Conclusion

Since the end of the Vietnam War, discussion of psychological warfare in the United States has waned, but with notable exceptions: during Ronald Reagan’s presidency the spectre of Soviet ‘active measures’ against the United States was raised during the so-called ‘second Cold War’ (Dalby 2016), and in the 21st century the promise of psychological warfare was hailed as a central component of a revamped US counterinsurgency strategy in the Middle East. In both cases, as in the Vietnam War, the failures of psychological warfare to ‘win hearts and minds’ abroad led to its quiet retreat from popular geopolitical discourses. It was, therefore, precisely at the moment when psychological warfare seemed destined for reconsignment to history that the shocks of both the Trump presidency and the Brexit referendum vaulted psychological warfare back into the political spotlight. Since 2016, reporting on Russian psychological warfare against the West has driven news cycles, animated high-level official investigations, and led to the creation of new government initiatives to counter foreign political influence (Klippenstein & Fang 2022).

Central to psychological warfare’s popular revival have been political imaginations of cataclysm and rupture. Long-form popular essays have stressed the novelty of ‘The New Cold War’ and the ‘New Theory of War’ that animates it (Osnos et al. 2017; Rutenberg 2017). Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA), for example, has claimed that Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election was ‘an act of hybrid warfare’. Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD), among others, called Russian interference a ‘political Pearl Harbor’ (Chalfant 2017). Hillary Clinton’s characterisation of Russian efforts as ‘a kind of cyber 9/11’ (Persio 2017) meanwhile carried similar implications of an epochal shift in national security priorities. While these imaginaries situate psychological war in different times and places, they are all deeply suggestive of fundamental changes to contemporary political reality. In these geopolitical imaginations we appear to embark upon a new world. As Council on Foreign Relations fellow Timothy Snyder put it,

after the Cold War, we moved into a different world, a world defined by the internet, and that’s a much more psychological world. The techniques they’ve been honing for decades are much more powerful in this new digital world, where emotion dominates and everyone is connected … This is a world of information warfare, and that suits Russia’s strengths. (Cited in Illing 2018, emphasis mine)

As with its arrival on the political scene in the early 1940s, contemporary discourses about psychological warfare have emphasised not only specific instances of propaganda or influence, but also a broader and more fundamental transformation of the geography of war. Just as Nelson Rockefeller insisted that German psychological warfare in the 1940s had created ‘a new geography of defense’, so too has contemporary discourse on Russian psychological warfare emphasised the fact of a ‘new world’ of insecurity. This ‘new world’ of online, socially mediated psychological warfare appears to invert the geopolitical imaginations of the 21st century’s War on Terror in which, as one analyst put it, ‘disconnectedness defined danger’ (Barnett 2005). By contrast, the ‘new world’ of psychological war appears porous, hyperconnected, and ‘deeply at odds with imaginative geographies of security and exclusion’ (Bialasiewicz et al. 2007, 418).

If Russian psychological warfare is said to transform contemporary geopolitical space, it also appears to have produced a strange, contradictory temporality in which it appears technologically futuristic yet timelessly antiquated. On the one hand, as Time magazine suggests, ‘the Russians are 10 years ahead of us in being willing to make use of social media to influence public opinion’ (Calabresi 2017). For Politico, contemporary Russian psychological warfare also appears highly sophisticated and technologically advanced, ‘an elaborate information architecture to use against the American public’, one whose primary purposes are ‘active measures, reflexive control and psychological warfare’ (McKew 2017). Yet as Russian psychological warfare is framed in terms of technological advances and strategic innovations, its ostensible novelty has been strangely juxtaposed against claims that it also represents a fixed and unchanging strategy unique to a geostrategically static Russian state. Appearing to contradict his previous statements concerning the unprecedented ‘new world’ of Russia’s psychological war, Snyder also claims that ‘Russia doesn’t really change, but [that] they’ve always led the world in understanding the psychology of power. Psychological warfare’, he claims, ‘is what they’ve done best going all the way back to the Bolsheviks’ (Illing 2018).

The Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Clint Watts has similarly suggested that ‘it’s the same playbook they [the Russians] used in the Cold War era’ (Graf 2017). More than a recurrence of the specific Cold War conjuncture, however, Russia’s contemporary actions appear in US political discourse as evidence of a kind of timeless and essential difference. ‘Russia’s active-measures playbook’, suggested WIRED magazine,

dates back to Czarist Russia and the beginning of the Soviet Union. It has been honed and deployed over decades to advance Russian interests both at home and abroad – and has long been driven by a consistent geopolitical worldview, executed in distinct ways, and guided by a unique tradecraft philosophy at odds with the approach of Western intelligence services. (Graf 2017)

Apart from the orientalist tones flattening the major upheavals of 20th-century Russian social history into a kind of timeless and unchanging geopolitical state, this characterisation of a static Russian geopolitical worldview itself appears as a rescripting of the United States’ own Cold War geopolitical imaginations. As the same Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Robert Strausz-Hupé wrote in 1959, ‘Communists take a very long-term view of conflict, seeing themselves in a perpetual state of revolutionary war’:

Thus, in periods the West conceptualizes as peaceful, the Soviet Union is still, if not explicitly, engaged in revolutionary warfare. Furthermore, protracted conflict strategy is one that utilizes all aspects of social, political, psychological, and economical warfare … It is a total view of warfare, the revolutionary doctrine dominating all aspects of society. (Cited in Crampton & Toal 1996, 548)

Russian psychological warfare therefore appears in contemporary political discourse as both past and future, a contradictory temporal phenomenon both inferior and superior to the United States’ capabilities. As Gerard Toal (1996, 177) argues, if the loss of the Soviet polestar in the early 1990s ‘deprived international affairs of an organising script and a defining drama’, the result was that, for the US foreign policy establishment, history became ‘no longer a fixed representational scene but a vertigo-inducing experience’. As the organising scripts grounding US foreign policy during the 21st century’s War on Terror have begun to fray, the revival of psychological warfare in popular political discourse now induces a new round of geopolitical vertigo. The contradictory temporality that governs US geopolitical scripting of Russian psychological warfare thus appears as both the ‘discovery’ of new and secret practices of statecraft and as their rediscovery as static features of an unchanging and alien political-military culture.

Just as German psychological warfare was purported to produce a ‘new geography of defense’ in the 1940s, so too has the ‘new world’ of contemporary psychological warfare been defined by calls for the United States to meet the demands of a new political reality. As Lt. Col. Brad Carr, director of information operations at US Army Special Operations Command, told the Army Times,

given Russian disinformation, given this new world where the information fight is becoming more complex and nuanced, there’s a level of pride when I can say, I’m a PSYOP soldier in a PSYOP unit that has this lineage and did these kinds of things. (Myers 2017)

Whereas US Army psychological warfare during the Obama administration had been terminologically rebranded to the softer-sounding ‘military information support operations’, since 2016 the perceived threat of Russian psychological warfare has allowed the United States to re-embrace the language and symbolism of psychological war – to ‘switch back to good ol’ psyop’ (Myers 2017). More than a specific set of practices and strategies, however, the return of psychological warfare to popular political discourses has revived the mythologies and moral economies that this book has set out to critique.

Perhaps nowhere have these mythologies been more visible than in the US Army’s attempt to rebrand and recruit for its contemporary psychological warfare units. In the spring of 2022, the US Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group released a short recruitment film on YouTube titled ‘Ghosts in the Machine’ (US Army 2022). In just a few months, the film collected over one million views and generated numerous commentaries and reactions. While commentators noted the film’s sleek production and haunting affective atmosphere, press coverage largely failed to interrogate the film’s deeper claims and evocations. Saturated in psychological war myth-making, the recruitment film opens with a quotation of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, invoking psychological warfare’s long-held claim to esoteric wisdom and an imagined ancient origin. Amid scenes of political protest and unrest, a dissonant whistling melody opens the film to a light-soaked image of an orchestra conductor. On-screen text hails the viewer: ‘have you ever wondered who’s pulling the strings?’

In the staccato procession of images, sound, and text that follows, the Army film endeavours to show that it is psychological warriors who do indeed pulls the strings. To the orchestra conductor are added other recurring images connoting power, control, precision, and expertise: a chessboard suggests deep strategy and intellectual acumen; the interlocking gears of an open-faced pocket watch suggest technological accuracy and craftsmanship; a concert pianist suggests virtuosic skill and creative genius. Together the images work to portray the psychological warrior as an elite artist-technician who asserts an unseen influence over the global political scene. ‘Warfare is evolving’, the film suggests as its orchestra conductor concludes its performance, ‘and all the world’s a stage’.

