Early on his campaign against the
Persian Empire Currying favor with supporters was the other side of psychological warfare, and an early practitioner of this was
Alexander the Great, who
successfully conquered large parts of
Europe and the
Middle East and held on to his territorial gains by co-opting local elites into the Greek administration and culture. Alexander left some of his men behind in each conquered city to introduce Greek culture and oppress dissident views. His soldiers were paid dowries to marry locals in an effort to encourage
assimilation.
Genghis Khan, leader of the
Mongol Empire in the 13th century AD employed less-subtle techniques. Defeating the will of the enemy before having to attack and reaching a consented settlement was preferable to facing his wrath. The Mongol generals demanded submission to the Khan and threatened the initially captured villages with complete destruction if they refused to surrender. If they had to fight to take the settlement, the Mongol generals fulfilled their threats and massacred the survivors. Tales of the encroaching horde spread to the next villages and created an aura of insecurity that undermined the possibility of future resistance. 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 to give the illusion of an overwhelming army and deceive and intimidate enemy scouts. He also sometimes had objects tied to the tails of his horses, so that riding on open and dry fields raised a cloud of dust that gave the enemy the impression of great numbers. His soldiers used arrows specially notched to whistle as they flew through the air, creating a terrifying noise. In the 6th century BCE Greek
Bias of Priene successfully resisted the
Lydian king
Alyattes by fattening up a pair of mules and driving them out of the besieged city. When Alyattes' envoy was then sent to Priene, Bias had piles of sand covered with wheat to give the impression of plentiful resources. During the
Granada War, Spanish captain Hernán Pérez del Pulgar routinely employed psychological tactics as part of his guerrilla actions against the
Emirate of Granada. In 1490, infiltrating the city by night with a small retinue of soldiers, he nailed a letter of challenge on the main
mosque and set fire to the
alcaicería before withdrawing. In 1574, having been informed about the pirate attacks previous to the
Battle of Manila, Spanish captain
Juan de Salcedo had his relief force return to the city by night while playing marching music and carrying torches in loose formations, so they would appear to be a much larger army to any nearby enemy. They reached the city unopposed.
Modern era Because psyops shape public opinion and public memory, the rise of the printing press and mass communication greatly increased the use of psyops for military advantage. During the Indian Wars of the 17th through 19th centuries, politicians, newspaper reports and fictional novels about Native Americans all conveyed the belief that tribes in the Northeast had "died out," and leaders of New England communities even gave speeches about the "last Indians" in New England, even as Native Americans continued to reside in these communities. Fort Detroit's entire garrison of 2,188 American troops became British prisoners in a "colossal disaster for the United States." The British victory demoralised the Americans and boosted the morale of Canadian soldiers and civilians along with
Tecumseh's confederacy.
