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01:01Many believe these words and pictures unfairly convince decent people to betray their friends and their country.
01:07The value of persuasion in times of conflict has been recognized for thousands of years.
01:18The ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, who wrote The Art of War over 2,000 years ago, said,
01:26One need not destroy one's enemy. One need only destroy his willingness to engage.
01:32In modern warfare, psychological warfare specialists use leaflets, loudspeaker broadcasts and radio messages in hopes that the pen will be mightier than the sword.
01:48Although persuasion is impossible to measure precisely, it appears that these compelling arguments, along with conventional firepower, have helped save countless lives while shortening wars.
02:02Lying in order to irrefutably brand your enemy as evil and deserving of destruction has always been tempting.
02:13But surprisingly, psychological warfare's most successful ingredient has actually been the truth.
02:21Let's not be mistaken. Psychological warfare is manipulation, but it is manipulation that's based to the maximum extent possible on the use of truth.
02:36Because in the long run, that is going to determine whether or not your message is credible.
02:45Because if you're caught out in a lie, the credibility of your message, and therefore of your organization, is going to be severely eroded.
02:56Today, the United States is recognized as the world leader in military psychological warfare.
03:02Here at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, teams of U.S. Army soldiers are constantly refining their complex skills and creating messages aimed at a variety of audiences.
03:16Mobile production units and armed loudspeaker teams train to deliver these messages to the most remote and dangerous parts of the world.
03:24All of these duties fall under the larger umbrella of psychological operations, as their objectives extend well beyond the battlefield.
03:37We have people every day down in Latin America supporting neighboring countries encounter drug operations.
03:45We also work with refugee control, we deploy to support humanitarian relief missions, but when we've been in the operations where we do have combat, we've been there right alongside with the other combat forces.
04:00This challenging field contains many specialties.
04:05Communications that are intended to raise the morale of allied troops or friendly civilian populations are known as cohesive.
04:15Those designed to lower your opponent's morale are divisive.
04:21Strategic messages reach general audiences far behind the front lines and focus on long-term results.
04:29But the primary mission of psychological warfare specialists is to lower the morale and decrease the efficiency of the enemy soldier on the immediate tactical battlefield.
04:39And persuading the enemy to surrender is the ultimate challenge.
04:47Battlefields are terrifying places and they're usually occupied, no matter how well trained the soldiers are, by terrified people.
04:55And so trying to insert messages to induce them to surrender or to desert or just to give up and walk away from the battlefield is a terribly difficult thing to do.
05:03Just as in advertising, understanding the target audience of a particular message is critically important.
05:13Civilian analysts who have devoted their careers to studying the history and culture of a particular country or region of the world help the soldiers shape their messages, which are also known as propaganda.
05:25More current information can also come from intelligence agents behind enemy lines and by interrogating prisoners of war.
05:37Pooling these secretive resources provides the best chance for words to be stronger than bullets.
05:43But even minor mistakes in the world of psychological warfare can carry disastrous consequences.
05:54And some of the biggest embarrassments in the history of psychological warfare have come about because the person or the organization attempting to persuade another audience
06:07made some really big goofs, made some really big goofs because they didn't understand the idioms and the language.
06:17For example, in the Persian Gulf War in 1991, Iraqi leaders were anxious to try and lower the morale of American soldiers who were fighting in a strange land thousands of miles from home.
06:30A female Iraqi broadcaster nicknamed Baghdad Betty tried to appeal to the predominantly male American troops.
06:43Baghdad Betty had suggested that while they were in the desert, their wives and sweethearts were at home sleeping with all sorts of movie stars, ranging from Mel Gibson to Bart Simpson.
06:56They clearly didn't know Bart Simpson was a cartoon character.
07:00The modern systematic use of psychological warfare began to emerge during World War I.
07:10Some messages were floated across the lines tied to small balloons, but airplanes provided a more accurate way of dropping leaflets on the enemy.
07:22The German army was actually the first to distribute leaflets beginning in the fall of 1914 on the battlefields in France.
07:30The British were hesitant to respond with similar attempts at persuasion.
