By Invitation

‘Munitions of the mind’:

A brief history of military
psychological operations
Received (in revised form): 11th July, 2007

Philip M. Taylor
is Professor of International Communications at the University of Leeds. He is the author of numerous works on propaganda
in its historical and contemporary appliance, including Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda from the Ancient World
to the Present Day (3rd edn, Manchester University Press, 2003). He lectures all around the world, including to such defence
establishments as the UK Ministry of Defence and NATO. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of the Center for
Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California. He is also an adjunct professor at the Universiti Teknologi Mara,
Shah Alam, Malaysia.

Abstract Western militaries have been progressively employing psychological

operations (PSYOPS) in support of their military missions for almost a century. This
article introduces readers of this journal to a brief history and outline of some of the
key developments, particularly with reference to the British and the Americans. Little
noticed, and rarely understood in their proper military context, PSYOPS has a poor public
reputation, being associated with the ‘black arts’ of deception and disinformation. In
fact, in their overt form, PSYOPS are closely related to branding and marketing — but in
a battlefield or combat or other military mission’s context. Whether the military are best
equipped to undertake such work has come into question largely as a result of the conflict
in Iraq. There have, however, been some notable successes as well as some serious
failures. The latter are usually more to do with the political rather than the military context.
Place Branding and Public Diplomacy (2007) 3, 196–204. doi:10.1057/palgrave.pb.6000064

Keywords: Propaganda, warfare, world wars, war on terror, psychological operations

INTRODUCTION disposal in order to win — and this

Correspondence:
Philip M. Taylor,
Institute of Communications Studies,
University of Leeds,
Leeds LS2 9JT, UK.
Tel: +44 (0) 113 435810
e-mail: p.m.taylor@leeds.ac.uk
It is almost mandatory in any writing
about military Psychological Operations
(PSYOPS) to begin with the quote from
Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese military
strategist, that ‘to subdue the enemy
without resort to force is the acme of
skill’. The history of mankind, however,
is replete with conflicts where this did
not occur. In a sense, Sun Tzu was talking
about deterrence. But when nations go
to war because deterrence has failed, or
because they wanted to pursue their
national interests by force, they have
to use any and every weapon at their
includes psychological weapons targeting
the full range of human perception that
attempt to change perception and
behaviour on the battlefield and beyond.
These ‘munitions of the mind’ may have
become ever more sophisticated in their
application and methods of dissemination
but they have always had one thing in
common: they are directed at human
beings.
THE ‘P’ WORD
What we are essentially talking about is
‘propaganda’, which nowadays tends to

196 Place Branding and Public Diplomacy Vol. 3, 3, 196–204 © 2007 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 1751-8040 $30.00
www.palgrave-journals.com/pb
 A brief history of military psychological operations
be regarded as a dirty word. It was not,
however, always a pejorative term. Invented by
the Catholic Church in the 17th century to
describe an organisation designed to combat
the growth of Protestantism, propaganda was
initially about the sowing of ideas and
values — and it was about faith. In particular,
it was about faith in institutions and the
people who ran them in accordance with
‘God’s Laws’. In ancient times, before the
advent of Christianity, commanders like
Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar
understood all too well the need not only to
motivate their soldiers to fight but also to
sustain popular support for military campaigns
being fought by fathers, brothers and sons
who could only be away from the land they
farmed until Harvest time. Ancient battles
were therefore short, brutal, seasonal affairs and
victory was the subject of great celebration in
public monuments, art, sculpture, re-enactments
and ceremonies. Battlefields were places where
people (men) made their place in history, and
performance on them influenced the ability
to better oneself in society or, in wars where
religion was a major factor, in the afterlife.
THE ART AND SCIENCE OF
PROPAGANDA
Until the 20th century and the age of
industrialised warfare — and the scale of
slaughter that came with it — the conduct of
propaganda was unsystematic and dependent
on individuals who instinctively understood the
importance of psychology. With the growth of
science and the loosening of ‘God’s Laws’ as a
means of understanding ‘why we are here’, the
workings of the human brain became the object
of growing fascination. While everyone still
understood that basic human instincts — the
need to breathe, eat, drink, sleep, reproduce —
were still important, psychologists began to
delve deeper into the workings of the human
mind, including the process of being rational or
irrational. While Freud and Jung were probing,
advertising became a social phenomenon and
sociologists became interested in things like
crowd behaviour and individual choice. The
© 2007 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 1751-8040 $30.00 Vol. 3, 3, 196–204
process of persuasion — for that is what
propaganda, in a strictly value-neutral sense, is
— also became of interest to politicians because
the spread of the vote meant that people’s
choices now mattered. New technologies like
the telegraph, radio, cinema and even the
telephone, created an information explosion
in response to widening literacy and popular
politicisation. The Information Age (sometimes
called ‘The Age of Propaganda’ by scholars)
was upon us.