Less subtle is the video’s identification of geopolitical threats to the United States. ‘A threat rises in the East’ overlays a scene of a Chinese military parade. A Times Square news ticker announces ‘Russia invades Ukraine’ as a cinematic depiction of Genghis Khan’s charging horsemen morphs into a scene of modern mechanised infantry. Beyond these specific geopolitical markers, however, the film invokes a geographical imagination of psychological warfare’s broader spatial ubiquity: urban scenes of subway stations and city buses blend into a moonlight raid on a dilapidated civilian residence. An image of the earth’s transition from night to day suggests not only the dawn of psychological warfare’s proverbial ‘new world’, but also its global scale and geographical extension. Text reading ‘we are everywhere’ dispenses with subtext. As this book has shown, the premise that psychological warfare has ‘no limits in space’ (Taylor 1940, 4) has been foundational to its geographical imagination since its construction in the early 1940s. It is perhaps unsurprising that the re-enchantment of psychological warfare has revived a spatial imagination of ubiquity and intractability from both international relations and everyday life.

In its contemporary iteration, the idea that psychological warfare is a kind of ‘everywhere war’ (Gregory 2011a) combines with the moral-economic tenet of its masculine prerogative. ‘Born from the ashes of a world at war’, reads another title card, ‘you’ll find us in the shadows at the tip of the spear.’ Here the psychological warrior appears not only ubiquitous, but also as a hunter in the dark, lurking in shadows, poised to pounce on unsuspecting prey. If the US psychological cold warrior was presented as an upstanding figure, a guarantor of truth, and a liberal-democratic bulwark against the evils of communism, the character of the contemporary psychological warrior appears by contrast in the idiom of the special forces ‘operator’, a destabilising hunter–killer wrapped in stealth, duplicity, mystery, and violence (see Van Veeren 2019; Wills & Steuter 2009). While the psychological cold warrior’s domination of the Other was couched in a Christian cosmology in which the divinity of US ‘truth’ and democracy underwrote the moral agency of the psychological warrior-as-patriarch, the ‘operator’ paradigm of military masculinity depicts the contemporary psychological warrior instead as a figure of brawling, anti-heroic frontier masculinity: ‘anything we touch is a weapon’ continues the on-screen text, paired with images of microphones and paint brushes. In the age of ‘post-truth’ political paranoia, US psychological warfare offers the promise not of restoring order to a fractured political landscape, but of being the manipulative antagonist on the other end of the spear. Perhaps ironically, the recruitment film offers the prospective recruit the opportunity to embody the very nightmare vision of foreign psychological warfare that has perennially haunted the American body politic.

Yet as contemporary psychological warfare re-enchants itself with egomaniacal masculinity, esoteric knowledge, virtuosic genius, and technological control, it also draws incongruously upon themes of the occult and the supernatural. This too has been central to psychological warfare’s contradictory mythologies since its earliest days, from Edmond Taylor’s portrayal of German psychological warfare as a kind of ‘magical war of witch-doctors’ to Douglas Pike’s insistence on the ‘mystical transformation’ of the Vietnamese individual. Here too the psychological warrior achieves its own mystical transformation: in its claim that ‘anything we touch is a weapon’, US psychological warfare not only celebrates an agential masculinity, it also suggests a kind of Midas touch in which the banal world of civilian life is transubstantiated into the body of war, a kind of mystical transformation through which the world is remade.

In the film’s climactic scene, its claim to the supernatural becomes most overt as the film’s themes collapse into the allegorical figure of the titular ‘ghost in the machine’. A tightly shot, deliberately unsettling scene of a clown applying white makeup appears amid scenes of war and political conflict. While the clown remains an ambiguous figure in the film, the scene’s tense affect alludes to the application of ‘war paint’ common in the American Western film genre. For the recruitment-aged male, the image of the clown might also allude to the 2019 film Joker, in which the comic book villain turned anti-hero becomes an avatar of disaffected male youth. As the makeup is completed, a television set fades into view. On its screen a 1933 Betty Boop animated short depicts a cartoon clown, an animated analogy to the one in the previous scene. The clown dances across the screen with an unnatural, almost hovering gait. The film’s music builds to a crescendo that climaxes as a witch passes a magic mirror over top of the clown’s head, a process that strips the clown of its corporeal form, leaving only a spectral ghost that continues to float and lilt across the screen. The camera pans out to reveal that the television set upon which this scene has played out is on fire (Figure 5.1).

