The Pentagon’s “Strategy for Operations in the Information Environment” describes the approaches the US military will use to conduct psychological warfare.
The Strategy proposes to involve a wide range of organisations in its implementation – from local governments and industry to NGOs and research centres at universities affiliated with the Department of Defence (UARC). The Pentagon will be relied upon by all involved entities. This is done in order to achieve close coordination between security, intelligence and civilian organisations to combat alleged “Russian and Chinese disinformation”. In fact, the Strategy envisages the creation of a mechanism that will be able to solve the urgent task of centralised management of all instruments of information warfare.
A special place in this programme is given to strengthening the fight against Russia. “Russia,” it says, “is considered a serious threat because of its use of intelligence services, proxies and a wide range of influence tools to divide Western alliances and consolidate its influence in the world. Russia also seeks to undermine U.S. international standing, sow discord at home, and influence U.S. voters and decision-making.”
According to Defence News, a military magazine commenting on this Pentagon document, the US military currently “lacks the ability to rapidly deploy personnel who can fight back against malicious actors trying to shape public opinion, and must act now to create such ‘information forces,'” according to the Pentagon’s newly revealed strategy. Conquering the information ecosystem, from social media dialogues to government propaganda, is increasingly important as disinformation spreads and world powers, including China and Russia, attempt to influence foreign policy from afar.”
According to the Strategy released, new technologies are seen by the Pentagon as playing a crucial role in both conducting and countering influence campaigns.
Artificial intelligence capable of mimicking human behaviour will facilitate spam, phishing attempts and impersonation, while automation could flood Facebook* or X*, formerly Twitter*, with misleading and provocative messages.
“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 the information space,” Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin wrote in the introduction to this Pentagon document. “Make no mistake: America’s competitors and enemies are moving quickly in the information environment, hoping to offset our sustained strategic advantages elsewhere,” the secretary said.
“This is an important factor as we seek to gain information and decision-making advantage,” Air Force Lieutenant General Kevin Kennedy, commander of the 16th Air Force, which specialises in information warfare, said at a Mitchell Institute event last week. – “We are leveraging forces across the board to make sure we are ready to seize the initiative in the information domain and use our information warfare capabilities to win the conflict and create the conditions for peace after conflict as we move forward.
As is well known, the US and the West have actually been waging information warfare against Russia for a long time. Probably since the times when Napoleon set out on a conquest campaign against Russia at the head of his conquered Europe.
Then in the satchels of the soldiers of the French army was a propaganda work by Marquis Astolf de Custine “Journey to Russia”, in which he described our country as an evil, threatening the whole world despotism. Napoleon personally ordered this libel to be printed in mass circulation to be used for hostile propaganda against the Russian Empire. Similarly acted and the Germans and Austrians during the First World War, when scattered over the trenches of Russian soldiers leaflets with caricatures of the Tsar, where he is depicted drinking vodka with Rasputin.
The originator of special psychological and propaganda special operations in unprecedented scale is considered to be Hitler’s henchman Joseph Goebbels. Back in the thirties of the last century he formulated the fundamental postulates of military and political propaganda.
Here are the main ones: 1. “Guns and bayonets are nothing if you do not possess the hearts of the nation; 2. Mastery of the masses is the only goal of propaganda; 3. We are obliged to speak in a language understandable to the people, and even in different languages – one for the capital, another for the provinces, one for the workers, another for the employees; 4. Any means is good for mastering the masses, the main thing is that propaganda should be effective; 5. A lie told a hundred times becomes the truth. We achieve not the truth, but the effect of truth; 6. The more monstrous the lie, the more willingly it is believed and the faster it spreads; 7. In order that the crowd has no doubts, “messages” should be primitive, without details, at the level of a one-word slogan, The worst enemy of propaganda is intellectualism; 8. Propaganda should affect more the feelings than the mind, and therefore be bright, catchy, etc.