THE GREAT WAR OF 1914–1918
Not everybody at first understood the
significance of this — especially in the military.
The traditions of secrecy and hierarchy were
the antithesis of these newer developments in
publicity and democratisation. So when the
First World War broke out, patriotism — that
phenomenon inbred into people from birth by
the environment around them, including the
glorification of national achievement in battle
or elsewhere — not propaganda as such was the
order of the day. Lord Kitchener’s intimidating
finger said it all: ‘Your Country Needs You’
(Note: not ‘Our Country’). It was only with the
huge losses of 1915 and 1916 in a war that was
supposed to have been over by the first
Christmas that the British Government began
to recognise that new weapons — among them
tanks, aircraft and propaganda — would be
needed to break the stalemate. When sheer
weight of numbers had failed to budge the
fighting front by only a few yards of mud,
anything was worth trying.
This slow evolution towards a more
systematic deployment of propaganda on
the battlefield can be traced through several
key events:
— In 1915, the Germans dropped some leaflets
over British lines. When it was suggested
that the British retaliate in kind, General
Wilson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff,
scoffed at the idea, saying that ‘the thing is
to kill Germans’.
— In 1916, conscription was introduced in
Britain for the first time and the element
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 Taylor
of compulsion required greater attention to
explaining the need for personal sacrifice
beyond crude patriotism. A government
more conscious of public opinion headed
by Lloyd George replaced the initial Asquith
Government.
— In 1917, the USA entered the war,
and Russia left it under the pressure
of revolution. As the fourth Christmas
approached, war weariness was setting in,
mutinies were occurring in the French
armies and ‘morale’ — both at home and
in the field — became more of an issue.
— In 1918, Lloyd George created Britain’s
first Ministry of Information (MoI) under
Lord Beaverbrook (owner of The Daily
Express) to look after home and allied
morale through propaganda. The Enemy
Propaganda Department at Crewe House
was created to deal with what we now call
‘psychological warfare’. It was headed by
the founder of modern popular journalism,
Lord Northcliffe (owner of The Daily Mail
and The Times).
This separation of home/allied propaganda on
the one hand and enemy propaganda on the
other allows us for the first time to distinguish
between the conduct of propaganda — by
which was meant persuasion largely at the
strategic level — and psychological warfare —
conducted largely at the tactical level. Put
another way, it distinguished between
propaganda that was directed at civilian
audiences and psychological warfare directed
at enemy soldiers (because dissemination
techniques were not yet available to reach the
German civilian audience located a long way
from the German armies in France).
LESSONS LEARNED FROM
WORLD WAR ONE
Lord Northcliffe claimed that ‘good propaganda
probably saved a year of war — and a million
lives’. He would say that, would not he? In an
age before audience research, few challenged
the reputation for British success. One of its
main admirers was Adolf Hitler who, in Mein
198 Place Branding and Public Diplomacy Vol. 3, 3, 196–204
Kampf, devoted two chapters to the wartime
propaganda experience. Interestingly, as a serving
soldier on the western front, Hitler noted that
the trickle of leaflets that began as early as in
1915 had turned into a stream and then a flood.
His commanding officer, General Lundendorff,
argued that ‘we were hypnotised as a rabbit is
by a snake’ and that ‘our soldiers learned to
think the way the enemy wanted them to
think’. Northcliffe was nicknamed ‘The Minister
for the Destruction of German Confidence’.
Yet Northcliffe was only appointed in 1918.
Who was doing the work before then?
In fact, it was the War Office and in
particular its section known as MI7b. History
has largely forgotten this unit, but in fact it
oversaw the distribution of all psychological
warfare material at the fighting fronts throughout
the war, even after the creation of Crewe
House. That distribution, at least on the western
front, was done largely by balloon. This was
because in late 1917, two captured Royal Flying
Corps (RFC) pilots were tried in a civilian
court as war criminals for dropping leaflets.
