Psychological Operations versus Military Information Support Operations and an Analysis of Organizational Change

https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/Online-Exclusive/2018-OLE/Mar/PSYOP/

Psychological operations (PSYOP) are critical to the success of the U.S. Army during both war and peacetime. Yet, in 2010, the term psychological operations was deemed too menacing by the Department of Defense (DOD), which then directed the Army to replace it with a new term—military information support operations (MISO).1 However, these units have returned to the use of PSYOP per U.S. Army Special Operations Command (USASOC) guidance as of 27 October 2017.2 By understanding how this change was implemented and ultimately undone, this article seeks to provide insights for the Army to better implement future organizational changes.

Also attached is a PDF with the following article:

Black Hats Versus White Hats Versus Grey Hats

What exactly is this white hat versus the black hat dichotomy? When making movies about the Old American West, filmmakers made a symbolic distinction at times between the good guys, wearing white hats, and the bad guys, wearing black hats. If, for the sake of our basic theme, we can adopt this distinction momentarily, we would like to go on to asseverate that the information systems field is heavily over emphasizing research on white hats to the detriment of studies on black hats. It is easy to see how this would, quite naturally, occur. Scholars have better access to white hats, although even here, white hat managers do not typically want to share detailed information about their losses and have responded in this manner for some time (Hoffer and Straub 1989). Thus it is a readier access to data that has led information security researchers to gravitate toward white hat issues.