/ world today news/ The “Strategy for Operations in the Information Environment” of the Pentagon describes the approaches that the US military will take when conducting psychological warfare.
The strategy proposes to involve a wide range of organizations in its implementation – from self-government bodies and industry to non-governmental organizations and research centers to universities associated with the Ministry of Defense (UARC). All participating entities will rely on the Pentagon.
This is done in order to achieve close coordination between security services, intelligence and civil organizations to combat alleged “Russian and Chinese disinformation”.
In fact, the Strategy includes the creation of a mechanism that will be able to solve the urgent problem of centralized management of all tools of information warfare.
A special place in this program is devoted to strengthening the fight against Russia. “Russia,” it said, “is considered a serious threat because of its use of intelligence services, proxies and a wide range of tools of influence to divide Western alliances and increase its influence in the world.”
Russia also seeks to undermine the United States’ international standing, sow discord at home, and influence American voters and decision-making.
According to the military magazine Defense News, commenting on this Pentagon document, the U.S. military currently “does not have the ability to quickly deploy personnel that can repel malicious players trying to shape public opinion, and they must act now to create such “information forces,” according to a recently revealed Pentagon strategy.
Capturing the information ecosystem, from social media conversations to government propaganda, is increasingly important as disinformation spreads and global powers, including China and Russia, seek to influence foreign policy from afar.”
According to the published Strategy, new technologies, according to the Pentagon, play a crucial role in both conducting and countering influence campaigns.
“As this strategy makes clear, our ability to gain and maintain an information advantage at a time and place of our choosing is critical to successful operations in information space,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin wrote in the introduction to the Pentagon paper.
“Make no mistake: America’s competitors and enemies are moving quickly in the information environment, hoping to offset our enduring strategic advantages elsewhere,” the secretary said.
“This is an important factor as we seek to gain information and an edge in decision making,” Air Force Lt. Gen. Kevin Kennedy, commander of the 16th Air Force’s Information Warfare Unit, said at a Mitchell Institute event last week.
“We are deploying forces in multiple areas to ensure that we are ready to take the initiative in the information domain and use our information warfare capabilities to win the conflict and create the conditions for a post-conflict world as we move forward.”
As is known, the US and the West have actually been waging an information war against Russia for a long time. Probably from the time when Napoleon, at the head of his conquered Europe, went on a conquest campaign against Russia.
At that time, in the backpacks of the soldiers of the French army, there was the propaganda work of the Marquis Astolph de Custin “Journey to Russia”, in which he described our country as an evil despotism that threatens the whole world.
Napoleon personally ordered this libel to be printed in mass circulation to be used for the purposes of hostile propaganda against the Russian Empire. The Germans and Austrians did exactly the same during the First World War when they spread leaflets with caricatures of the Tsar over the trenches of Russian soldiers, where he was depicted drinking vodka with Rasputin.
Hitler’s supporter Joseph Goebbels is considered the founder of special psychological and propaganda special operations on an unprecedented scale. Already in the 1930s, he formulated the basic postulates of military and political propaganda.
Here are the main ones: 1. “Guns and bayonets are nothing if you don’t have the hearts of the nation”; 2. The conquest of the masses is the sole purpose of propaganda; 3. We are obliged to speak in a language understandable to people, and even in different languages - one for the capital, another for the countryside, one for the workers, a third for the employees; 4. All means are good for conquering the masses, the main thing is that the propaganda is effective;
5. A lie told a hundred times becomes the truth. We do not seek truth, but the effect of truth; 6. The more monstrous the lie, the more willingly it is believed, and the more rapidly it spreads; 7. So that there are no doubts in the crowd, the “messages” must be primitive, without details, at the level of a monosyllabic slogan. The greatest enemy of propaganda is intellectualism; 8. Propaganda should affect the feelings more than the mind, and therefore be bright, catchy, etc.