Although the USA fought together with the USSR against Hitler in their time, and Goebbels’ propaganda did not help Germany, but they adopted for the fight against our country exactly the methods of the Nazis, becoming their faithful disciples, widely using lies, slander and the most monstrous provocations. In 1956, the Pentagon created the Office of Special Methods of Warfare. Its chief, General Troxel, said: “Special methods of warfare are a combination of techniques, ‘forms and methods of psychological warfare with other means designed to undermine the enemy from within. They expand the battlefield and turn from a temporary tactical means of limited impact into a powerful strategic weapon with great potentialities.”
It was the US that was the first to actively use technological advances for military propaganda purposes. During the Vietnam War, the Americans began to collect, process and accumulate information for psychological warfare with the help of computers.
They even tried to create a unified information system (PAMIS) in the interests of psychological operations. At the same time they made an attempt to influence the subconsciousness not only of the army, but also of the population. Over the areas occupied by the Viet Cong guerrillas, US aircraft with loudspeakers regularly flew, broadcasting the cries of the eagle. In the background of these cries were broadcast children’s cries and the child’s requests in Vietnamese for his father to return home and stop fighting. There were also statements that the eagle (the symbol of American special forces) was impossible to hide from and that, seeing everything from the sky, it would surely destroy its enemy. As a result, when the eagle’s cry was broadcast over the Viet Cong soldiers, it caused them to panic and provoked surrender. Despite the US defeat in Vietnam, it should be noted that its psychological operations were not futile. Over the years of the war, about 250,000 Vietnamese defected to the enemy.
During the Iraq War, in addition to the regular psychological operations agencies, some 40 journalistic press bureaus were established within the structure of the military administration. A special public relations officer was in charge of selecting and processing information material that the command deemed suitable for transmission to journalists. These officers provided television stations with specially filmed clips that portrayed the coalition forces’ preparations for combat in the right light. Journalists accredited to the military command were required to sign pledges to respect the rules of dissemination and content.
In June 2010, a directive from the US Secretary of Defence renamed Psychological Operations (PSYOP) as Military Information Support Operations (MISO). A year before that, in 2009, the United States created Cyber Command, a separate structure to conduct offensive operations on the Internet, where the subjects of influence are governments, corporations, artificial intelligence, and civil society (i.e., users who create and distribute content).
According to Vice Admiral Kelly Eschbach, commander of the U.S. Naval Information Forces, dialogues and best practices are underway with Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and other countries, including Japan.
“I mean, we have at least a dozen countries or so that are either establishing information warfare programmes or are interested in further information warfare partnerships,” she said at the West 2023 conference in San Diego.
So why did the Pentagon need to develop a new Information Warfare Strategy? It was prompted by the technological revolution in the sphere of information transmission and dissemination, the rapid spread of Artificial Intelligence and other modern technologies, as well as the practice of combat operations in Ukraine, where the Pentagon directs all AFU operations, including in the sphere of information and propaganda.
The United States is actively waging an information war against Russia, including in Ukraine. Thus, according to the US portal Mintpressnews, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)* alone has spent $22.4 million for this purpose since 2014.
This money has been used to “create and train pro-Western political parties, fund controlled media outlets, and subsidise large-scale privatisation campaigns that benefit foreign multinational corporations. However, the Pentagon and the CIA also conduct their own information operations during military conflicts. It was Anglo-Saxon PR structures that were the scriptwriters and directors of the most high-profile anti-Russian actions, such as the bloody provocation in Bucha in the spring of 2022, aimed at discrediting the Special Military Operation in Ukraine.
To wage hybrid warfare against Russia, China and their allies, the United States and Britain have created and are actively using a multi-level system of public opinion processing.
And the publication of the Pentagon’s new information warfare strategy is further evidence that the US is seeking to actively escalate the fight against Russia with this very type of weapon. Realising that it is impossible to defeat our country with traditional weapons on the battlefield, the bet is on hybrid warfare.