Is this story about the DOD using "psy-ops" on senators even remarkable?

[BrainGlutton]

Story here. (http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/another-runaway-general-army-deploys-psy-ops-on-u-s-senators-20110223) Look, any federal agency will try to win over visiting Congresscritters to its agenda whenever it gets the chance. Why is it "psy-ops" when the military does it? Is it just because they use more scientific techniques?

[An Arky]

Yeah, Sales/Marketing/Advertising is Psy Ops, if you think about it, IMHO. Hell, half of parenting is Psy Ops, too! :D

[yanceylebeef]

I think the biggest problem with this, is the actual use of Psy-ops, or Information Operation troops. Every base or post has a Public Affairs or Protocol office who's job it is to prepare for VIP visits.

The use of these specially trained troops to pursue a general's agenda is a spectacularly bad idea, and should not have been allowed out of what ever meeting it was brought up in.

Using assets that are supposed to be used against the enemy is akin to firing on American civilians. (note, this is hyperbole, used to make a point.)

This falls under the "Fraud, Waste and Abuse" program that used to be everywhere in the military. You don't take a military vehicle through the drive through or to the BX, and you don't use assets that are to be used against the enemy against members of Congress.

[Vinyl Turnip]

I wondered the same thing. If they mean "we lied," say "we lied." Otherwise... well, I'm pretty sure I've used "psy-ops" at every job interview I've ever had, not to mention every attempt at getting laid.

[margin]

I was psyops before I switched and became an interrogator. It's a bit more complicated than marketing, but interestingly enough, a lot of the guys I was with went into that field. I don't know about other units, but mine was really screwed up. (When one soldier tried to kill another in Moscow, the offender was sheltered and protected and....the witnesses and victim were hounded and suddenly disciplined for ridiculous things. All of them were forced out of the Army.) Pysops is a lot more directed and aimed than just marketing, way more manipulative. The good ones can get inside your head whether you want them there or not. And there seemed to be some element of pride in doing that, whatever the desires of the targeted person. This guy (the general) just talked to the wrong person. I'd only be surprised if this was the first time.

[msmith537]

I was psyops before I switched and became an interrogator. It's a bit more complicated than marketing, but interestingly enough, a lot of the guys I was with went into that field. I don't know about other units, but mine was really screwed up. (When one soldier tried to kill another in Moscow, the offender was sheltered and protected and....the witnesses and victim were hounded and suddenly disciplined for ridiculous things. All of them were forced out of the Army.) Pysops is a lot more directed and aimed than just marketing, way more manipulative. The good ones can get inside your head whether you want them there or not. And there seemed to be some element of pride in doing that, whatever the desires of the targeted person. This guy (the general) just talked to the wrong person. I'd only be surprised if this was the first time.

This.

The difference between mere marketing and PR and "psychological operations" is that marketing and PR is used to inform while psyops looks for triggers or pressure points to get it's target to behave in a particular manner.

To provide a civilian world example as told to me by some people at the "strategic communications" consulting group at a company I used to work at:

Lets say you have a bill that you don't want passed:

Marketing and PR will basically send out mailings and flyers and hold rallys discussing the negatives, trying to inform the voters to vote against it.

Psyops (or strategic communications) will hire people to show up at pro-bill rallys to act inappropriate and cast pro-bill supporters in a negative light.

They may dig up or invent dirt on pro-bill politicians and supporters to ruin their credibility and otherwise cause distraction.

They might spread misinformation to discourage voters.


They call it psychological warfare for a reason. It's the difference between posting "Amy is a slut" on your Facebook page and hacking into Amy's page and telling every one of her friends (as her) that you want to have sex with them.

[JXJohns]

Can anyone break down exactly what they were doing? Psy-ops sounds dark and sinister. Everything that I have read falls short regarding the details of what happened. Are we talking about like a well orchestrated, strong armed, sales pitch for time shares in Branson or something akin to water boarding, or somewhere in the middle?

[Hbns]

Interesting, but have to admit my first thought wasn't OMG, but rather really?

Al Franken says no way (http://www.startribune.com/politics/national/116886313.html) did it matter, if it even happened.

Isn't this the same writer whose expose got General McChrystal relieved of command? Any chance that he is reaching a little, hoping to get lightning to strike again?

[BrainGlutton]

The difference between mere marketing and PR and "psychological operations" is that marketing and PR is used to inform while psyops looks for triggers or pressure points to get it's target to behave in a particular manner.

:confused: No, that's the difference between marketing/PR and advertising.

[Nadir]

The difference between mere marketing and PR and "psychological operations" is that marketing and PR is used to inform while psyops looks for triggers or pressure points to get it's target to behave in a particular manner.
Yes maybe, depending on how loosely you are using the term "inform."