07:37You have to remember, psychology, advertising were still in their infancy.
07:42And so people thought that interfering with thought processes was almost against God's will.
07:49And so they were very suspicious of psychological warfare.
07:52The human mind was not as fully understood as it is today.
07:55Lord Northcliffe, who owned the London Times and Daily Mail newspapers, wanted to lead a psychological warfare retaliation.
08:05At first, convincing British military leaders was difficult.
08:13As one general plainly said, the thing was to kill Germans.
08:17Both sides used similar themes, such as portraying the enemy's leaders as self-serving burdens on the common soldier to increase dissension in the ranks.
08:37But since the war degenerated into a stalemate, it was hard for any army to gain a distinct advantage.
08:46As the Allied navies constricted the amount of supplies that reached Germany and his large amounts of men and materiel from America arrived in France in 1917,
09:00In 1915, the tide of war began to turn, the morale of Allied soldiers began to rise while the Germans' morale continued to sink,
09:10making them more vulnerable to psychological warfare.
09:17When some captured German prisoners of war revealed that they'd had very little food,
09:23American and British propagandists quickly swung into action.
09:26One of the most effective was the food leaflet.
09:31It said, German prisoners of war received the same rations as American soldiers.
09:36And they listed in mouth-watering detail what the American soldier was eating then.
09:41And many soldiers come in with this leaflet in their hands.
09:45A clear sign that these words and pictures were successful was the fact that German officers began to punish soldiers for reading Allied leaflets,
09:53or just for having them in their pockets.
09:56Allied victories on the battlefield, combined with continued German supply problems,
10:04and the eventual ousting of Kaiser Wilhelm, all helped end the war by November 1918.
10:13General Erich von Ludendorff, one of the most senior members of the German general staff, remarked that
10:19we were as hypnotized by the enemy propaganda as a rabbit is by a snake.
10:27A much lower-ranking member of the German army, a common infantryman, had also paid close attention to the Allies' success in World War I.
10:38Propaganda would become one of the cornerstones for his rise to power,
10:43the foundation upon
10:45on which he would build his dream of world conquest.
10:56Following the German defeat in World War I, Adolf Hitler marveled at the Allies' successful use of propaganda in his book, Mein Kampf.
11:03He wrote,
11:05Our soldiers learned to think the way the enemy wanted them to think.
11:13Throughout the 1930s, Hitler and his information minister, Joseph Goebbels, became masters of strategic and political propaganda,
11:19both within Germany and on an international scale.
11:29But once World War II began in 1939, their focus remained more on civilian propaganda, rather than on tactical psychological warfare.
11:38The British had dismantled their successful propaganda program after World War I, and had to quickly scramble to resurrect their capabilities when World War II began.
11:55In the first few years of the war, the British were more willing to use black propaganda,
12:00deceptive messages that claimed to come from one country, but actually originated in another.
12:06The British propagandist named Sefton Delmer played a German radio character that claimed to be making broadcasts from an official German station inside that country.
12:23He attacked Churchill and the royal family to attract an audience and gain credibility,
12:29but he also subtly criticized the Nazi party and promoted the idea that it was acceptable for a German citizen.
12:36In the first few years of the war, the British were forced to disagree with Hitler.
12:41Colorful personalities such as Delmers were common in a field where imaginative thinkers were forced to work in the structured world of the military.
12:49The British Broadcasting Corporation, or BBC, was often used to deliver psychological warfare messages, since many German soldiers in France listened to this radio station.
13:04As the Germans prepared for a possible invasion across the English Channel in the summer of 1940,
13:11broadcasters mockingly offered to teach the invaders English phrases that they might soon need.
13:17Examples such as, I am burning and my boat is sinking, were repeated over and over again.
13:24The British were employing the truth in these messages since they did have a system in place to literally set the ocean on fire by releasing and igniting oil offshore as well as on beaches.
13:40But what they didn't tell the Germans was that this was only a limited capability, covering a small fraction of England's southern coastline.
13:49This was a prime example of what another British propagandist, Richard Crossman, termed selective truth.
13:57Meaning the truth, but not necessarily the whole truth.
