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The U.S. Department of Defense defines psychological warfare (PSYWAR) as: "The planned use of propaganda and other psychological actions having the primary purpose of influencing the opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior of hostile foreign groups in such a way as to support the achievement of national objectives."^{[citation needed]} Psychological Warfare is also known as infowars.

Contents 1 History 1.1 Alexander the Great 1.2 The Mongols 2 Propaganda Warfare 3 Postwar Military and Political Methods 4 British Use of Psychological Warfare 5 United States Use of Psychological Warfare 6 Israeli Use of Psychological Warfare 7 Psychological Warfare in the Information Age 8 Recent military psychological warfare methods 9 References 10 See also 11 External links

Although not always accredited as the first practitioner of psychological warfare, Alexander the Great of Macedon undoubtedly showed to be effective in swaying the mindsets of the populaces that were expropriated in his campaigns. In order to keep the new Macedonian states from revolting against their leader, Alexander the Great would leave a number of his men behind in each city to introduce Greek culture and interbreed. Since this method of persuasion did indeed influence loyalist and separatist opinions alike, it directly altered the psyches of the occupied people to conform.

Genghis Khan, leader of the Mongols in the 13th century AD, united his people to eventually conquer more territory than any other leader in human history. Defeating the will of the enemy was the top priority.

Before attacking a settlement, the Mongol generals demanded submission to the Khan, and threatened the initial villages with complete destruction if they refuse to surrender. After winning the battle, the Mongol general "kept their promise" and performed massacres. Examples include the destruction of the nations of Kiev and Khwarizm. Consequently, tales of the encroaching horde spread to the next villages, intentionally. This created an aura of insecurity with the resistance. Subsequent nations were much more likely to surrender to the Mongols without fighting. Often, this in itself secured quick Mongol victories.

Genghis Khan also employed tactics that made his numbers seem greater than they actually were. During night operations he ordered each soldier to light three torches at dusk in order to deceive and intimidate enemy scouts. He also sometimes had objects tied to the tails of his horses, so that when riding on an open and dry field, would raise a cloud of dust that gives the enemy the impression of great numbers.

The Mongolians also employed other gruesome terror tactics to weaken the will to resist. In one infamous incident, the Mongol leader Tamerlane built a pyramid of 90,000 human heads in front of the walls of Delhi, to convince them to surrender. Other tactics included firing severed human heads from catapults into enemy lines and over city walls to frighten citizens, and spread disease.

Most of the events throughout history involving psychological warfare utilized tactics that instilled fear or a sense of awe towards the enemy. But as humanity continued into the 19th century, advances in communication technology acted as a catalyst for mass propaganda usage.

One of the first leaders to inexorably gain fanatical support through the use of microphone technology was leader of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler. By first creating a speaking environment, designed by Joseph Goebbels, that exaggerated his presence to make him seem almost god-like, Hitler then coupled this with the resonating projections of his orations through a microphone. Prime Minister of Great Britain Winston Churchill made similar use of radio for propaganda against the Nazis.

During WWII, psychological warfare was used effectively by the military as well. The enormous success, that the invasion of Normandy displayed, was a fusion of psychological warfare with military deception. Before D-Day, Operation Quicksilver created a fictional "First United States Army Group" (FUSAG) commanded by General George Patton that supposedly would invade France at the Pas-de-Calais. American troops used false signals, decoy installations and phony equipment to deceive German observation aircraft and radio interception operators. This had the desired effect of misleading the German High Command as to the location of the primary invasion, and of keeping reserves away from the actual landings. Erwin Rommel was the primary target of the psychological aspects of this operation. Convinced that Patton would lead the invasion, as he was clearly the best Allied armored commander, Rommel was caught off-guard and unable to react strongly to the Normandy invasion, since Patton's illusory FUSAG had not "yet" landed. Confidence in his own intelligence and judgement was also reduced enough that the German response to the beachhead was not decisive.