It should come as no surprise that "psyops" guys also work in the PA offices when they're not busy bundling leaflets or planning infiltration missions. :rolleyes:

You don't think they let just anybody talk to the Congresspeople and Senators, do you? :smack:

[msmith537]

Yes maybe, depending on how loosely you are using the term "inform."

It should come as no surprise that "psyops" guys also work in the PA offices when they're not busy bundling leaflets or planning infiltration missions. :rolleyes:


And they work in the CIA's Special Activities Division.

You don't think psyops is just droping leaflets from helicopters blaring "Flight of the Valkyries" do you?


In WWII Daniel Lerner described psychological warfare in terms of three levels (http://www.truth-it.net/psychological_warfare_techniques.html):

Level White is basically truthful and only slightly biased and the source of information is provided.

Then Lerner defined Level Grey, which is much the same as White but here a racial, ethnic, and/or religious bias enters the mix.

Level Grey is, once again, largely accurate and truthful and is important to note that it contains no information that can be discredited as a lie.


Grey requires that the source need not necessarily be provided.

The final category is Level Black, where totally falsified reports are created, particularly for the enemy, where complete deception is the objective.

Level Black means that no holds are barred and outright lying and deception are permissible.

I thought that was interesting.

[Nadir]

Sure, they do lots of intel and covert-related stuff, so what? To imply the notion that the Army was performing a psyops mission on Congress based on who they talked to is ludicrous.

If your implying the legislators may have been dumb enough to buy it, that's another question.

Another great conspiracy theory.

[msmith537]

Sure, they do lots of intel and covert-related stuff, so what? To imply the notion that the Army was performing a psyops mission on Congress based on who they talked to is ludicrous.


I didn't really get what was so "psy op" about what they did. Gathering a bunch of publicly available information about a visiting VIP hardly seems sinister.

[Baracus]

I didn't really get what was so "psy op" about what they did. Gathering a bunch of publicly available information about a visiting VIP hardly seems sinister.
I think the problem is not that it was sinister, but that it was a misuse of resources for a "psy-ops" unit to be spending a majority of its time generating propaganda for friendly VIPs rather than against enemies. According to the article, all the unit did for the first 4 months was prep for VIPs.

[Nadir]

I think the problem is not that it was sinister, but that it was a misuse of resources for a "psy-ops" unit to be spending a majority of its time generating propaganda for friendly VIPs rather than against enemies. According to the article, all the unit did for the first 4 months was prep for VIPs.
I remember months of training for things that never even happened. :rolleyes:

[yanceylebeef]

I think the problem is not that it was sinister, but that it was a misuse of resources for a "psy-ops" unit to be spending a majority of its time generating propaganda for friendly VIPs rather than against enemies. According to the article, all the unit did for the first 4 months was prep for VIPs.

This is what I was trying to say in my post earlier. Sheesh, cough syrup with codeine leaves you in no position to post.

The problem is they were doing the job of the P.A. and Protocol shops. Like I said, this should never have escaped whatever staff meeting it first came up in.

[Tom Tildrum]

I think the problem is not that it was sinister, but that it was a misuse of resources for a "psy-ops" unit to be spending a majority of its time generating propaganda for friendly VIPs rather than against enemies. According to the article, all the unit did for the first 4 months was prep for VIPs.

That's basically what the whistleblower is saying (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/26/AR2011022603776.html), too.

In a telephone interview with The Washington Post, Holmes said he was not ordered to do anything that would be illegal if he was not an information operations officer. The dispute, he said, "has to do with who we are, not what we were doing."

There is disagreement on this point.

But independent specialists in military law said Holmes's position as an information operations officer, regardless of whether he was formally reassigned, does not mean he cannot be asked to perform other legal tasks. "If you're being asked to chip in and help someone else, that's a lawful order," said Jeffrey Addicott, who was as an Army lawyer for 20 years and now is a law professor at St. Mary's University in San Antonio.

Holmes also says that he is not a psy-ops officer as such.

Although the Rolling Stone piece claims that Holmes specializes in psychological operations, the Army said it has no record of training Holmes in "psychological operations." Holmes said in his interview with The Post that he learned psychological operations techniques as part of his information operations training but he said he never claimed that he was psychological operations officer.

"It's stretching to say that we're the Jedi-mind-tricks guys," he said.

[Nadir]

Wasn't Rolling Stone also the outfit that got the best wartime general since Robert E. Lee fired last year?