To avoid repetitions — even though the pilots
were eventually treated as normal PoWs — the
RFC and its successor, the RAF, refused to
allow air-dropped distribution of leaflets by
plane: the beginnings of a long tradition of
resistance to risking air crew lives for the sake
of ‘bullshit bombs’.
INTO THE SHADOW WORLD
Britain was embarrassed by its reputation for
successful wartime propaganda. Revelations
about the highly secret campaign to bring the
United States into the war between 1914
and 1917 did not help. This kind of covert
campaign would later evolve into what was to
be termed black propaganda. So, at the end of
the Great War, the British dismantled their
propaganda machinery leaving only the
News Department of the Foreign Office as a
surviving remnant. This Whitehall press office
predated that created at 10 Downing Street
by around ten years, and reflected the growth
of what we would now call ‘official public
relations’ or ‘spin doctoring’. Abroad, however,
© 2007 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 1751-8040 $30.00
 A brief history of military psychological operations
Europe was undergoing traumatic disruption
with the arrival of a communist regime in the
Soviet Union and the emergence of anti-
communist fascist regimes in Italy, Germany and
elsewhere (like Franco’s Spain after the Spanish
Civil War). This ideological confrontation
generated a new activity in foreign affairs,
namely the conduct of international propaganda,
utilising the new media of radio and sound
cinema to compete for the hearts and minds
of a European population coming increasingly
under the control of authoritarian regimes
of left and right persuasion. Hitler, Mussolini
and Stalin all took an enormous interest in
propaganda as an instrument for securing
and retaining political power. For all their
differences, they shared a common enemy —
the democracies, especially a Britain still at the
height of its Empire and the only true world
power at that time. Having pioneered the use of
propaganda in the First World War, the British
now found themselves on the defensive.
The ideological conflict of the inter-war
years saw some rudimentary British
psychological warfare activities conducted in the
realm of the secret services. Because the official
files are still largely closed, we know very little
about this but during the Munich Crisis of
1938, when Europe went to the brink of
war over Czechoslovakia, the British did get
involved in a remarkable ‘black’ operation. This
was using Radio Luxembourg to beam into
Nazi Germany the British Government’s
position over the crisis — technically, a
violation of an international agreement
brokered by the League of Nations to prevent
the use of radio for ‘propaganda’ purposes. More
honoured in the breach by the dictators, the
very fact that the British should effectively
launch an appeal directly to the German people
rather than through their government could be
said to be the final nail in the coffin for the
principle that nation states should not ‘interfere’
with the internal affairs of other countries.
THE SECOND WORLD WAR
Although, during the Great War, it had taken
several years for the British to build up to a
© 2007 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 1751-8040 $30.00 Vol. 3, 3, 196–204
concerted psychological warfare effort, the next
time was different. Indeed, the opening night of
the war saw RAF bombers pepper Germany
with paper. The leaflets reassured the German
people that Britain had not declared war on
them, but on the Nazi leadership. This theme,
so beloved of PSYOPs today, was soon to be
abandoned in the Second World War, especially
after the declaration of Unconditional Surrender
by the Allies in 1942. From a PSYWAR point
of view, this was arguably the single biggest
policy mistake of the entire war. The policy,
by insisting on complete surrender and by
promising no negotiated armistice and peace
treaty (as in 1918), deprived PSYWAR of
key themes, such as ‘rise up against your
government and you can return to the
community of nations’ (as in 1918) or even
‘surrender’ messages since surrender may result
in war crimes prosecution. Nazi propaganda
minister Joseph Goebbels was delighted. In a
stroke, the policy had linked the destiny of the
German people to the fate of the Nazi Party
after the war in a way that none of his own
propaganda had been able to achieve. It enabled
the Nazis to promote their own themes such as
‘Victory or Death’ and to urge fighting to the
bitter end because the consequences in defeat
would be dire.
The German army and people did indeed
fight to the bitter end. But in the opening
months of the war, such a likelihood seemed
remote to say the least. As German armed
forces blitzkrieged their way through Poland
and then through western Europe, the axiom
that successful propaganda loves a winner was
plain for all to see. It was the British who
were on the defensive, both militarily and
psychologically, as they stood alone in their
‘finest hour’. After Dunkirk, propaganda and
psychological warfare were among the limited
offensive options that remained open to the
British. In this respect, they held a trump card:
the BBC. Within a generation of its foundation
in the 1920s, the BBC had become a ‘national
institution’. Within the six years of the
Second World War, it was about to become
an international institution with a reputation
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 Taylor
for credibility worldwide matched by no
other broadcaster.