In this climactic scene, the film’s use of the horror genre is most pronounced, a point noted by 4th Psyop Group commander Col. Chris Stangle. ‘The artist behind the video tailored it a bit after iconic horror film Jaws’, he notes. ‘The filmmakers showed restraint in actually showing the shark. Instead, viewers knew it was lurking just below the surface’ (Britzky 2022). While the horror genre has been central to political imaginaries of psychological warfare from its earliest days, it has generally been used to characterise the psychological war of enemy countries directed at the United States. If the revival of psychological warfare has been associated with contemporary ‘post-truth’ crises, it is notable that US psychological warfare has departed from its traditional tendency to appear as a benevolent and stabilising force. More than a necessary if begrudging response to an enemy offensive, US psychological warfare now advertises its own aspiration to embody the fear and uncertainty of the contemporary political moment.

If the role of ‘truth’ in the moral economy of 20th-century US psychological warfare was to establish, distribute, and manifest the ontological and epistemic security of American empire, here truth appears not as an evangelising force, but as a kind of esoteric, almost occult possession guarded from the public and exploited by a psychological warrior elite. While this book has shown that US psychological warfare has often been coordinated and conducted in secret, it has generally eschewed political imaginaries of conspiracy when characterising its own activities. In its contemporary recruitment drive, however, US psychological warfare actively adorns itself in the symbolism of conspiracy, but with the promise that the new recruit may attain the initiate’s knowledge. The film therefore makes use of the ‘paranoid style’ in American politics, offering the disaffected civilian a chance to hold the other end of the spear.

The symbolism of the film’s climactic magic mirror thus suggests the revelation of a hidden world – a world of secret power and political machinations. At the same time, the mirror also represents the transformation of the individual, a kind of baptismal epiphany in which the truth not only of the world but also of the self is revealed. No longer burdened by the trappings of its flesh, the shambolic clown is shorn of its corporeal form; it is transformed into pure spirit and will, the ostensible raw materials of psychological war. It promises that, having passed through the looking glass, the recruit may take leave of the material world of disaffection and confusion to become the spectre haunting its enemies, a reactionary fantasy of power and self-possession. Yet the mirror image is also a mirror image: it represents not only the mystical transformation of the self, but also the transformation of the Other as the achievement of the psychological warrior. This conceit has long underwritten the political imagination of psychological war, from Barry Zorthian’s (1965) claim that the United States could ‘reconstruct’ the Vietnamese individual, to more recent claims about Russian psychological warfare ‘breaking down [the individual] from within’ (Illing 2018).

As this book has argued, the power to achieve the ‘mystical transformation’ of the Other has in reality been elusive. While psychological warfare purports to be ‘everywhere’, like the shark beneath the surface, it nevertheless seems to remain always just out of view. As Politico has recently suggested, Russian psychological warfare is a ‘sophisticated operation constructed within American society and media that we still do not see clearly’ (McKew 2017). Or as Time magazine put it, ‘the 2016 Russian operation was just the most visible battle in an ongoing information war against global democracy’ (Calabresi 2017). The foreboding, paranoiac spectre of psychological warfare as something that is everywhere yet always elusive further serves to re-centre the individual in all their corporeality as its key terrain and site of struggle. Indeed, while the individual may not be able to escape the reach of psychological war, they may nevertheless endeavour to secure themselves against it.