14:02Often what was left out of messages was just as important as what was left in.
14:10American psychological warriors first saw action during the North Africa campaign in November 1942,
14:17where they worked jointly with their British counterparts.
14:21In fact, Allied persuasion efforts fell to a hodgepodge group from four different agencies in the two countries.
14:29General Dwight Eisenhower, commander of the North African landings, turned to Brigadier General Robert McClure to sort out the confusion.
14:43He had been the military attache in London prior to this time.
14:48So he knew the British allies.
14:51One of the reasons why McClure was selected as the man for the job,
14:55because one of the duties that he had as a military attache was press relations.
15:01It's not because he had extensive background in psychological warfare.
15:06No one did.
15:11McClure's men stumbled through much of the North African campaign.
15:16Surrender appeals were sometimes dropped on German units that had recently enjoyed several battlefield victories.
15:23If we're losing, I'd say we're in retreat, then just basically forget about it.
15:28If the other side's on a roll, you're not going to have much success.
15:32You might as well save your energy and shut down.
15:35By the time the Allies advanced into Italy in July 1943, their psychological warfare efforts had improved.
15:44But even when messages were properly prepared and delivered when enemy morale was sufficiently low, failure was still possible.
15:53Credibility was essential as the Allies learned after dropping one particular leaflet.
15:59It promised surrendering Germans the same food that American soldiers received, such as bacon and eggs.
16:08The Americans weren't misrepresenting facts, but German forces didn't believe that U.S. troops could possibly have access to luxuries like bacon and eggs during wartime.
16:20Even though the message was true, it backfired and made German soldiers more suspicious of future Allied persuasion efforts.
16:27When General Eisenhower was named Supreme Allied Commander and charged with retaking Western Europe in 1943,
16:39he again put Brigadier General McClure in charge of all psychological warfare activities.
16:44The man who had fallen into this field by accident had become a true believer in the power of persuasion in combat.
16:54He was able to finally convince the Air Force to dedicate a special squadron to drop leaflets, aerial leaflets.
17:07That was not an easy task.
17:10When the Air Force felt that their primary purpose was to drop bombs that explode, not paper.
17:17Once the Allies established a foothold on the continent in June 1944, their psychological warfare operations swung into action.
17:30In addition to dropping leaflets, loudspeaker teams advanced with the front-line troops to deliver messages in German that could be tailored to immediate battlefield situations.
17:40The loudspeaker teams were right on the scene. Some of the most important things they did was to go to bunkers where the Germans were holed up and saying,
17:51Look, you're surrounded. You have no way of getting out. If you surrender, you'll be treated honorably. And that often worked.
17:58Loudspeakers were also mounted on tanks to offer more protection and to reduce casualties among these specialized soldiers.
18:10The Germans tried to persuade Allied soldiers with radio broadcasts and leaflets, but their efforts were mostly ineffective.
18:25They were retreating, and their battlefield propaganda often contained awkward English phrases.
18:35When they tried to inspire loneliness in American soldiers, they overplayed perceived notions of anti-Semitism in the U.S.
18:43by portraying American wives or girlfriends falling into the arms of lecherous Jews.
18:54As the Allied advance continued, the American psychological warriors did resort to fictional propaganda in November 1944.
19:04In order to counter declining morale, German propagandists dropped a series of encouraging cohesive leaflets to their own soldiers from a fictional friend known as Scorpion.
19:16So we made duplicate copies of the Scorpion, in which we were saying things like,
19:21If your officers don't exhibit sufficient national socialist zeal, you can shoot them.
19:27Well, eventually Field Marshal Modell caught on that we were using the Scorpion, and he told his own people to shut down.
19:33He said, If you can be made fools that easily by the Americans, then you might as well go out of business.
19:38As the situation became increasingly hopeless and supplies began to run short, more and more German soldiers decided to surrender and live rather than fight and die.
19:55The Safe Conduct Pass was the primary message designed to make surrender seem acceptable.
20:02This virtual ticket out of the war provided an enemy soldier with specific instructions on how to give himself up.
20:10He needs to know how to surrender, and he needs to be assured that he will not be shot by the other side and that he can surrender safely.
