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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.
12:20He attacked Churchill and the royal family to attract an audience and gain credibility.
12:25But he also subtly criticized the Nazi party and promoted the idea that it was acceptable for German citizens.
12:34It was acceptable for German citizens 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.
12:48The British Broadcasting Corporation or BBC was often used to deliver psychological warfare messages since many German soldiers in France listened to this radio station.
13:03As the Germans prepared for a possible invasion across the English Channel in the summer of 1940, broadcasters mockingly offered to teach the invaders English phrases that they might soon need.
13:18Examples such as, I am burning and my boat is sinking were repeated over and over again.
13:25The 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.
13:37But what they didn't tell the Germans was that this was only a limited capability, covering a small fraction of England's southern coastline.
13:50This was a prime example of what another British propagandist, Richard Crossman, termed selective truth.
13:56Selective truth, meaning the truth, but not necessarily the whole truth.
14:03Often 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, where 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.
14:31General Dwight Eisenhower, commander of the North African landings, turned to Brigadier General Robert McClure to sort out the confusion.
14:42He had been the military attache in London prior to this time, so he knew the British allies.
14:51One of the reasons why McClure was selected as the man for the job, because 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. No one did.
15:08McClure's men stumbled through much of the North African campaign.
15:17Surrender appeals were sometimes dropped on German units that had recently enjoyed several battlefield victories.
15:25If we are 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.
15:36By the time the Allies advanced into Italy in July 1943, their psychological warfare efforts had improved.
15:45But even when messages were properly prepared and delivered when enemy morale was sufficiently low, failure was still possible.
15:54Credibility was essential, as the Allies learned after dropping one particular leaflet.
16:00It promised surrendering Germans the same food that American soldiers received, such as bacon and eggs.
16:09The 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.
16:19Even though the message was true, it backfired and made German soldiers more suspicious of future Allied persuasion efforts.
16:32When General Eisenhower was named Supreme Allied Commander and charged with retaking Western Europe in 1943,
16:38he again put Brigadier General McClure in charge of all psychological warfare activities.
16:47The man who had fallen into this field by accident had become a true believer in the power of persuasion in combat.
16:57He 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, it exploded, not paper.
17:20Once the Allies established a foothold on the continent in June 1944, their psychological warfare operations swung into action.
17:31In 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.
17:43Loudspeaker teams were right on the scene.
17:45Some 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.
17:57And that often worked.
18:02Loudspeakers were also mounted on tanks to offer more protection and to reduce casualties among these specialized soldiers.
18:17The 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.
18:32When they tried to inspire loneliness in American soldiers, they overplayed perceived notions of anti-Semitism in the U.S.
18:42by portraying American wives or girlfriends falling into the arms of lecherous Jews.
18:48As the Allied advance continued, the American psychological warriors did resort to fictional propaganda in November 1944.
19:01In 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.
19:13So we made duplicate copies of the Scorpion, in which we were saying things like,
19:20If your officers don't exhibit sufficient national socialist zeal, you can shoot them.
19:26Well, eventually Field Marshal Imodil caught on that we were using the Scorpion, and he told his own people to shut down and said,
19:31If 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.
19:52The 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.
20:09He 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.
20:26Cultural factors were still important, even with this type of straightforward appeal.
20:32The 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.
20:55The Allies waged an effective psychological warfare campaign in support of more traditional military weapons.
21:01in Europe.
21:03But their counterparts in the Pacific faced an even greater challenge.
21:08They would confront a mysterious, often incomprehensible culture, in 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,
21:34the U.S. psychological warfare specialists were few in number and unprepared to challenge their new enemy.
21:41They 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.
22:33The process of showing sample messages to prisoners of war are a culturally similar group,
22:39such as recent Japanese immigrants.
22:42And 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.
23:00Japanese 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.
23:12By 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.
23:26The Japanese soldiers were running low on food and other supplies,
23:31and morale was falling, but still very few surrendered.
23:35However, U.S. psychological warriors did have some success.
23:46Japanese American soldiers known as Nisei put themselves in harm's way
23:51to make loudspeaker broadcasts to the enemy in Japanese.
23:58The Americans also dropped leaflets before and after devastating raids by U.S. bombers.
24:04These messages stressed the superiority of American firepower and the futility of resisting.
24:14Telling 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.
24:36Even Japanese Emperor Hirohito reportedly felt the effect of these words and images.
24:42The emperor picked up one in his own imperial palace garden,
24:48which told him when Tokyo was going to be bombed.
