Psychological operations

From Free net encyclopedia

Psychological Operations (PSYOP or PSYOPS) are planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to specific foreign and (in certain countries) domestic audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of governments, organizations, groups, and individuals. The purpose of psychological operations is to induce or reinforce attitudes and behaviors favorable to the originator's objectives.

This concept has especially been used by military institutions throughout the 20th century.

1 United Kingdom
2 United States
3 Germany
4 Trivia
5 See also
6 External links

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United Kingdom

In the British Armed Forces, PSYOPS are handled by the tri-service 15 Psychological Operations Group.

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United States

Image:Psyoppatches.JPG

In the United States Department of Defense, Psychological Operations units exist in the Army and Air Force. The United States Navy also plans and executes limited PSYOP missions.

Unlike some countries, United States PSYOP units and soldiers of all branches of the military are prohibited by law from conducting PSYOP missions on domestic audiences. While PSYOP soldiers may offer non-PSYOP related support to domestic military missions , PSYOP can only target foreign audiences. Though, it is worth noting that this does not rule out PSYOP targeting foreign audiences of allied nations. Additionally, in the Information Operations Roadmap made public January 2006 but originally approved by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in October 2003, it stated "information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and PSYOP, increasingly is consumed by our domestic audience and vice-versa."<ref>US propaganda aimed at foreigners reaches US public: Pentagon document AFP via Yahoo! news</ref>

Within the U.S. Psychological Operations community, PSYOPS is generally considered to be an incorrect abbreviation. The correct abbreviation is PSYOP.

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Army

The Army's Psychological Operations elements are administratively organized alongside Civil Affairs to form the US Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command (USACAPOC), part of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command (USASOC). There are both Active Duty and Army Reserve PSYOP units. Operationally, PSYOP individuals and organizations support Army and Joint maneuver forces or interagency organizations. Image:Loudspeaker.jpg Army Psychological Operations support operations ranging from strategic planning down to tactical employment. The smallest organizational PSYOP element is the Tactical PSYOP Team (TPT). A TPT generally consists of a Psyop team chief (Staff Sergeant or Sergeant), an assistant team chief (Sergeant or Specialist), and an additional team member/soldier to operate the manpack speaker system (Specialist) who is often referred to as the "speaker-monkey". A team is equipped with a Humvee fitted with a loud speaker, and often works with a local translator indigenous to the host or occupied country.

Generally, each maneuver battalion-sized element in a theater of war or operational area has at least one TPT attached to it. While in the Army women are allowed to hold the psychological operations occupational specialty, they are not allowed to serve on TPTs in a war zone due to the high level of contact with the enemy (with exceptions sometimes being made).

PSYOP soldiers are required to complete nine weeks of Basic Combat Training. After basic training (BCT), all enlisted PSYOP Soldiers report to Fort Bragg to complete the 16-week Psychological Operation Advanced Individual Training (AIT) course. The active duty PSYOP Soldier is then required to attend Airborne training. Upon successful completion of Airborne School, PSYOP Soldiers will spend up to a year in foreign language qualification training. Certain reserve soldiers serving in units designated as Airborne are also required to attend Airborne training directly after the AIT course, while language training and Airborne qualification for PSYOP Soldiers assigned to non-Airborne units is awarded on a merit and need basis. Image:PSYOP Structure.JPG

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Air Force

The Air Force runs a specific set of operations for Psychological Operations using a modified C-130 Hercules aircraft named Commando Solo. The purpose of Commando Solo is to provide an aerial platform for broadcast media on both television and radio. The media broadcast is created by various agencies and organizations.

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Navy

The lead Navy PSYOP organization is the Naval Network Warfare Command (NETWARCOM) and the Naval Information Operations Command (NIOC), both located in Norfolk, VA. Navy PSYOP assets included shortwave and very high frequency (VHF) radio broadcast from surface ships and leaflet/handbill reproduction. Handbills are distributed to merchant ships during inspection. Leaflets are dropped utilizing the PDU-5B dispenser unit (aka Leaflet Bomb). The Navy works closely with the Army in planning and designing of PSYOP products.

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U.S. Psychological Operations in Afghanistan

A recent operation of the U.S. PSYOP involved the public burning of enemy bodies in Afghanistan. While the bodies had been left on the battlefield and were to be burned anyway because of hygiene concerns, the decision by a tactical PSYOP team with the 173rd Airborne to burn the bodies in public to try and lure enemy fighters to attack has become a public relations nightmare for the U.S. Army.

During the War on Terror U.S. PSYOP teams often use the broadcasting of inflammatory messages over loudspeakers to try tempting enemy fighters into a direct confrontation where the Americans have the upper hand. In the Afghanistan incident, a PSYOP sergeant read out the following message to the Taliban:

Attention, Taliban, you are all cowardly dogs. You allowed your fighters to be laid down facing west and burned. You are too scared to retrieve their bodies. This just proves you are the lady boys we always believed you to be.

Another soldier stated:

You attack and run away like women. You call yourself Talibs but you are a disgrace to the Muslim religion and you bring shame upon your family. Come and fight like men instead of the cowardly dogs you are.

U. S. authorities were to investigate the incident which may have contravened the Geneva convention. [1]

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Germany

In the German Bundeswehr the Bataillon für Operative Information 950 and the Zentrum Operative Information are responsible for the PSYOPS efforts. Both the center and the battalion are subordinate to the new Streitkräftebasis (Joint Services Support Command, SKB) and together consist of about 1.000 soldiers that specialise in modern communication and media technologies. Projects of the German PSYOPS forces are the radio station Voice of the freedom which is used by tens of thousands of Afghans and different newspapers and magazines published in Kosovo and Bosnia.

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Trivia

The general's daughter from both the novel and blockbuster movie The General's Daughter was a PSYOP officer, although PSYOP in this film is something completely different than what it is the actual US military.
PSYOP teams and companies adopt call signs of all different sorts, but by far "Voodoo" is the most commonly used in the PSYOP community.

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