20:18And so one of the most effective methods of getting that message across was the Safe Conduct Pass.
20:27Cultural factors were still important, even with this type of straightforward appeal.
20:33The Germans really respected order and discipline and structure.
20:40So what actually happened was a leaflet was designed to appear to be an order,
20:45and the order was signed by General Eisenhower requesting that they surrender as soon as possible.
20:54The Allies waged an effective psychological warfare campaign in support of more traditional military weapons in Europe.
21:02But their counterparts in the Pacific faced an even greater challenge.
21:08They would confront a mysterious, often incomprehensible culture,
21:13in which anything, even death, was more acceptable than surrender.
21:18Just as America's conventional forces were caught off guard by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor in 1941,
21:33the U.S. psychological warfare specialists were few in number and unprepared to challenge their new enemy.
21:40They underestimated the strong indoctrination of the Japanese.
21:47Honor and loyalty to the Emperor, even in the face of death, were much more important than survival.
21:53It was not until they decided to consult Japanese Americans being held in internment camps,
22:02and had a chance to interrogate some of the early Japanese prisoners of war,
22:07that they discovered how abhorrent the very word surrender was in that culture.
22:12We really started off on the wrong foot in the Pacific.
22:18Our first leaflet was, I surrender.
22:21Well, Japanese soldier basically does not surrender.
22:24So we went over to the second leaflet was, I cease resistance, or I take the honorable course.
22:31The process of showing sample messages to prisoners of war are a culturally similar group,
22:39such as recent Japanese immigrants.
22:41And making changes based on their feedback became known as pre-testing.
22:49Because of the complexities of the Japanese language and culture,
22:53the Americans took the process a step further.
22:57Japanese Americans, or actual Japanese POWs, who were willing to cooperate with us.
23:04It would draw up the leaflets, not only to use the correct Japanese terminology,
23:08the right cultural forms and so on, but just to get the language correct.
23:15By 1944, the tide of war in the Pacific had turned.
23:19The American forces were advancing in a bloody island-hopping campaign
23:23against strong Japanese resistance.
23:27The Japanese soldiers were running low on food and other supplies,
23:31and morale was falling, but still very few surrendered.
23:41However, U.S. psychological warriors did have some success.
23:46Japanese American soldiers, known as Nisei, put themselves in harm's way
23:50to make loudspeaker broadcasts to the enemy in Japanese.
23:58The Americans also dropped leaflets before and after devastating raids by U.S. bombers.
24:03These messages stressed the superiority of American firepower and the futility of resisting.
24:13U.S. bombers.
24:15Telling them, this is what's going to happen tomorrow at 0700 hours.
24:19And it happens at 0700 hours.
24:21Now, we're going to do it again tomorrow at the same time.
24:25And if you'd just as soon not have to undergo that again, here's what you have to do.
24:35Even Japanese Emperor Hirohito reportedly felt the effect of these words and images.
24:45The Emperor picked up one in his own Imperial Palace garden,
24:49which told him when Tokyo was going to be bombed.
24:51And he said in an interrogation after the war, after reading this leaflet and seeing Tokyo being bombed then,
24:57that Japan was, you know, on its way to losing the war.
25:03Japanese psychological warfare efforts were not as successful.
25:08Western style and culture were apparently as foreign to them as their culture was to the Americans.
25:14The Japanese also violated one of the most important rules in psychological warfare.
25:21Don't insult the enemy soldier you're trying to persuade.
25:27Frequently, our enemies, whether Japanese or Germans, would portray the Americans as cowardly.
25:34That's just going to get people's backs up.
25:36I mean, that's elementary psychology.
25:40The Japanese leaflets that attempted to make Allied soldiers feel lonely
25:45or suggested that their wives or girlfriends were being unfaithful
25:49were some of the most sexually explicit leaflets used by any country.
25:55This tended to cause more humor than any drop in morale.
26:00And in fact, some soldiers were rather disappointed when these kind of leaflets weren't dropped.
26:04The radio broadcasts by Tokyo Rose also had little effect.
26:13Certain death awaits you over here.