24:51And he said in an interrogation after the war,
24:54after reading this leaflet and seeing Tokyo being bombed,
24:57that Japan was, you know, on its way to losing the war.
25:01Japanese 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.
25:15The Japanese also violated one of the most important rules in psychological warfare.
25:21Don't insult the enemy soldier you're trying to persuade.
25:25Frequently, 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.
25:54This tended to cause more humor than any drop in morale.
26:00And, in fact, some soldiers were rather disappointed
26:02when these kind of leaflets weren't dropped.
26:08The radio broadcasts by Tokyo Rose also had little effect.
26:13A certain death awaits you over here.
26:16And now I'll play for you, unfortunate Americans, a popular recording.
26:22She may have made some soldiers homesick, but convincing them to stop fighting was a far different matter.
26:32By 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.
26:54Psychological 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.
27:13And, on the other count, the enemy soldier whose life is saved.
27:21Despite their success in supporting combat forces, most American propagandists reentered civilian life after the war.
27:29Again, Brigadier General Robert McClure lobbied for more resources.
27:39Some progress was made, but there was still only a handful of trained people in Asia when the Korean War suddenly broke out in June 1950.
27:48At that time, J. Woodall Green, a key member of General MacArthur's psychological warfare team in World War II, was still stationed in the Pacific.
28:01He hurriedly marshalled his limited assets.
28:05The 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.
28:25Once the Chinese entered the conflict on the Communist side in October 1950, the Americans began to target them as well.
28:34South Korean personnel worked with the Americans to make loudspeaker broadcasts, both on the ground and for the first time in the air.
28:44Aerial loudspeakers could cover a much wider range and therefore reach a larger audience.
28:51But leaflets were still the primary means of influencing the Communist forces.
29:01Probably 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, negotiations began at Panmunjong in 1951 and dragged on for almost two years.
29:22One of the American propagandists happened to notice something in a picture of one of the chief North Korean negotiators, Lieutenant 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.
29:43They just put a phrase underneath saying, Mr. White Boots, do you think he cares about you?
29:48And another photograph showing a Chinese soldier's boots are rotting away.
29:52A number of defectors after this cited as a reason for defecting is their boots were gone.
29:57Like the Japanese in World War II, the North Koreans and Chinese often struggled with the English language.
30:07They were especially fond of referring to American leaders as Yankee imperialists running dogs of capitalism.
30:14It was not surprising that such language seemed strange and the messages unconvincing to American soldiers.
30:26However, some of the communists' ideas did work.
30:31With numerous American soldiers already wondering why they were fighting in a Korean civil war half a world away,
30:38the Leave Korea to the Koreans leaflet resonated with many.
30:45But once again, even compelling enemy messages did not lead Americans to freely surrender and adopt the North Korean way of life.
30:57Following the Korean War, psychological warfare capabilities in America were drastically reduced in the mid-1950s.
31:05Once again, U.S. propagandists would be ill-prepared for their nation's next conflict in Vietnam a decade later.
31:18Modern war has become a struggle for men's minds as well as for their bodies.
31:24In 1952, General Robert McClure's years of lobbying finally resulted in the opening of a training center
31:30eventually known as the U.S. Army Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
31:37Besides being a permanent home for the training of psychological warfare personnel,
31:42it was also home to the units that grew into the U.S. Army Special Forces.
31:47Despite McClure's efforts in the 1950s, U.S. propagandists still struggled to assist the South Vietnamese government in the mid-1960s
32:02as the conflict in Vietnam began to escalate.
32:05Psychological operations, or PSYOP, became the new, all-encompassing American military term for persuasion efforts aimed at friendly and enemy forces in Vietnam.
32:19One reason for this broader term was the fact that more of the propagandists' resources were devoted to winning the hearts and minds of friendly or neutral civilians than in earlier conflicts.
32:33The fact that there were two different types of enemy forces, regular North Vietnamese Army soldiers, or NVA, and local South Vietnamese guerrilla fighters, known as Viet Cong, or VC, presented yet another challenge for U.S. psychological warfare specialists.
32:54One audio recording in their arsenal of influence that was particularly effective was known as the Wandering Soul.
33:07It exploited the belief among many of the Vietnamese people that once a person is dead, the remains must be placed in an ancestral burial ground,
33:21otherwise the soul of that person would forever wander in space aimlessly.
33:28This tape consisted of a male voice that was recorded through an echo chamber that represented the soul of a dead soldier.