THE WAR OF WORDS
The BBC was left in charge of Britain’s ‘white’
(or overt) radio propaganda working relatively
independently of MoI control. Not that it was
called propaganda. That was something the
enemy engaged in. ‘We’ told ‘the truth’. Or, as
the MoI put it, ‘to tell the truth, nothing but
the truth — and, as near as possible, the whole
truth’. When the BBC began extending its
remit to broadcasting in the foreign languages
under Nazi control, this principle was
applied rigorously — and it greatly aided the
development of the institution’s credibility as
the most reliable of wartime broadcasters. The
Nazis were so frightened of this alternate view
of the war that they banned the listening of
foreign broadcasts, punishable by death. There
was to be no hypnosis of the snake this time.
This presented the British with a formidable
challenge from the psychological warfare point
of view. Although, of course, many people in
occupied Europe did listen to the BBC, the
latter valued its reputation for credibility created
by its news-based approach. In the Political
Warfare Executive (PWE), there was a need
to generate views in support of the Churchill-
inspired mission ‘to set Europe ablaze’ with
rumours (or ‘sibs’), espionage and insurrection.
It was Sefton Delmer of the PWE who came
up with the idea of using ‘black’ radio
transmissions to help achieve this goal. This
‘black game’ would depend for its credibility
upon the belief of the recipients that the source
was what it said it was — when entirely the
opposite was the case.
Using the codename ‘Research Unit’, Delmer
established several black radio stations, including
Soldatensender Calais and GS1 (or Gustaf
Seigfreid Eins, an apparent German dissident in
fact played by Delmer himself). The point of
these transmissions was that ordinary law-
abiding German citizens could come across
these stations without realising that they were
emanating from Britain. The aim was simple:
to sow seeds of doubt about a possible German
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victory and to make listeners believe in the
existence of internal German opposition to
the Nazis. Similarly, among the German
armed forces — always recognised as a tough
psychological nut to crack made even tougher
by the policy of Unconditional Surrender —
the aim of allied ‘white’ propaganda broadcasts
and leaflets was more ‘informational’, being
designed to provoke desertion, defection,
surrender or insurrection.
Once again, however, credibility was essential.
When for example in 1943, the Americans
dropped a leaflet over German forces in Italy
stating that, in the event of surrender, German
PoWs would be treated well, including a
breakfast of bacon and eggs — which was true
— the German soldiers simply refused to
believe it.
THE RECORD OF WW2 PSYWAR
Over the past 50 years, as the wartime record of
code breaking and intelligence became clearer,
historians have concluded that the ability to
break the German ‘Enigma’ codes probably
saved the allies two years in the defeat of
Germany. They can make no similar claims for
propaganda and psychological warfare. Perhaps
this was down to the policy of Unconditional
Surrender. Perhaps it was due to the
effectiveness of Nazi domestic propaganda and
the allies’ inability to break German military
and civilian morale. This was not for want of
trying. Over 1.5 billion leaflets were dropped
by the allies between 1939 and 1945. Ingenious
techniques involving deception were tried and
tested for the first time, including Operation
Fortitude that fooled the Germans about the
actual location of the D-Day Landings. But
regardless of the overall allied record, it is
important to emphasise that this was a ‘Total
War’ in which the gap between the military and
civilian fronts narrowed substantially. Because of
the advent of the bomber, civilians were in the
front line now too. And because, for the British
at least, the war lasted for almost six years, ‘Total
Propaganda’ was the order of the day.
This propaganda had several characteristics
that made it different from the type of
 A brief history of military psychological operations
propaganda being conducted by Britain’s
enemies. These include:
— It was based on ‘credible truths’ in
accordance with the Anglo-American
democratic recognition of ‘the Strategy of
Truth’. This does not mean the whole truth
was told.
— Censorship was an essential component
of this but news was censored at source
prior to distribution to the media in case
enemy agents (a ‘fifth column’ — in fact
nonexistent in Britain) were scouring the
media.
— British propaganda was based on the
importance of censoring news (for
Operational Security — OPSEC — and
morale) rather than views.