Although the United States once fought alongside the USSR against Hitler and Goebbels’ propaganda did not help Germany, they adopted exactly the methods of the Nazis to fight our country, becoming their faithful disciples, widely using lies, slander and the most monstrous provocations.
In 1956, the Office of Special Warfare was created in the Pentagon. Its chief, General Troxel, said: “Special methods of warfare are a combination of techniques, “forms and methods of psychological warfare with other means aimed at undermining the enemy from within.
They expanded the battlefield and transformed it from a temporary tactical weapon with limited impact to a powerful strategic weapon with great potential.
The United States was the first to actively use technical advances for military propaganda. During the Vietnam War, Americans began to collect, process and accumulate information for psychological warfare using computers.
They even tried to create a unified information system (PAMIS) for the benefit of psychological operations. At the same time, they made an attempt to influence the subconscious not only of the army, but also of the population.
American planes with loudspeakers regularly fly over areas occupied by Viet Cong guerrillas, broadcasting the cries of the eagle. Amidst these screams, a child’s cries and the child’s pleas to his father, expressed in Vietnamese, to come home and stop fighting were transmitted.
Claims were also conveyed that it was impossible to hide from the eagle (the symbol of the American special forces) and that, seeing everything from the sky, he would surely destroy his enemy. As a result, when the cry of an eagle was broadcast over the Viet Cong soldiers, it caused them to panic and provoke them to surrender.
Despite the US defeat in Vietnam, it should be noted that their psychological operations were not in vain. During the years of the war, about 250 thousand Vietnamese went over to the enemy side.
During the Iraq War, in addition to the regular psychological operations agencies, some 40 journalistic press offices were established within the military command structure. A special public relations officer was responsible for the selection and processing of information material that the command deemed suitable for transmission to journalists.
These officers broadcast specially filmed videos to television companies that portrayed the coalition forces’ preparations for combat in the right light. Journalists accredited by the military command had to sign obligations to comply with the rules for the dissemination of information and its content.
In June 2010, by directive of the US Secretary of Defense, Psychological Operations (PSYOP) was renamed Military Information Support Operation (MISO).
And a year before that, in 2009, the “Cyber Command” was created in the United States – a separate structure for conducting offensive operations on the Internet, where the subjects of influence are the governments of various countries, corporations, artificial intelligence, as well as civil society ( i.e. users who create and distribute content).
Dialogues and sharing of best practices are currently underway with Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and other countries, including Japan, according to Vice Admiral Kelly Eschbach, commander of US Naval Information Forces.
“I mean we have at least a dozen countries that are either creating information warfare programs or are interested in further information warfare partnerships,” she said at the West 2023 conference in San Francisco.Diego.
Why did the Pentagon need to develop a new strategy for information warfare? The American military was pushed to this by the technological revolution in the field of transmission and dissemination of information, the rapid spread of the use of artificial intelligence and other modern technologies, as well as the practice of hostilities in Ukraine, where the Pentagon manages all operations of the armed forces of Ukraine. including in the field of information and propaganda.
The US is actively waging an information war against Russia, including in Ukraine. Thus, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) alone, according to the American portal Mintpressnews, has spent 22.4 million dollars for these purposes since 2014.
This money was used to “create and train pro-Western political parties, finance controlled media and subsidize large-scale privatization campaigns that benefit foreign multinational corporations.
However, the Pentagon and the CIA also conduct their own information operations during military conflicts. It was the Anglo-Saxon PR structures who wrote and directed the most resonant anti-Russian actions, such as the bloody provocation in Bucha in the spring of 2022, aimed at discrediting the Special Military Operation in Ukraine.
In order to wage a hybrid war against Russia, China and their allies, the US and Britain have created and actively use a multi-level system for processing public opinion.
And the publication of the Pentagon’s new strategy for information warfare is another proof that the US is actively seeking to strengthen the fight against Russia using this type of weapon. Realizing that it is impossible to defeat our country on the battlefield with traditional weapons, we are betting on hybrid warfare.
Translation: SM
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