapers.

“Through skillful propaganda operations, the enemy successfully leverages their asymmetric attacks to encourage potential recruits to join their violent cause and to try to convince those of us in free nations to give in to hopelessness, self-doubt and despair.” [world at war, unemployment up over 10%, loss of trillions of dollars, long-term debt for decades, all brought to us by the folks at the military-industrial-Congressional-corporate/fascist complex -- hey, I'm ecstatic]

Their decentralized networks have been able to effectively employ the tools of the Information Age, while the U.S. government remains ponderous, muscle-bound and unable to respond in real time to the deceits of these enemies. To succeed in this first struggle of the 21st century, we will need fresh thinking and capabilities well beyond the Defense Department. If free people are to meet the challenges posed by what will be a long struggle against violent extremists, we will need all elements of national power, private as well as public — diplomatic, economic, as well as intelligence and military to work in concert. We will need to rethink and rearrange our domestic and global institutions designed for the Industrial Age to better suit the Information Age.

Gleaned this from Jedburgh at SWJ:

Quote: We live in a world of citizen journalists, where every action or operation is witnessed, taped and reported, individual actions are amplified, and organizations face the challenge of strategic implication. In today’s flat world, a seemingly isolated interaction in the morning becomes fodder for bloggers immediately, appears on local television news by noon, and is international news by evening.

Captain Hal Pittman, Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense (Joint Communication)

Already in the works are initiatives on coordinated web hosting and content, video and blogging, a renewed effort to identify and find ways to empower credible Muslim voices, develop a shared image databank and strengthen the effectiveness of Military Information Support Teams (MIST) work in our overseas missions.

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The Missing Component of U.S. Strategic Communications
http://www.ndu.edu/inss/Press/jfq_pages/...i47/25.pdf

by Colonel William M. Darley, USA,
Director of Strategic Communications for the
Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth and
Editor-in-Chief of Military Review.

Read the whole thing, then go over to Swedish Meatballs and read the comments.


Some of the best:

. . . we cannot agree among ourselves as to what we view as those cultural values of our own we are willing to openly assert are superior and preferable to those championed by our enemies as a reason for engaging in war, which by definition must be promoted and internalized by targeted audiences in order for a war of ideas to be successful. Yet the assertion of superiority of values as compared to those of an adversary must be, in fact, the essence of strategic communications messages aimed at achieving wartime political objectives.

The social pressure of a seemingly intractable war is polarizing in increasingly dangerous ways an already ideologically divided society, moving it toward another virtual domestic civil war among advocates of conflicting ideologies.

. . . actual war between irreconcilable camps of ideological enemies who are increasingly gravitating to, if not openly rallying around, two inimical and antithetical sets of values as distinct as those that divide the Shia and Sunni factions in the Islamic world.

. . . the agendas of the domestic political parties have evolved to a point where they view the outcome of the war in Iraq less as an issue of homeland security than as a key factor in the success of their own parochial struggles to wrest domestic political power as a means to shape national values. To this end, domestic political opponents increasingly appear to view the war as more about controlling future nominations to the Supreme Court than about defending American citizens or improving Middle Eastern stability.

[Mom, applie pie and the girl next door?]

[Oil, SUV’s, global hegemony, forward air bases with which to attack Russia and/or secure Caspian Sea basin energy supplies, profits for the oil companies and military contractors]

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The Unorganized Cyber Militia of the United States

“Kat is a blogger and a Denizen or infowarrior in Virtual Warlord John Donovan’s castle garrison who has just posted a magnum opus that may well be to Pinch Sulzberger what the Declaration of Independence was to King George III. Future students of this period will recognize this piece as a key treatise in the narrative of the pajamahadeen.

It was only those of us who disconnected from the “Matrix” of the mass media who knew the reality on the ground did not match the “reality” perpetrated by the media.

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We few, we happy few, we band of blogs, having looked beyond the Matrix, discussed strategy and pointed to successes long before the media ever knew who Petraeus was or anything about the new COIN manual that incorporated ideas written by Kilcullen and discussed at length on the blogs.