World War I led the
commission of 1915 to document German
atrocities committed against Belgian civilians. The start of modern psychological operations in war is generally dated to
World War I. By that point, Western societies were increasingly educated and urbanized, and mass media was available in the form of large circulation
newspapers and posters. It was also possible to transmit propaganda to the enemy via the use of
airborne leaflets or through explosive delivery systems like modified artillery or
mortar rounds. At the start of the war, the belligerents, especially the British and Germans, began distributing propaganda, both domestically and on the
Western front. The British had several advantages that allowed them to succeed in the battle for
world opinion; they had one of the world's most reputable news systems, with much experience in international and cross-cultural communication, and they controlled much of the
undersea communications cable system then in operation. These capabilities were easily transitioned to the task of warfare. The British also had a
diplomatic service that maintained good relations with many nations around the world, in contrast to the reputation of the German services. While German attempts to foment revolution in parts of the
British Empire, such as
Ireland and
India, were ineffective, extensive experience in the
Middle East allowed the British to successfully induce the Arabs to
revolt against the
Ottoman Empire. In August 1914,
David Lloyd George appointed a
Member of Parliament (MP),
Charles Masterman, to head a
Propaganda Agency at Wellington House. A distinguished body of literary talent was enlisted for the task, with its members including
Arthur Conan Doyle,
Ford Madox Ford,
G. K. Chesterton,
Thomas Hardy,
Rudyard Kipling and
H. G. Wells. Over 1,160 pamphlets were published during the war and distributed to neutral countries, and eventually, to Germany. One of the first significant publications, the
Report on Alleged German Outrages of 1915, had a great effect on general opinion across the world. The pamphlet documented
atrocities, both actual and alleged, committed by the German army against Belgian civilians. A Dutch illustrator,
Louis Raemaekers, provided the highly emotional drawings which appeared in the pamphlet. In 1917, the bureau was subsumed into the new
Department of Information and branched out into
telegraph communications,
radio, newspapers, magazines and the cinema. In 1918,
Viscount Northcliffe was appointed Director of Propaganda in Enemy Countries. The department was split between propaganda against Germany organized by H.G Wells, and propaganda against the
Austro-Hungarian Empire supervised by
Wickham Steed and
Robert William Seton-Watson; the attempts of the latter focused on the lack of ethnic cohesion in the Empire and stoked the grievances of minorities such as the
Croats and
Slovenes. It had a significant effect on the final collapse of the
Austro-Hungarian Army at the
Battle of Vittorio Veneto. At the start of the war, the French government took control of the media to suppress negative coverage. Only in 1916, with the establishment of the Maison de la Presse, did they begin to use similar tactics for the purpose of psychological warfare. One of its sections was the "Service de la Propagande aérienne" (Aerial Propaganda Service), headed by Professor Tonnelat and
Jean-Jacques Waltz, an Alsatian artist code-named "
Hansi". The French tended to distribute leaflets of images only, although the full publication of
US President Woodrow Wilson's
Fourteen Points, which had been heavily edited in the German newspapers, was distributed via airborne leaflets by the French.
World War II from an American
B-17 over German cities (see the
file description page for a translation) Germany's
Fall Grün plan of invasion of Czechoslovakia had a large part dealing with psychological warfare aimed both at the Czechoslovak civilians and government as well as, crucially, at Czechoslovakia's allies. It became successful to the point that Germany
gained the acquiescence of the British and French governments to the German occupation of Czechoslovakia without having to fight an all-out war, sustaining only minimum losses in
covert war before the
Munich Agreement. During World War II, the British made extensive use of deception – developing many new techniques and theories. The main protagonists at this time were 'A' Force, set up in 1940 under
Dudley Clarke, and the London Controlling Section, chartered in 1942 under the control of John Bevan. Clarke pioneered many of the strategies of military deception. His ideas for combining fictional orders of battle, visual deception and
double agents helped define Allied deception strategy during the war, for which he has been referred to as "the greatest British deceiver of WW2". During the lead-up to the Allied
invasion of Normandy, many new tactics in psychological warfare were devised. The plan for
Operation Bodyguard set out a general strategy to mislead German high command as to the date and location of the invasion, which was obviously going to happen. Planning began in 1943 under the auspices of the
London Controlling Section (LCS). A draft strategy, referred to as Plan Jael, was presented to Allied high command at the
Tehran Conference.
Operation Fortitude was intended to convince the Germans of a greater Allied military strength than was the case, through fictional
field armies, faked operations to prepare the ground for invasion and "leaked" misinformation about the Allied order of battle and war plans. Elaborate
naval deceptions (Operations
Glimmer,
Taxable and
Big Drum) were undertaken in the English Channel. Small ships and aircraft simulated invasion fleets lying off Pas de Calais, Cap d'Antifer and the western flank of the real invasion force. At the same time
Operation Titanic involved the
RAF dropping fake paratroopers to the east and west of the Normandy landings. , used to deceive the Germans The deceptions were implemented with the use of double agents, radio traffic and visual deception. The British "
Double Cross" anti-espionage operation had proven very successful from the outset of the war, and the LCS was able to use double agents to send back misleading information about Allied invasion plans. The use of visual deception, including mock tanks and other military hardware had been developed during the
North Africa campaign. Mock hardware was created for
Bodyguard; in particular, dummy landing craft were stockpiled to give the impression that the invasion would take place near
Calais. The Operation was a strategic success and the
Normandy landings caught German defences unaware. Continuing deception, portraying the landings as a diversion from a forthcoming main invasion in the Calais region, led Hitler into delaying transferring forces from Calais to the real battleground for nearly seven weeks.