33:38But in some cases, the recording was actually too persuasive for its own good.
33:50The tape was so effective that we were instructed not to have it played within earshot of South Vietnamese forces,
34:00because they too were as susceptible as the Viet Cong or North Vietnamese.
34:10Improvements in high-speed presses meant that leaflet output in Vietnam was prodigious.
34:16Some units ran three presses operating around the clock to print enough leaflets to stretch a hundred miles from end to end each day.
34:24This level of output and the effectiveness of many of the messages made these production centers targets for the VC in a country where there was no safe haven.
34:36Rick Hoffman was the operations sergeant at the regional printing facility in Saigon.
34:43One of the most sincere forms of flattery, I think, is when the opposition thinks you're doing them so much harm that they want to blow you up.
34:50And on December 4th of 1966, they got wind that we were producing a leaflet that featured a VC colonel who had defected.
35:01A small team of explosives people, clandestine operation, came across the roofs.
35:08The explosion was so loud, and at the time I was off-duty and in my billet, and we heard the explosion three miles away.
35:16These photographs show how extensive the damage was.
35:22But the leaflets had already been loaded onto trucks before the explosion, and they were delivered on schedule.
35:29Using enemy soldiers to actually write personalized messages or make loudspeaker broadcasts back to their own troops was the primary tactic of America's most effective propaganda program in Vietnam.
35:45It was known as Chu Hoi, meaning open arms.
35:51The Americans and South Vietnamese promoted it as the first step towards a better way of life.
35:58They welcomed defectors, fed them, gave them a place to sleep, and even taught them a trade.
36:04Sometimes defectors were used immediately after they'd surrendered to influence a battle that was still taking place.
36:16Such circumstances called for special quick reaction leaflets.
36:20As 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.
36:38The NVA launched an attack near the Benoit Air Base.
36:45When South Vietnamese and American troops stopped the NVA attempts to overrun the base and free a large group of their prisoners, the NVA flooded into the village of Tanhep.
36:56The residents fled and a battle ensued.
37:02During 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 directed towards the surrounding remaining North Vietnamese forces in the village.
37:23This is the actual leaflet developed that day.
37:29It contains personal appeals to some of the man's former comrades by name.
37:34His 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 airstrikes.
37:49After about the fifth distribution of the leaflets and the tape, several 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.
38:16The village was recaptured without further loss of life.
38:21Most often, the NVA and VC preferred more violent forms of persuasion.
38:27They didn't hesitate to kill the civilian leaders of some villages to keep the rest of the people loyal to their cause.
38:34They also countered American psychological warfare with lectures to their own troops, which included fabricated horror stories about American treatment of NVA and VC prisoners.
38:49In particular, they said that when they were prisoners of war and were captured, they 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, so they would not defect.
39:08In spite of these efforts to counter American propaganda, 196,000 enemy soldiers, mostly VC, defected through the Chu Hoi program by war's end in 1973.
39:23The cyclical pattern of U.S. psychological operations falling into decay after major conflicts was finally broken in the 1980s, when President Reagan drastically increased military spending.
39:41By the time American troops were sent to Panama in 1989 to oust Manuel Noriega, psychological 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 was Manuel Noriega being tormented by American loudspeakers playing rock music.
40:11This occurred in December 1989 while he was taking refuge in the Vatican's embassy building in Panama City, known as the Papal Nuncio.
40:25But what most people didn't realize was that American psychological warriors had a different objective in mind.
40:32Our primary mission with the rock music was not to blast Noriega, although it was a positive side benefit, but our primary mission was to protect the sensitive negotiations that were going on at the gate from being eavesdropped by the press.
40:52The music worked on both levels and Noriega eventually surrendered without a fight.
40:59Little did these soldiers imagine that Operation Just Cause would merely be a well-run test for a larger conflict just a few months away in the hot sands of the Middle East.
41:10Following the success of psychological operations in Panama, more American military leaders were willing to incorporate persuasion into their battle plans at a fairly early stage of the Persian Gulf War in 1991.
41:33Intelligence sources also indicated that the morale of conscripted Iraqi soldiers was 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, critical part of any campaign that we must get involved in.
41:58Advanced planning allowed American psychological warriors to test their messages beforehand.
42:05Since 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.
42:19A lot of them couldn't figure out what a thought bubble was, because that's just not a common thing apparently in that part of the world.
42:27Another thing that we found out pretty early was that for some reason they didn't generally correlate what would be on the front of a printed product to what was on the back.