What bunch of douchebags. :rolleyes:

[The Second Stone]

Robert E. Lee was not a particularly good wartime general. He deliberately choose to be on the losing side. That he was particularly good in battle pales in comparison. Personally I disagree with saying that McChrystal was a "best" general. Did he win any particularly difficult battles? Not that were famous. Assuming that you are only talking about American generals, although it is not specifically stated, you are leaving out Pershing, Patton, MacArthur, Schwarzkopf, etc. who all have a much stronger claim to being good generals.

Marketing to Congress isn't a problem, but lying to Congress is against the law.

The Rolling Stone did the US a great service is exposing McChrystal as an insubordinate boob. It caused Petraeus great personal grief in having to double his work load, but McChrystal was very reckless around reporters and probably the same around his Afghan counterparts and subordinate officers, which doomed his job.

Eisenhower may have been a Republican to the Democratic Roosevelt, but he never bad mouthed Roosevelt to the press. Eisenhower fired a blabbing general once and severely rebuked Patton when Patton spoke out of turn in a manner not nearly as damaging as McChrystal when Patton was a battlefield commander, not a theater commander. McChrystal was way out of line even if it was not in front of a reporter. The fact it was before a reporter shows he had really poor judgment about diplomatic matters which are crucial to theater commander work. It was intolerable lack of self-discipline. While there will always be people who support a loud mouth against insubordination charges from liberals like me, the true historical parallel was when MacArthur was finally fired by Truman, Truman asked Marshall his opinion and Marshall said he would have done it a long time ago. And this too caused public uproar. But the damage MacArthur did by talking out of school was far greater diplomatically than the advantage another Inchon level success would have brought. Inchon was a brilliant success, but that sort of thing can almost always be ground out the really hard way. Keeping and gathering allies for yourself and keeping opponents from gaining allies is of far greater importance in the big scheme of things. Suppose it was MacArthur's big mouth and reckless that brought the Chinese into the war in a big way? If it was, than Marshall was right, and MacArthur should have been fired long before that time. I don't know if Marshall had asked to fire MacArthur earlier, I suppose I can look it up. I do know that Truman later claimed that he admired MacArthur and had some loyalty to MacArthur because Mac had been his own commanding general in WWI.

[Little Nemo]

There's an important point missing here. The armed forces are not supposed to be telling Congress what to do. The armed forces work for Congress not the other way around. The duty of the armed forces is to give members of Congress accurate information. And then Congress sets the policies and the armed forces carry those policies out.

[Little Nemo]

Wasn't Rolling Stone also the outfit that got the best wartime general since Robert E. Lee fired last year?It would be a sad state of affairs if that was anywhere close to true. Lee lost the war he was in charge of. If every general after him was worse, then the United States would have lost every war since 1865.

[Nadir]

- Much less understanding psyops, and other duties as assigned. Opinions on generals aside, Rolling Stone would do better sticking to what it knows best: The entertainment industry's fascination with sex, Drugs, Rock 'n Roll and other assorted related salacious topics.

Leave journalism and war fighting to the men who know it. Bed wetting liberal crybabies like RS reporters are way out of their league in military affairs.

[The Second Stone]

I disagree with you there. RS performed a great service in helping sack McChrystal, a disaster waiting to happen. Liberals by and large are much better informed as citizens than conservatives on the contra-indications of wars because we are by and large skeptical of the use of force, whereas conservatives will suck down any patriotic line of bullshit as long as it appeals to the use of force because conservatives like to think that the military is always correct and patriotic and try to remove dissenting voices. Since at least the time of Pericles people who have been democratically trying to stop wars have been correct that war can lead to disaster and at least since classical Athens war hawks believing themselves to be patriots have wrongly convinced people to go to war and their own deaths by appeals to patriotism and asking the nay-saying war skeptics to shut up because they don't know anything about war making. And that is what you are doing.

Had Pericles failed to take Athens to war against Sparta, the Athenian empire might have not fallen for a long time and become the leading center of culture, rather than Rome. Turtledove would have a field day with such an alternate history. (I knew him through his wife 30 years ago when she and I were both studying classical Greece at UCLA.)

Liberals like me know a hell of a lot more about war than conservatives. War is expensive beyond all pre-war imagining and it's outcome uncertain. The only kind of people who stand to benefit from all war are arms manufacturers. The people at large in a democracy do not benefit from war at all with one very important exception: if they win, they can keep their freedom. Thus, it is necessary for the people to fight when they judge that their freedom is at risk, and at no other time.

The last time our freedom was seriously at risk requiring a war declaration by the people was in WWII. Roosevelt, a liberal, had worked hard for years preparing the groundwork for that war: conservatives opposed moving toward war.

[JXJohns]

The last time our freedom was seriously at risk requiring a war declaration by the people was in WWII. Roosevelt, a liberal, had worked hard for years preparing the groundwork for that war: conservatives opposed moving toward war.