Here the final ‘mystical transformation’ of the individual takes place: by attaining appropriate knowledge, the individual may become the modern iteration of Edmond Taylor’s ‘nerve private’, one who wages psychological warfare in, through, and over oneself. ‘If it sounds alarming’, advises Time magazine, ‘it helps to understand the battlespace of this new information war’ (Calabresi 2017, emphasis mine). Or as Politico suggests, for the contemporary US citizen, ‘understanding how the Kremlin has tried to achieve [its goal] is absolutely essential’ (McKew, 2017). This injunction to understand reflects the ‘obligation to know’ (Foucault 2014b, 291) that has defined popular conceptions of self-defence in psychological war while also collapsing the scale of the geopolitical onto the scale of the individual. Not only does this geopolitical ‘obligation to know’ shrink the terrain of the political to the personal, it constitutes the individual as a kind of ‘double subject’ of war (Foucault 2014b, 81): the individual is seen not only as an object and target of enemy technique, but also and crucially as a subject of war with an active, participatory role to play. If Edmond Taylor originated the claim that in psychological war ‘the only defense is understanding’ (New York Times, 18 June 1940), contemporary psychological war discourse has similarly stressed the agency of ordinary individuals to participate in self-cum-national defence. ‘If you understand what the Kremlin is up to, the news is grim’, reports Politico, ‘but it also gives us a clear path to fight back.’

Beyond specific factual knowledge of the true and the false, of political and geopolitical affairs, psychological warfare ultimately posits a kind of self-knowledge as the final line of defence. As one former Central Intelligence Agency analyst suggests, ‘if we are confident in ourselves, these Russian attacks have little effect’ (Sipher 2018). Here it is not knowledge of the world, but knowledge of the self, that is in question. If the sexual politics of psychological warfare have stressed the ‘penetration’ of individuals in ways that mirror anxieties surrounding the porous and permeable nation, self-defence appears as the reaffirmation of what Deutsche (1991, 27) calls the otherwise assumed ‘complete masculine subject’. Indeed, as Snyder warns, ‘Russia was always better than us when it came to penetrating their enemies and breaking them down from within’ (Illing 2018). To defend against the emasculation of psychological war is therefore to steel oneself against enemy incursion, not necessarily through the acquisition of external, factual truths, but through a kind of talismanic self-knowledge. Psychological warfare thus involves the formulation of what Foucault (2014a, 19) calls ‘the strange truth that the individual must produce about himself’. To secure oneself against psychological war is to secure ‘not only a docile body but also an anxious, self-disclosing citizen’ (Salter 2007, 49). A strange truth indeed: as Clint Watts put it, ‘you cannot counter back … unless you know what your nation’s policies are, what your belief systems are’ (Seldin 2017). In this strange formulation, vulnerability to psychological war consists in not knowing who you are.

As this book has argued, these political imaginations of psychological warfare often have little basis in reality, their power ephemeral. This is not to deny the power of propaganda. On the contrary, this book has shown how coordinated propaganda efforts such as the campaign to fund Radio Free Europe in the early 1950s can enjoy lasting and meaningful success. Indeed, the very idea of ‘psychological war’ itself owes much to the success of propaganda coordinated by British and American intelligence actors in the early 1940s. This book has thus in large part attempted to understand psychological warfare as a kind of ‘propaganda about propaganda’. Where propaganda does succeed, however, it is rarely the result of the kind of social-scientific, technological, or indeed mystical acumen so often credited to psychological warriors. Rather, it is generally the achievement of a more direct and banal exploitation of social, political, and economic capital, forms of exploitation that the more mystified visions of psychological warfare serve to obscure. Where these connections are made, real manipulation of public opinion remains possible and probable. Where they are not, as in the United States’ efforts to ‘win hearts and minds’ in places such as Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, psychological warfare appears anaemic and ineffectual.

While it may ultimately be impossible to evaluate the effectiveness of psychological warfare campaigns – a conclusion reached by the United States’ own retrospectives on the Vietnam War – the shadow they cast on US political culture has been and remains significant. In contrast to standard claims that psychological warfare is as ‘old as war itself’, this book has attempted to lay out the specific and contingent circumstances under which the idea of psychological warfare was conceived, how it was made socially legible, and the kinds of political, military, and cultural activities it has licensed. Psychological warfare is more than it seems, but also in some ways less. This book has attempted to provide tools for meeting popular claims concerning psychological warfare with due scepticism. It has shown that claims concerning the ubiquity and invisibility of psychological warfare have often led to more definite, visible, and traditional forms of war. The cause of psychological warfare has furthermore served to strengthen relationships between government and industry. As renewed calls for a ‘strategy of truth’ now appear directed towards the algorithmic and digital platforms of social media, it remains to be seen to what ends a new strategy of truth will be put. How will spiritual war be waged in the 21st century? Will the war of words again turn ballistic?