Vietnam War leaflets urging the defection of
Viet Cong The United States ran an extensive program of psychological warfare during the
Vietnam War. The
Phoenix Program had the dual aim of assassinating National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF or
Viet Cong) personnel and terrorizing any potential sympathizers or passive supporters. During the Phoenix Program, over 19,000 NLF supporters were killed. In
Operation Wandering Soul, the United States also used tapes of distorted human sounds and played them during the night making the Vietnamese soldiers think that the dead were back for revenge. The Vietcong and their forces also used a program of psychological warfare during this war. Trịnh Thị Ngọ, also known as Thu Hương and
Hanoi Hannah, was a Vietnamese radio personality. She made English-language broadcasts for North Vietnam directed at United States troops. During the Vietnam War, Ngọ became famous among US soldiers for her propaganda broadcasts on Radio Hanoi. Her scripts were written by the North Vietnamese Army and were intended to frighten and shame the soldiers into leaving their posts. She made three broadcasts a day, reading a list of newly killed or imprisoned Americans, and playing popular US anti-war songs in an effort to incite feelings of nostalgia and homesickness, attempting to persuade US GIs that the US involvement in the Vietnam War was unjust and immoral. A typical broadcast began as follows: How are you, GI Joe? It seems to me that most of you are poorly informed about the going of the war, to say nothing about a correct explanation of your presence over here. Nothing is more confused than to be ordered into a war to die or to be maimed for life without the faintest idea of what's going on.
21st century . It shows a caricature of
Al-Qaeda in Iraq leader
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi caught in a
rat trap. The caption reads "This is your future, Zarqawi". The
CIA made extensive use of
Contra soldiers to destabilize the
Sandinista government in
Nicaragua. The CIA used psychological warfare techniques against the
Panamanians by delivering unlicensed TV broadcasts. The United States government has used propaganda broadcasts against the
Cuban government through
TV Marti, based in
Miami, Florida. However, the Cuban government has been successful at jamming the signal of TV Marti. In the
Iraq War, the United States used the
shock and awe campaign to psychologically maim and break the will of the
Iraqi Army to fight. In cyberspace,
social media has enabled the use of
disinformation on a wide scale. Analysts have found evidence of doctored or misleading photographs spread by social media in the
Syrian Civil War and
2014 Russian military intervention in Ukraine, possibly with state involvement. Military and governments have engaged in psychological operations (PSYOP) and
informational warfare (IW) on social networking platforms to regulate foreign propaganda, which includes countries like the
US,
Russia, and
China. In 2022,
Meta and the
Stanford Internet Observatory found that over five years people associated with the U.S. military, who tried to conceal their identities, created fake accounts on social media systems including
Balatarin,
Facebook,
Instagram,
Odnoklassniki,
Telegram,
Twitter,
VKontakte and
YouTube in an influence operation in Central Asia and the Middle East. Their posts, primarily in Arabic, Farsi and Russian, criticized Iran, China and Russia and gave pro-Western narratives. Data suggested the activity was a series of covert campaigns rather than a single operation. In operations in the South and East China Seas, both the United States and China have been engaged in "
cognitive warfare", which involves displays of force, staged photographs and sharing disinformation. The start of the public use of "
cognitive warfare" as a clear movement occurred in 2013 with China's political rhetoric. ==Examples of the term==