26:16And now I'll play for you unfortunate Americans, a popular recording.
26:21She may have made some soldiers homesick, but convincing them to stop fighting was a far different matter.
26:36By the end of World War II, hundreds of thousands of enemy troops had surrendered to Allied forces,
26:42many of them clutching safe conduct passes or other leaflets.
26:48Although it was difficult to quantify precisely, the power of persuasion was still very apparent.
26:57Psychological warfare does help save lives on both counts.
27:03On the count of the American soldier who isn't going to be killed trying to dig an enemy soldier out of his foxhole or his bunker.
27:14And on the other count, the enemy soldier whose life is saved.
27:22Despite their success in supporting combat forces,
27:25most American propagandists re-entered civilian life after the war.
27:31Again, Brigadier General Robert McClure lobbied for more resources.
27:40Some progress was made, but there was still only a handful of trained people in Asia
27:45when the Korean War suddenly broke out in June 1950.
27:52At that time, J. Woodall Green, a key member of General MacArthur's psychological warfare team in World War II,
27:59was still stationed in the Pacific.
28:02He hurriedly marshaled his limited assets.
28:09The predominantly American United Nations psychological warfare team faced an opponent similar to the Japanese.
28:18Just as in World War II, the Americans learned by trial and error.
28:22Once the Chinese entered the conflict on the Communist side in October 1950,
28:29the Americans began to target them as well.
28:33South Korean personnel worked with the Americans to make loudspeaker broadcasts,
28:41both on the ground and for the first time in the air.
28:43Aerial loudspeakers could cover a much wider range and therefore reach a larger audience.
28:52But leaflets were still the primary means of influencing the Communist forces.
28:59Probably the most effective American message of the war was a creative leaflet known as Mr. White Boots.
29:10When the war settled into more of a stalemate near the 38th parallel,
29:15negotiations began at Panmunjom in 1951 and dragged on for almost two years.
29:21One of the American propagandists happened to notice something in a picture of one of the chief North Korean negotiators,
29:30Lieutenant General Nam Il, in the winter of 1952.
29:35We had a photograph of him striding to the negotiations in these beautiful soft-skinned white calf boots.
29:44They just put a phrase underneath saying,
29:46Mr. White Boots, do you think he cares about you?
29:49And another photograph showing a Chinese soldier's boots are rotting away.
29:53A number of defectors after this cited as a reason for defecting is their boots were gone.
30:00Like the Japanese in World War II,
30:02the North Koreans and Chinese often struggled with the English language.
30:07They were especially fond of referring to American leaders as
30:12Yankee imperialists running dogs of capitalism.
30:15It was not surprising that such language seemed strange
30:20and the messages unconvincing to American soldiers.
30:26However, some of the Communists' ideas did work.
30:29very much of the American soldiers.
30:31With numerous American soldiers already wondering why they were fighting in a Korean Civil War half a world away,
30:37the Leave Korea to the Koreans leaflet resonated with many.
30:42But once again, even compelling enemy messages did not lead Americans to freely surrender and adopt the North Korean way of life.
30:52North Korean way of life.
30:57Following the Korean War,
30:59psychological warfare capabilities in America
31:02were drastically reduced in the mid-1950s.
31:06Once again, U.S. propagandists would be ill-prepared
31:09for their nation's next conflict in Vietnam a decade later.
31:18Modern war has become a struggle for men's minds
31:21as well as for their bodies.
31:24In 1952, General Robert McClure's years of lobbying
31:28finally resulted in the opening of a training center
31:31eventually known as the U.S. Army Special Warfare Center
31:34at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
31:38Besides being a permanent home for the training
31:41of psychological warfare personnel,
31:42it was also home to the units
31:44that grew into the U.S. Army Special Forces.
31:47Despite McClure's efforts in the 1950s,
31:55U.S. propagandists still struggled to assist
31:58the South Vietnamese government in the mid-1960s
32:01as the conflict in Vietnam began to escalate.
32:05Psychological operations, or PSYOP, became the new,
32:12all-encompassing American military term
32:15for persuasion efforts aimed at friendly
32:17and enemy forces in Vietnam.