— British ‘political warfare’ conducted by the
PWE set the standard for the approach
adopted by the Psychological Warfare
Department of the Supreme Headquarters
of Allied Command in Europe once the
Americans entered the war.
— This was a combined civilian and military
effort, essential for any campaign targeting
soldiers and civilians. It had more latitude in
its covert or black forms with ‘the truth’ —
provided it remained a secret who the
source exactly was.
THE COLD WAR
As with the aftermath of the Great War, the
British chose to dismantle their Second World
War propaganda machinery once the war was
over. This time, however, some of it survived in
the form of the Central Office of Information
to conduct government ‘publicity’ campaigns
relating to such issues as public health and road
safety — a recognition of the permanent need
for government to explain itself in peacetime
to the citizens who elected it. But Britain’s
position in the world was in decline, epitomised
in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s by the ‘retreat
from Empire’. Two superpowers had emerged
from the war in the shape of the USA and the
Soviet Union. As Britain lost its Empire and
struggled to find a new role in world, or
© 2007 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 1751-8040 $30.00 Vol. 3, 3, 196–204
European, affairs, the outbreak of the Cold War
from around 1947 onwards meant that the
ideological struggle between two conflicting
ways of life involved a global propaganda
struggle for hearts and minds — and one
in which the British took a backseat.
They did contribute in what was often a
covert struggle, conducted through the media,
in the form of the secret Information Research
Department of the Foreign Office. But in what
was essentially a worldwide strategic
psychological warfare campaign that was to last
for another 40 years, the British involvement
was minor in comparison to the efforts of the
CIA and KGB. On an overt level, the
Americans established the United States
Information Agency (USIA) to counter the
‘disinformation’ campaigns of the numerous
Soviet propaganda agencies attempting to bring
the newly independent countries of the ‘Third
World’ under Russian influence. Indeed, it was
in those former British colonies where
independence movements resorted to armed
guerrilla warfare that the British military
relearned the importance of psychological
warfare. In Malaya, in Aden, Cyprus, Kenya and
in the Suez Crisis, the British resorted to leaflet
drops and broadcasting to tell their side of ‘the
truth’. The most famous exponent of psywar in
Low Intensity Conflicts was General Templar
whose experience in Malaya was drawn upon
by the Americans in the early 1960s as they
increased their involvement in Vietnam.
By that time, the separation of white
‘propaganda’ conducted by civilian diplomatic
and strategic agencies such as the USIA, covert
propaganda conducted by the intelligence
agencies and overt psychological warfare at the
tactical level conducted by the military had
been institutionalised.
Coordination between the various agencies
had become an essential necessity, although
it did not always happen in practice. The
explosion of propaganda in what was now
being termed ‘the information age’ had become
a fact of life. ‘We’ still told ‘the truth’ while ‘the
enemy’ still told lies, but the prominence of
‘propaganda’ only really became apparent to
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 Taylor
the general public in times of war, such as the
Falklands Conflict of 1982. Northern Ireland
was a different matter.
THE GULF WAR OF 1991
Partly because of the American defeat in
Vietnam, military psychological warfare entered
a period of decline and discredit. It was Ronald
Reagan, the President known as the ‘Great
Communicator’, who revitalised PSYOPS. At
the strategic level, communications was used
as means of flooding the Soviet bloc with
western truths, especially after the arrival of
satellite television and the arrival of New
Communications Technologies such as the
videocassette and the fax machine (and later
the mobile phone). The extent to which these
NCTs helped to end the Cold War remains
a matter of much debate, but it is hard to
imagine the fall of the Berlin Wall and the
downfall of the Caecescu regime without them.
At the tactical level, the first indication of
the value of a revitalised military PSYOPS
campaign came with the 1989 Panama episode.
Then, following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in
August 1990, President Bush was persuaded to
incorporate PSYOPS planning as an integral
part of Operation Desert Storm. Although
the British contribution (Operation Granby)
constituted only 5 per cent of the overall war
effort, and indeed there was only one full-time
British PSYOPS officer at that time, the success
of the American PSYOPS campaign in the Gulf
was to signal a new era for what was now being
termed ‘a combat force multiplier’. A total of
69,000 Iraqis surrendered or deserted — more
than were actually killed — and at a relatively
small cost to the overall war effort.