… We knew deep down that what we were being told was not the whole story. And we believed that our nation was a force for good in this world, and that the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines sent forth to break militant Islamicists of their homocidal habits were the best human beings this Republic had to offer…

We almost lost the war. Not on the battle field, but right here at home. As General Lynch recently said, the reason people thought it was being lost and now appears to be miraculously won? The media, with its central editorial boards “shaping American opinion” told everyone it was so. And, at least half of the American population was unaware because they had no idea they were being sold a bill of goods. They didn’t disconnect from the “Matrix”.

We have all been the victims of a massive psychological operation. Even those of us who resisted. Our faith in our armed forces remains unshaken, but our faith in government, media, academia, elites, and many of our fellow citizens has plummeted. Many of us no longer look to government for solutions. Some of us are empowering ourselves. The reason that you are failing, the reason the stock in your companies continues to dwindle, the reason that you missed the true story of Iraq in lieu of “the narrative”, the reason that a sitting president invited bloggers to the White House, however limited in its actual journalistic moments that you claim as “real” journalism, is because you and your kind became “the Matrix”; alternate reality created by you and others like you. You are no longer independent. You are no longer individuals seeking “the truth”. … We are at war. Several wars. The outcome of all of them depends on control of the key terrain, the battle space between the ears of the American voter. And for a whole lot of reasons explained elsewhere on this blog, this key terrain has been left undefended. Will and morale are essential elements of national power that must be defended, if not by Regulars, than by us.

Also, it is clear that “good news” must come directly from the units on the ground or the Iraqis themselves. Anything coming from higher headquarters or the Pentagon is dismissed, fairly or unfairly, as propaganda. Recent reports that the Pentagon is building its public relations efforts, including “message development” teams and “surrogate” spokesmen, demonstrate an awareness of the problem. More Pentagon talking heads, however, will have less impact on broadcasting a more balanced message than authentic reporting from the troops.

… Tactical units should each have two members who are trained in public relations and equipped with high-quality cameras and laptops with video editing software, and offered incentives and rewards for effective reporting. They should record unit activities in writing and video, and share them with the American people via sites modeled on wildly successful pro-military websites, such as Blackfive.net and MoveAmericaForward.org.

… The general staff in Baghdad should measure the success of its public affairs effort by how many journos get out on the ground, in contrast to recent reports of the staff making life difficult for proven combat communicators like Michael Yon to embed with units. Yon, a former special operator, does so much to report an authoritative, balanced perspective from Iraq that the generals should instead assign him his own helicopter, and perhaps a limo.

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Quote: … The military has no monopoly on information, and you don’t have to wear a uniform to be an information operator. All you need is some very basic literacy and an internet connection and you, too can be a force multiplier for the good guys. You can be a civilian irregular information group IO auxiliary.

Now doesn’t that give you more warm and fuzzies than watching Dances With the Stars?

Quote: DoD needs an element that monitors the blogosphere, getting good ideas from friendly bloggers, early warning from hostile bloggers, assessment of communications effectiveness, early identification of potential PR flaps, and establishing relationships with pro-military bloggers. The center of gravity in the Jihad is the will of the American people. Psychological Operations are being conducted which are undermining that will. The MSM is hostile. Much of the blogosphere is not hostile. The blogosphere is a virtual battlespace for the will of the American people. Pro-military bloggers could be organized to function as auxiliaries, legally permitted to target domestic audiences in ways prohibited to active duty bloggers.

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Click-s-krieg on these:

http://cannoneerno4.wordpress.com/category...arriors/page/2/

http://warintel11.wetpaint.com/?t=anon

http://pist10.wetpaint.com/?t=anon

http://cannoneerno4.wordpress.com/2007/04/...-battle-spaces/

http://cannoneerno4.wordpress.com/2007/04/...-propagandists/

http://cannoneerno4.wordpress.com/2007/08/...aganda-proxies/

http://cannoneerno4.wordpress.com/2007/12/...-mind%e2%80%9d/