32:19One reason for this broader term
32:25was the fact that more of the propagandists' resources
32:28were devoted to winning the hearts and minds
32:30of friendly or neutral civilians
32:32than in earlier conflicts.
32:37The fact that there were two different types
32:40of enemy forces, regular North Vietnamese Army soldiers,
32:44or NVA, and local South Vietnamese guerrilla fighters,
32:48known as Viet Cong, or VC, presented yet another challenge
32:52for U.S. psychological warfare specialists.
32:57One audio recording in their arsenal of influence
33:00that was particularly effective was known as the Wandering Soul.
33:03It exploited the belief among many of the Vietnamese people
33:13that once a person is dead, the remains must be placed
33:20in an ancestral burial ground, otherwise the soul of that person
33:25would forever wander in space aimlessly.
33:28This tape consisted of a male voice that was recorded
33:33through an echo chamber that represented the soul
33:37of a dead soldier.
33:45But in some cases, the recording was actually
33:48too persuasive for its own good.
33:51The tape was so effective that we were instructed
33:57not to have it played within earshot of South Vietnamese forces,
34:01because they too were as susceptible
34:05as the Viet Cong or North Vietnamese.
34:10Improvements in high-speed presses meant that leaflet output
34:14in Vietnam was prodigious.
34:17Some units ran three presses operating around the clock
34:20to print enough leaflets to stretch 100 miles
34:23from end to end each day.
34:24This level of output and the effectiveness of many of the messages
34:30made these production centers targets for the VC in a country
34:34where there was no safe haven.
34:38Rick Hoffman was the operations sergeant at the original printing facility in Saigon.
34:44One of the most sincere forms of flattery, I think,
34:47is when the opposition thinks you're doing them so much harm that they want to blow you up.
34:52And on December 4th of 1966, they got wind that we were producing a leaflet
34:58that featured a VC colonel who had defected.
35:01A small team of explosives people, a clandestine operation, came across the roofs.
35:08The explosion was so loud that, at the time, I was off duty and in my billet.
35:14And we heard the explosion three miles away.
35:19These photographs show how extensive the damage was.
35:24But the leaflets had already been loaded onto trucks before the explosion
35:28and they were delivered on schedule.
35:33Using enemy soldiers to actually write personalized messages
35:37or make loudspeaker broadcasts back to their own troops
35:40was the primary tactic of America's most effective propaganda program in Vietnam.
35:48It was known as Chu Hoi, meaning open arms.
35:53The Americans and South Vietnamese promoted it as the first step towards a better way of life.
35:59They welcomed defectors, fed them, gave them a place to sleep, and even taught them a trade.
36:07It was the first step towards a better way of life.
36:10Sometimes defectors were used immediately after they'd surrendered to influence a battle that was still taking place.
36:17Such circumstances called for special quick reaction leaflets.
36:25As many as 50,000 leaflets could be delivered by air in an hour's time.
36:29Ray Deitch witnessed the power of a quick reaction leaflet on February 24th, 1969.
36:41The NVA launched an attack near the Benoit airbase.
36:45When South Vietnamese and American troops stopped the NVA attempts to overrun the base and free a large group of their prisoners,
36:55the NVA flooded into the village of Tanhep.
36:57The residents fled and a battle ensued.
37:03During that battle, there were two North Vietnamese that were captured.
37:08One was an officer.
37:10Our battalion persuaded him into making a tape broadcast, handwriting a leaflet that would be
37:18directed towards the surrounded remaining North Vietnamese forces in the village.
37:26This is the actual leaflet developed that day.
37:29It contains personal appeals to some of the man's former comrades by name.
37:35His identity has been obscured for security reasons since he may still face harsh repercussions in Vietnam.
37:44The leaflet drops in loudspeaker broadcasts were then combined with American air strikes.
37:52After about the fifth distribution of the leaflets and the tape,
37:58several North Vietnamese soldiers crawled out from the rubble with their arms raised.
38:04Soon others followed and others.
38:07And at the end of the day, we had collected 66 North Vietnamese prisoners of war.