Sorry for the hijack, but when was our freedom ever seriously at risk during WW2? I suppose it will boil down to a difference of opinion of the word seriously. This last jab at conservatives seems to contradict the previous ones.

[Nadir]

I disagree with you there. RS performed a great service...
You are certainly entitled to have an incorrect opinion about that. Only as much would be expected from anyone who forms an opinion about the military or military leaders from sources like Rolling Stone.

Stan McChrystal is great leader, respected by his troops, feared by his enemies, and feared even more by liberal lackeys with no clue about the prosecution of war. The only great service done was to the general himself. I imagine he's making double the salary in his current civilian position along with a nice retirement package, while the situation in Afghanistan roils in ongoing chaos.

Congratulations Rolling Stone and all the liberals like you who think you know more about war than the men and women who actually do the job as opposed to waxing philosophic in your historical hindsight.

[yanceylebeef]

Nadir, are you trying to pick a fight? What gives?

If so, start a thread in the BBQ pit.

[Little Nemo]

Nadir, are you trying to pick a fight? What gives?He's telling The Truth. And we can't handle it. Because we're all bed-wetting liberals.

(Ever notice how a certain breed of conservatives keep throwing bed-wetting into the argument out of nowhere? It makes you wonder.)

[Nadir]

Maybe you need the term "bed wetting liberal" explained to you, so can decide if you are one of them, or not?

[Marley23]

Congratulations Rolling Stone and all the liberals like you who think you know more about war than the men and women who actually do the job as opposed to waxing philosophic in your historical hindsight.
Nadir, I'm tired of seeing you do this in every thread you post in. Drop the hostility and the one-liners. Either contribute to arguments with facts instead of insults, or confine your posting to the Pit. This is a formal warning.

[tomndebb]

Nadir, you are way out of line, taking this thread into personal attacks.

Back off.

[ /Moderating ]

[Nadir]

Rather than continuing this in a PM exchange with the mods, I'll just get on with it here:

Little nemo brought up the "bed wetter" thing, not me. A mod quoted my whole post in warning and after being questioned as to exactly what I said was wrong, still did not point out where I called anybody anything with the possible of exception of "liberal." If pointing out a poster's liberal POV as their only basis for an uninformed opinion is wrong or against the rules, I humbly apologize. Maybe little nemo was for baiting me into saying something you could warn me about? I was exhorted in my "warning" to provide "facts or cites, or even a complete position," yet reading back through this thread see none of that from anyone else. Is this required of only the unpopular opinion? Is an editiorial begininning with the question "Is the Pentagon trying to control Sen. Al Franken's mind?" considered good, factual support material in the SDMB model? There is no supporting evidence, facts or anything similar backing up a statement anywhere in this thread.

Look, I really could not possibly care any less what anyone here thinks of me, personally. I've been called a jerk, an idiot and few other things not quite so nice in my short time here thus far. Let's keep things in perspective - it is the Internet, after all. Psychological warfare may be an interesting topic to some, but if you call that little bit (http://www.truth-it.net/psychological_warfare_techniques.html) about it from msmth537 supporting evidence of what the Army does with legislators, you might want to ponder what Rolling Stone does with you. The whole episode from the time RS released the story amounts to nothing more that journalistic sensationalism targetd at their gullible audience. Congratulatins on being rabble roused - hook, line and sinker.

FYI: There is no "great debate" about psyops troops and operations. The rock bottom truth about the OP's original question posted: No, it is not remarkable - at all. I can assure you anything posted in this forum on that subject is purely speculative and opinionated, as is any interpretation of General McChrystal's portrayal by said journalists. Psyops activites are by and large higlhly classified. Nobody except cretins like those that feed Wikileaks would offer further details. The meager bits and pieces dreged up and published out of context by people like RS reporters, only stoke the wild imaginatjons of their cluless readers.

If you feel my dialog needs supressed here because you disagree with my POV, by all means keep it up. I'll either get banned or decide to leave you to your little liberal rant fests all on my own. I have plenty of other things I may wish to attend to in my slack time.

carry on.

[user_hostile]

Former Lt. General Chrystal (not "Stan" Chrystal) was part of conspiracy which covered-up the fratricide of Pat Tillman. If that's a sign of great leadership, Nadir, feel free to explain to me why that is the case. In the meanwhile, I believe he was being insubordinate with respect to his superiors. Remember he always had the choice to keep his mouth shut. He screwed up, not RS. He was one of the few who actually got what was coming to him IMHO.

BTW, on the aside, just how classified are psyops? "Secret", "Top Secret", higher?

[Nadir]

On the cover of the Rolling Stone...

Rolling Stone.... Rolling Stone...
...:rolleyes: