MINDWAR
WHY IS THIS RELEVANT?
excerpts from 1980 paper "PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory" (7th Psychological Operations Group)
The advantage of Mind War is that it conducts wars in nonlethal, noninjurious, and
nondestructive ways. Essentially you overwhelm your enemy with argument. You seize
control of all of the means by which his government and populace process information to
make up their minds, and you adjust it so that those minds are made up as you desire.
Everyone is happy, no one gets hurt or killed, and nothing is destroyed.
Ordinary warfare, on the other hand, is characterized by its lack of reason. The
antagonists just maim or kill each other's people, and steal or destroy each other's land,
until one side is hurt so badly that it gives up [or both sides are hurt so badly that they
agree to stop short of victory]. After such a war there is lasting misery, hate, and suffering.
The only loser in MindWar are the war profiteers: companies and corporations which
grow fat on orders for helicopters, tanks, guns, munitions, etc. Consequently what
President Dwight Eisenhower referred to as the "military/industrial complex" can be
counted upon to resist implementation of MindWar as the governing strategic conflict
doctrine.
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Invoking as it does the most intense emotions and commitments of its
audiences, it must deliver the goods as they are judged by the target audiences. If the
ethical values of those audiences are not respected - if MindWar is used only in the service
of ulterior motives and objectives - the resulting "disintoxication" can be socially shattering.
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"MindWar must target all participants if it is to be effective. It must not only weaken
the enemy; it must strengthen the United States. It strengthens the United States by
denying enemy propaganda access to our people, and by explaining and emphasizing to
our people the rationale for our national interest in a specific war.
Under existing United States law, PSYOP units may not target American citizens.
That prohibition is based upon the presumption that "propaganda" is necessarily a lie or at
least a misleading half-truth, and that the government has no right to lie to the people. The
Propaganda Ministry of Goebbels must not be a part of the American way of life.
Quite right, and so it must be axiomatic of MindWar that it always speaks the truth.
Its power lies in its ability to focus recipients' attention on the truth of the future as well
as that of the present. MindWar thus involves the stated promise of the truth that the
United States has resolved to make real if it is not already so."