38:18The village was recaptured without further loss of life.
38:24Most often, the NVA and VC preferred more violent forms of persuasion.
38:30They didn't hesitate to kill the civilian leaders of some villages to keep the rest of the people loyal to their cause.
38:39They also countered American psychological warfare with lectures to their own troops,
38:44which included fabricated horror stories about American treatment of NVA and VC prisoners.
38:50In particular, they said that when they were prisoners of war and were captured,
38:56they were not treated humanely, that they were not given the medical supplies that they were promised.
39:01So there were some lies that were told there to the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers,
39:07so they would not defect.
39:11In spite of these efforts to counter American propaganda,
39:15196,000 enemy soldiers, mostly VC, defected through the Chu Hoi program by war's end in 1973.
39:24The cyclical pattern of U.S. psychological operations falling into decay after major conflicts
39:35was finally broken in the 1980s, when President Reagan drastically increased military spending.
39:42By the time American troops were sent to Panama in 1989 to oust Manuel Noriega,
39:51psychological warfare had been integrated into the battle plan from an early stage.
39:59The psychological warfare image most people remembered from the 1989 invasion of Panama
40:05was Manuel Noriega being tormented by American loudspeakers playing rock music.
40:16This occurred in December 1989 while he was taking refuge in the Vatican's embassy building in Panama City,
40:23known as the Papal Nuncio.
40:28But what most people didn't realize was that American psychological warriors had a different objective in mind.
40:35It was a positive side benefit, but our primary mission was to protect the sensitive negotiations
40:48that were going on at the gate from being eavesdropped by the press.
40:55The music worked on both levels and Noriega eventually surrendered without a fight.
41:00Little did these soldiers imagine that Operation Just Cause would merely be a well-run test
41:08for a larger conflict just a few months away in the hot sands of the Middle East.
41:20Following the success of psychological operations in Panama,
41:23more American military leaders were willing to incorporate persuasion into their battle plans
41:30at a fairly early stage of the Persian Gulf War in 1991.
41:37Intelligence sources also indicated that the morale of conscripted Iraqi soldiers
41:42was expected to sink rapidly once fighting began.
41:45If we do have to go to war, the psychological operations are going to be absolutely a critical,
41:53critical part of any campaign that we must get involved in.
41:59Advanced planning allowed American psychological warriors to test their messages beforehand.
42:06Since there were no prisoners of war yet, Kuwaiti soldiers were used as the closest sample group.
42:12Once again, the complexities of a foreign culture quickly became evident.
42:21A lot of them couldn't figure out what a thought bubble was,
42:24because that's just not a common thing, apparently, in that part of the world.
42:28And another thing that we found out pretty early was that, for some reason,
42:33they didn't generally correlate what would be on the front of a printed product to what was on the back.
42:38So our entire book was pretty much invalidated.
42:44Changes were made, and Saudi Arabian illustrators were also used to make the drawings appear more
42:49authentic and familiar to Iraqi soldiers.
42:55Since Iraqi radio broadcasts portrayed the Americans as barbaric invading infidels,
43:01a decision was made to promote the unity between the Iraqis and other Arab countries in the coalition forces.
43:10But the most successful means of conveying this brotherhood made many Westerners uncomfortable.
43:18A drawing with an Iraqi flag and a Saudi flag pictured two men walking into a desert sunset holding hands.
43:25Some of the American forces thought two men holding hands implied much more than brotherhood.
43:32But the message was very effective, since heterosexual men frequently hold hands in many Middle Eastern cultures.
43:42When coalition forces began the aerial bombing campaign in January 1991,
43:48leaflets emphasizing their overwhelming force were dropped.
43:54As in previous conflicts, promising destruction, then delivering it, was effective.
44:02Just as intelligence reports had indicated, Iraqi morale plummeted,
44:06and many soldiers surrendered even before the ground campaign began.
44:13When loudspeaker teams advanced with the ground forces on February 24th,
44:17the number of surrendering Iraqi soldiers became almost overwhelming.
44:26I don't know how many, it could be a thousand, it could be two thousand,
44:29prisoners that surrendered just to our loudspeaker team.