One significant deviation from this largely
white PSYOPS campaign was, however, to have
serious long-term consequences. The US-led
coalition was mandated by the UN to liberate
Kuwait, and when that was achieved the war
stopped. Covert or black radio broadcasts,
however, subsequently encouraged the Kurds to
the north and the Shi’ites to the south to rise
up and overthrow Saddam. This was not part
of coalition policy. When uprisings did occur,
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no help from the coalition was forthcoming
and Saddam’s forces brutally crushed the
insurrectionists. Just over 12 years later when
US-led forces again entered Iraq — this time
to implement ‘regime change’ and overthrow
Saddam — PSYOPS messages that this was a
‘liberation’ rather than an ‘invasion’ fell largely
on deaf Iraqi ears. The response of the Shi’ites
still reeling from the ‘betrayal’ of 1991 was quite
simple: Why should we believe you this time?
OPERATIONS OTHER THAN WAR
The post-Gulf War era witnessed a series of
international crises — in Bosnia, Somalia,
Rwanda, Haiti and Kosovo — which all saw
PSYOPS deployed in support of these military
operations other than war. The clumsiness of this
phrase reflected a recognition that there was now
a ‘New World Order’ (some would say ‘disorder’)
where new ways of thinking were required to
address what many saw as a Revolution in
Military Affairs (RMA). This revolution, together
with new rules of operation in world affairs, was
driven by advances in technologies, especially in
communications. PSYOPS was seen as a
genuinely useful tool in support of these
operations, although the products — and
even the philosophy behind them — were
very different from the use of ‘traditional’
psychological warfare. The essential characteristics
and context of this new type of thinking
revolved around the following phenomena:
— Intra-state conflicts (ie conflicts within
states) were replacing inter-state conflicts as
the norm.
— Internally collapsing states, often ravaged by
civil war and highly destructive of civilian
infrastructures, produced harrowing images
of ‘innocent women and children’ that were
broadcast immediately around the world
by the new international television services
such as CNN.
— Some argued that this ‘CNN Effect’ forced
policy makers into ‘doing something’,
that is, international interventions or, as in
northern Iraq in 1991 or Somalia in 1992,
‘humanitarian’ interventions.
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 A brief history of military psychological operations
— As military forces were now increasingly
interacting with civilians in such operations
other than war, there was a need to
communicate effectively with them if, for
example, a peacekeeping mission was to
succeed.
— A range of what might really be termed
‘public information’ or ‘information
support’ rather than PSYOPS in the
old sense was thus required, from mine
awareness campaigns to assisting food relief
distribution.
— This shift from traditional battlefield to
operational spaces required new ways of
thinking, which was hard for many military
personnel schooled in the old ways.
— In these new spaces, communications and
information assumed a much more central
position than ever before; indeed success or
failure of the mission could depend on this
(Somalia, 1992–1993).
— Hence the lines between PSYOPS, civil–
military relations and public affairs/public
information became more blurred in
practice than those clear delineations
specified in doctrinal documents.
— It is this new reality that is exercising
military planning today, including in
emerging information operations doctrine.
THE WAR ON TERROR
The 1990s saw the Americans reduce their
strategic communications (SC) capabilities —
called Public Diplomacy since the 1960s.
Indeed, they even closed down the USIA
in 1999. Having ‘won’ the ideological
confrontation that was the Cold War, they
seemed to believe that power — as the sole
surviving superpower — would speak for itself.
This alarmed people like Joseph Nye who came
up with the concept of ‘soft power’, by which
he meant that nations could achieve their
foreign policy objectives without recourse to
war (hard power) by projecting their most
attractive characteristics. In the American case,
of course, this essentially meant life, liberty and
the pursuit of happiness — surely everyone
would be attracted to that and, hence, would
© 2007 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 1751-8040 $30.00 Vol. 3, 3, 196–204
want to be like that as well? Underlining this
concept was the belief that democracies do not
go to war against democracies. Their enemies
were nondemocracies and thus emerged the
concept of nation building. But this nation
state-centric view of the international system
was to be partially shattered on September
11th, 2001.
