Top Highlights

• light, overt (white), covert (black), and gray propaganda; subversion; sabotage; special operations; guerrilla warfare; espionage; political, cultural, economic, and racial pressures are all effective weapons. They are effective because they produce dissension, distrust, fear and hopelessness in the minds of the enemy, not because they originate in...
• airmen.26 The army study goes on to summarize several of the tactics of persuasion just outlined, the three most basic of which are known as “white,” “black,” and “gray” propaganda. “White propaganda,” the army states, “stress[es] simplicity, clarity and repetition.” It is designed to be perceived by its audience as truthful, balanced, and factual,...
• U.S. Army and National Security Council documents from the same period stress three additional attributes of the U.S. psychological warfare strategy of the day: the use of “plausible deniability” to permit the government to deny responsibility for “black” operations that were in truth originated by the United States;29 a conscious policy of polariz...
• countries, for psychological operations.31 Throughout this book, psychological warfare and psychological operations encompass this range of activities, as specified by the Army and the National Security Council. Several points should be underlined. First, psychological warfare in the U.S. conception has consistently made use of a wide range of viol...
• Psychological warfare is not new, of course. It is a modern coalescence and development of very old methods. Some of the earliest human civilizations used symbols, masks, and totems as instruments of power,1 and the ancient Chinese military philosopher Sun Tzu