44:32They told us that some of them had been hiding their leaflets since the first day that they got them.
44:38We got some intelligence from these folks that the Iraqi officers were taking everything white
44:42away from the soldiers so they couldn't surrender.
44:47Broadcasts and leaflets instructed the Iraqis to avoid destruction by abandoning their equipment.
44:54Safe conduct passes also provided detailed information on how to cease resistance and promised good
45:01treatment for prisoners of war.
45:02Since many Iraqi soldiers had little to eat after enduring five weeks of incessant bombing,
45:11messages that emphasized food were created to capitalize on Iraqi hunger.
45:18POWs who said that bananas were a rare delicacy in Iraq probably didn't think they were revealing anything important.
45:26But American psychological warfare specialists used this tasty bit of information to create a very compelling leaflet.
45:35Bananas were prominently displayed in a bowl being offered by coalition forces to Iraqi soldiers
45:42in what was known as the Arab feast message.
45:48Iraqi psychological warfare efforts were far less effective.
45:52They repeated many of the same mistakes that American opponents in earlier wars had committed,
45:58such as portraying U.S. soldiers in a cowardly and insulting manner.
46:04In the end, the combination of overwhelming coalition force, low Iraqi morale and effective messages
46:11created a unique situation in the Gulf War.
46:14It's been the benchmark for the use of SIOP ever since.
46:23This is because more Iraqi soldiers surrendered than were killed.
46:29And so Desert Storm stands as a central example of the effectiveness of psychological operations.
46:37But if the surrender of over 86,000 Iraqi soldiers in Desert Storm renewed Western faith in psychological warfare,
46:48the 1999 Balkan conflict in Kosovo raised question marks once again.
46:55Propagandists from member nations of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization,
47:00drenched the region with over 100 million leaflets after Serbian forces invaded the predominantly Muslim province of Kosovo.
47:1170 million more leaflets were delivered in the Balkans than in Desert Storm.
47:18NATO also conducted an effective bombing campaign.
47:22But without the threat of advancing ground troops, soldiers in Slobodan Milosevic's army could not be persuaded to surrender during the conflict.
47:32This served as a potent reminder that psychological warfare alone cannot win wars.
47:39Still, this shadowy art of influence continues to evolve.
47:43When the history of the 20th century is written and it's noticed that psychological warfare has been a part of every confrontation,
47:53the lesson for the 21st century is that it will remain a key instrument of combat situations on battlefields.
48:03Training goes on at the US Army Post in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, home of the 4th Psychological Operations Group.
48:10The psychological warfare specialists constantly hone their skills developing messages with advanced computer graphics,
48:20reproducing them on high-speed presses, delivering messages in the field,
48:25or using satellite feeds or the internet to disseminate them around the world.
48:33Striking that balance between the traditional principles and methods
48:37and media that we've evolved over the years,
48:41and also at the same time trying to adapt to the information age.
48:47That's the principal challenge.
48:51Another challenge that psychological warfare practitioners will have to overcome is the negative image of their craft.
48:58For all of its successes over the years, many people still see this field as little more than underhanded mind control.
49:09Psychological warfare has always rested as an uneasy activity in democracies, even in wartime.
49:17And much secrecy still surrounds its practice, and I think it's partly to do with the suspicion that using the mind to influence the mind is somehow unacceptable.
49:29But is it more acceptable to shoot somebody's brains out than to persuade that brain to drop down their weapon and live?
49:37Battlefield psychological warfare will remain an attractive option since it helps save lives.
49:48It's also less expensive than most conventional weapons systems.
49:53But influencing potential enemies during peacetime may be even more important.
49:58Certainly if we can prevent the combat or the war or the battle from occurring before it starts, there'll be a big advantage there to everyone involved.
50:10Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese military strategist, recognized the power of persuasion in preventing conflicts when he said,
50:18To win 100 victories in 100 battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the supreme mark of excellence.
50:32Ideally, the impact of psychological operations in the past, the messages developed in secret and exposed to the world, will provide lessons to help shorten wars in the future.
50:44Or perhaps even prevent them all together.
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