That day, 19 terrorist hijackers crashed civil
aircraft into the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon. These Islamic extremists were
members of a nonstate actor, Al Qaida, an
international terrorist ‘organisation’ who fully
understood the ancient concept of the
‘propaganda of the deed’. They also understood
the new communications environment that
heralded the end of the Cold War, namely the
age of the World Wide Web. While the
Americans reacted to 9/11 with hard power
to defeat the Al Qaida-sponsored Taliban in
Afghanistan, the terrorists waged a new kind
of global ideological struggle in the name of
Islam versus the west and all it represented,
including modernity. To them, the western
infidel crusaders were involved in a ‘clash of
civilizations’ with Islam. But no one
understood better the power of publicity
and the role of communications as an
asymmetric weapon than the terrorists. By the
time the USA embarked in 2003 upon ‘regime
change’ in the nondemocratic Saddam regime
of Iraq, the terrorists were winning a global
struggle for hearts and minds with propaganda
punctuated by terrorist attacks in Bali and
elsewhere. Istanbul, Madrid and London
would be next.
These events reinvigorated the debates about
the need for improved Public Diplomacy and
PSYOPS. On the battlefields of Afghanistan and
Iraq, tactical PSYOPS in the form of leaflets and
broadcasts supported the military missions —
with mixed results. But the real battlespace was
now the global information environment, and it
was here that the propaganda war was being
lost. Levels of anti-American sentiment reached
all-time highs, even in traditional US allies like
France and Germany, never mind the Islamic
world. Richard Holbrooke famously asked
Place Branding and Public Diplomacy 203
 Taylor
why a man in a cave could out-communicate
the most powerful communications nation
in the world.
Although the answer to this question is
complex, the reaction to Al Qaida’s skilful
propaganda has not been encouraging. Former
Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (who once
remarked that he did not know what ‘soft
power’ meant) attempted to rectify the situation
beginning with an Information Operations
Roadmap. This plan was to join up all the
different voices of the US Government —
Public Diplomacy, Public Affairs and PSYOPS
— into a new ‘Perception Management’
machine. Today that ugly phrase has been
abandoned in favour of SC.
Some key characteristics of the SC challenges
are as follows:
— PSYOPS is a key component of SC but
perhaps functions best at the tactical and
operational levels in support of military
intervention.
— There is, however, really no longer any
such thing as tactical information; it is all
strategic. A leaflet dropped on an Afghan
mountain can be scanned into a laptop
computer and placed on the internet within
minutes.
— Al Qaida does not play by the same
rules as western democracies and is not
constrained by certain democratic traditions
of conducting propaganda, especially with
regard to beheading videos or telling ‘the
truth’ about what western values really
mean.
— They exploit western ‘mistakes’ (such as Abu
Ghraib) quickly and ruthlessly.
— In Iraq, the blowback from Desert Storm
black PSYOPS in 1991 deeply hampered
white PSYOPS about the ‘liberation’ of the
204 Place Branding and Public Diplomacy Vol. 3, 3, 196–204
Iraqi people from the Saddam regime in
2003 and after.
CONCLUSION
Despite surviving political nervousness about
the ‘P’ word, western PSYOPS today have
moved a long way from the ‘dirty tricks’ image
of the past. They are still about changing or
reinforcing human perceptions, but now they
are more about not just helping the mission but
also about helping the people the mission is
there to assist. As today this is more about peace
support and nation building than traditional war
fighting — although PSYOPS is still required
for that, as evidenced by the 103 million leaflets
dropped over the Serbs during the 1999 Kosovo
conflict. Unlike the Iraqi army in 1991, however,
the professional volunteers of the Serb army did
not see their morale undermined. And the Iraq
conflict from 2003 onwards meant that
PSYOPS had to return more to the tradition of
counter-insurgency, which General Templar had
pioneered in Malaya.
Regardless of the challenges of the war on
terror — now re-branded as ‘The Long War —
we are still left with essentially the same moral
aspect of the use of these munitions of the
mind: Is it better to persuade or kill? Terrorists
believe that killing will persuade their victims
to give up. Does anyone in the west believe
otherwise?
Further reading
Pratkanis, A. R. and Aronson, E. (2001) ‘Age of Propaganda:
The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion’,W.H. Freeman,
New York, NY.
Taylor, P. M. (1995) ‘Munitions of the Mind: A History of
Propaganda from the Ancient World to the Present Day’,
Manchester University Press, Manchester, UK.
Taylor, P. M. (1999) ‘British propaganda in the Twentieth
Century: Selling Democracy’, Edinburgh University Press,
Edinburgh, UK.
© 2007 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 1751-8040 $30.00
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