The Cold War raised psychological techniques to a high art and merged them with economic warfare, character assassination, and brainwashing. Some techniques that were used:

• Broadcasting of white noise to convince eavesdroppers that encryption was in use — and to waste vast sums of money and man-hours trying to decrypt it.
• Capturing of enemy spies and brainwashing them into filmed/taped confessions that would embarrass and demoralize their side and their families.^{[citation needed]}
• Recruiting particularly innocent-appearing individuals to be spies or saboteurs so that, when revealed or captured, doubt would be cast on many more individuals.
• Various methods to ensure that any captured agent implicated as many innocent others as possible, for instance, maximizing the number of questionable contacts.

The British were one of the first major military powers to use psychological warfare in World War II, especially against the Japanese. The Gurkhas, who are Nepalese soldiers in British service, have always been feared by the enemy. The British put this to great effect, as Gurkhas were used to terrorize Japanese soldiers through nighttime raids on their camps. It has also been reported that when the Gurkhas landed on the Falkland Islands, some Argentinian troops abandoned their positions and fled.

The United States ran an extensive program of psychological warfare during the Vietnam War. The Phoenix Program was not only a project of assassination but also aimed to terrorize the Vietnamese civilian population so that they would not support the Viet Cong. When civilians were assassinated, the CIA operatives and Special Forces placed poker cards in the mouth of the deceased as a calling card. During the Phoenix Program, over 19,000 Vietnamese civilians were tortured and killed[1][2] [3][4].

The CIA made extensive use of death squads in Nicaragua to destabilize the Sandinista government which the US claimed was communist[5]. The CIA used psychological warfare techniques against the Panamanians by broadcasting pirate TV broadcasts. The CIA has extensively used propaganda broadcasts against the Cuban government through TV Marti, based in Miami, Florida. However, the Cuban government has been successful in jamming the signal of TV Marti, making the CIA effort useless. The CIA has also trained Cuban right wing insurgents, their most notable operation being the Bay of Pigs operation. Cuban right wing terrorists such as Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles were also trained to bomb Cuban resort hotels [6]. Orlando Bosch and other Cuban terrorists were responsible for the bombing of Cubana airlines in 1976 [7] [8].

In the Iraq War, The United States used the Shock and awe campaign to terrorize, psychologically maim, and break the will of the Iraqi people to fight. There have also been claims that Iraqi death squads were trained and operated by the CIA using methods similar to those of the Phoenix Program[9][10] [11].

The CIA conducted several experiments in its MKULTRA project. Some of these experiments were performed on hospitalized persons in Montreal, Canada, without the informed consent of the subjects. LSD, electroshocks, and drug-induced comas were used trying to find efficient brainwashing methods. The affected patients eventually received financial compensation from the government of Canada, which knew about the CIA experiments.

The Israelis have used various psychological warfare tactics against the Palestinians and the Arabs in general. In recent years, the Israeli airforce has been making nightly low-level flights by supersonic aircraft to create sonic booms over Palestinian civilians to wake them from sleep.[12][13] [14][15].

Their famous secret service, the Mossad, is often described as the most efficient in the world, using all known psychological tactics against Palestinians or even against their own people as needed.

The neutrality of this article is disputed. Please see the discussion on the talk page.

As these techniques impinged on the civilian realm the threat grew and the paranoia eventually emerged that the government could wage psychological warfare on its own people through the censorship of information. This inadvertently influenced several anti-government/anti-establishment social revolutions in the 1960s and 1970s, including counter-culture and anarchism. The Yippies in particular were among the first to exploit culture jamming.

The so-called "information age" that began in the 1980s was arguably a simple extension of the psychological warfare mindset and principles throughout all civilian activities of developed nations, but especially the English-speaking countries. Growing exponentially through the rise of radio, broadcast television, satellite television, and cable television, and finally manifesting itself on the Internet, the power of those who framed facts about the world steadily grew during the postwar period. A failed UNESCO effort to put countries in more control of reporting about themselves was evidence that many in the developing world saw the extreme danger of most of their citizens learning about their own country from Western news sources.

By the end of the 20th century, however, good factual information on almost anything was not so difficult to attain, even for poor working people. Though this has been thought to be one of the greatest achievements in human history, the susceptibility for deep framing of information to control people and nations on a grand scale became apparent to many intellectual figures as the century closed: Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, Neil Postman, George Lakoff and others argued that the new data-rich environment greatly increased the power of those who were trusted to report and sort it out.

This power was hardly restricted to military use of information. The rise of Microsoft based on its control of operating system technology for most personal computers in the 1980s and 1990s proved that control of the most basic information elements of a system could yield a great deal of power to interfere with competitors and rivals. The term ontological warfare came into use to describe, for instance, Microsoft's methods of modifying application programming interfaces to ensure that competitors could not ever fully exploit the operating system itself.^{[citation needed]}

Doubt that competitors could do so caused a great many companies not to be funded or invest in competing efforts, according to a United States Federal Court finding of fact against the company. See a separate article on that subject.

The increasing popularity of the open source operating system Linux can be at least partly attributed to the restrictive nature of Microsoft and its products.

However, most uses of the term psychological warfare refers to military methods, such as:

• Distributing pamphlets, e.g. in the Gulf War, encouraging desertion or (in WWII) supplying instructions on how to surrender.
• Propaganda radio stations, such as Lord Haw-Haw in World War II on the Germany calling station
• Renaming cities and other places when captured, such as Baghdad airport
• Shock and awe military strategy
• Projecting repetitive and annoying sounds and music for long periods at high volume towards groups under siege.
• The use of Humvees and other vehicles to create mobile broadcasting stations, allowing the US military to verbally harass and agitate Taliban fighters in Afghanistan so that they emerge from hiding places and engage US troops.
• Spreading rumours, hoaxes and wild stories.
• Use of loudspeaker systems to communicate with enemy soldiers.

Most of these techniques were developed during WWII or earlier, and have been used to some degree in every conflict since. Daniel Lerner was in the OSS (the predecessor to the US CIA) and in his book, attempts to analyze how effective the various strategies were. He concludes that there is little evidence that any of them were dramatically successful, except perhaps surrender instructions over loudspeakers when victory was imminent. It should be noted, though, that measuring the success or failure of psychological warfare is very hard, as the conditions are very far from being a controlled experiment.

Lerner divides psychological warfare operations into three categories:

• White -- truthful and not strongly biased, where the source of information is acknowledged.
• Grey -- largely truthful, containing no information that can be proven wrong; the source may or may not be hidden.
• Black -- Intended to deceive the enemy.

Lerner points out that grey and black operations ultimately have a heavy cost, in that the target population will sooner or later recognize them as propaganda and discredit the source. He writes "This is one of the few dogmas advanced by Sykewarriors that is likely to endure as an axiom of propaganda: Credibility is a condition of persuasion. Before you can make a man do as you say, you must make him believe what you say." (Lerner, 1971 p. 28) Consequently, the Allied strategy in WWII was predominantly one of truth (with certain exceptions).

• Fred Cohen. Frauds, Spies, and Lies - and How to Defeat Them. ISBN 1-878109-36-7 (2006). ASP Press.
• Fred Cohen. World War 3 ... Information Warfare Basics. ISBN 1-878109-40-5 (2006). ASP Press.
• Paul M. A. Linebarger. Psychological Warfare. International Propaganda and Communications. ISBN 0-405-04755-X (1948). Revised second edition, Duell, Sloan and Pearce (1954).
• Daniel Lerner. Psychological Warfare Against Nazi Germany: The Sykewar Campaign, D-Day to VE-Day. ISBN 0-262-12045-3 or 0-262-62019-7 (1949). George W. Stewart, New York; Reprinted (1971) MIT Press.

• Doublespeak
• Information Operations Roadmap
• Newspeak
• Political Warfare Executive
• Psychological Warfare Division
• PSYOP
• Propaganda
• Psychological operations (United States)
• Zarqawi PSYOP program

• Pentagon psychological warfare operation
• OSS - The Psychology of War