42:37So our entire book was pretty much invalidated.
42:43Changes were made and Saudi Arabian illustrators were also used to make the drawings appear more authentic and familiar to Iraqi soldiers.
42:51Since Iraqi radio broadcasts portrayed the Americans as barbaric invading infiddles, a decision was made to promote the unity between the Iraqis and other Arab countries in the coalition forces.
43:07But the most successful means of conveying this brotherhood made many Westerners uncomfortable.
43:14A drawing with an Iraqi flag and a Saudi flag pictured two men walking into a desert sunset holding hands.
43:24Some of the American forces thought two men holding hands implied much more than brotherhood.
43:31But the message was very effective since heterosexual men frequently hold hands in many Middle Eastern cultures.
43:39When coalition forces began the aerial bombing campaign in January 1991, leaflets emphasizing their overwhelming force were dropped.
43:52As in previous conflicts, promising destruction, then delivering it, was effective.
43:59Just as intelligence reports had indicated, Iraqi morale plummeted and many soldiers surrendered even before the ground campaign began.
44:12When loudspeaker teams advanced with the ground forces on February 24th, the number of surrendering Iraqi soldiers became almost overwhelming.
44:25I don't know how many, it could be a thousand, it could be two thousand prisoners 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.
44:37We got some intelligence from these folks that the Iraqi officers were taking everything white away from the soldiers so they couldn't surrender.
44:44Broadcasts and leaflets instructed the Iraqis to avoid destruction by abandoning their equipment.
44:53Safe conduct passes also provided detailed information on how to cease resistance and promised good treatment for prisoners of war.
45:02Since many Iraqi soldiers had little to eat after enduring five weeks of incessant bombing, messages that emphasized food were created to capitalize on Iraqi hunger.
45:16P.O.W.'s who said that bananas were a rare delicacy in Iraq probably didn't think they were revealing anything important.
45:25But American psychological warfare specialists used this tasty bit of information to create a very compelling leaflet.
45:33Bananas were prominently displayed in a bowl being offered by coalition forces to Iraqi soldiers in what was known as the Arab feast message.
45:44Iraqi psychological warfare efforts were far less effective.
45:51Iraqi psychological warfare efforts were far less effective.
45:53They repeated many of the same mistakes that American opponents in earlier wars had committed, such as portraying U.S. soldiers in a cowardly and insulting manner.
46:03In the end, the combination of overwhelming coalition force, low Iraqi morale and effective messages created a unique situation in the Gulf War.
46:14It's been the benchmark for the use of SIOP ever since.
46:22This 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,
46:46the 1999 Balkan conflict in Kosovo raised question marks once again.
46:53Propagandists from member nations of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, drenched the region with over 100 million leaflets after Serbian forces invaded the predominantly Muslim province of Kosovo.
47:1070 million more leaflets were delivered in the Balkans than in Desert Storm.
47:15NATO also conducted an effective bombing campaign.
47:21But without the threat of advancing ground troops, soldiers in Slobodan Milosevic's army could not be persuaded to surrender during the conflict.
47:31This served as a potent reminder that psychological warfare alone cannot win wars.
47:38Still, this shadowy art of influence continues to evolve.
47:45When the history of the 20th century is written and it's noticed that psychological warfare has been a part of every confrontation,
47:52the 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,
48:19reproducing them on high-speed presses, delivering messages in the field or using satellite feeds or the Internet to disseminate them around the world.
48:29Striking that balance between traditional principles and methods and media that we've evolved over the years and also at the same time trying to adapt to the information age, that's the principle challenge.
48:48Another challenge that psychological warfare practitioners will have to overcome is the negative image of their craft.
48:59For all of its successes over the years, many people still see this field as little more than underhanded mind control.
49:07Psychological warfare has always rested as an uneasy activity in democracies, even in wartime.
49:17Much 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?
49:41Battlefield psychological warfare will remain an attractive option since it helps save lives.
49:47It's also less expensive than most conventional weapons systems.
49:51But influencing potential enemies during peacetime may be even more important.
49:59Certainly if we can prevent the combat or the war or the battle from occurring before it starts, there will be a big advantage there to everyone involved.
50:09Sun 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.
50:25To subdue the enemy without fighting is the supreme mark of excellence.
50:31Ideally, 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.
50:43Or perhaps even prevent them altogether.
50:48To be continued...
50:49To be continued...
50:50To be continued...
51:18To be continued...
51:20To be continued...
51:48To be continued...