If our difference of opinion is so inclusive that we can agree on nothing political, our differences have gone from mere opinion into the depths of ideology. Here the institutional framework is affected. You and I would not want to live in the same city; we could not feel safe in one another's presence; each would be afraid of the effect which the other might have on the morals of the community. If I were a Nazi, and you a democrat, you would not like the idea of my children living next door to yours. If I believed that you were a good enough creature—poor deluded devil—but that you were not fit to vote, scarcely to be trusted with property, not to be trusted as an army officer, and generally subversive and dangerous, you would find it hard to get along with me.

It was not metaphysical theories that made Protestants and Catholics burn one another's adherents as heretics in early wars. In the seventeenth century, the Protestants knew perfectly well what would happen if the Catholics got the upper hand, and the Catholics knew what would happen if the Protestants came to power. In each case the new rulers, fearful that they might be overthrown, would have suppressed the former rulers, and would have used the rack, the stake, and the dungeon as preventives of counterrevolution. Freedom cannot be accorded to persons outside the ideological pale. If an antagonist is not going to respect your freedom of speech, your property, and your personal safety, then you are not obliged to respect his. The absolute minimum of any ideology is the assumption that each person living in an ideologically uniform area (what the Nazi General Haushofer, following Rudolf Kjellen, would call a geo-psychic zone) will respect the personal safety, etc., of other individuals in the same area.

In our own time, we have seen Spaniards get more and more mistrustful of one another, until years of ferocious civil war were necessary before one of the two factions could feel safe. Spain went from republican unity to dictatorial unity in four years; in neither case was the unity perfect, but it was enough to give one government and one educational system control of most of the country. The other countries of the world vary in the degree of their ideological cohesion. Scandinavia seemed serene until the German invasion brought to the surface cleavages, latent and unseen, which made Quisling a quisling. Russia, Italy, Germany and various other states have made a fetish of their ideologies and have tried to define orthodoxy and heresy in such a way as to be sure of the mentality of all their people. But most of the countries of the world suffer from a considerable degree of ideological confusion—of instability of basic beliefs—without having any immediate remedy at hand, or even seeking one.

In the states which are ideologically self-conscious and anxious to promote a fixed mentality, the process of education is combined with agitation and regulation, so that the entire population lives under conditions approximating the psychological side of war. Heretics are put to death or are otherwise silenced. Historical materialism and the Marxian "objectivity," or the Volk, or Fascismo, or Yamato-damashii, or "new democracy" is set up as the touchstone of all good and evil, even in unrelated fields of activity. Education and propaganda merge into everlasting indoctrination. And when such states go to war against states which do not have propaganda machinery, the more liberal states are at a disadvantage for sheer lack of practice in the administrative and mechanical aspects of propaganda. Education is to psychological warfare what a glacier is to an avalanche. The mind is to be in both cases captured, but the speed and techniques differ.

Allegiance in war is a matter of ideology, not of opinion. A man cannot want his own side to lose while remaining a good citizen in all other respects. The desire for defeat—even the acceptance of defeat—is of tragic importance to any responsible, sane person. A German who wanted the Reich to be overthrown was a traitor to Germany, just as any American who wished us to pull out of the war and exterminate American Jews would have been a traitor to his own country. These decisions cannot be compared with the choice of a toothpaste, a deodorant, or a cigarette.

Advertising succeeds in peacetime precisely because it does not matter; the choice which the consumer makes is of slight importance to himself, even though it is of importance to the seller of the product. A Dromedary cigarette and an Old Coin cigarette are both cigarettes; the man is going to smoke one anyhow. It does not matter so much to him. If Dromedaries are associated in his mind with mere tobacco, while Old Coins call up unaccountable but persistent memories of actresses' legs, he may buy Old Coins. The physical implements of propaganda were at hand in 1941-1942, but we Americans had become so accustomed to their use for trivial purposes that much of our wartime propaganda was conducted in terms of salesmanship.

In a sense, however, salesmanship does serve the military purpose of accustoming the audience to appeals both visual and auditory. The consequence is that competing, outside propaganda can reach the domestic American audience only in competition with the local advertising. It is difficult for foreign competition to hold attention amid an almost limitless number of professionally competent commercial appeals. A Communist or Fascist party cannot get public attention in the United States by the simple expedient of a "mass meeting" of three hundred persons, or by the use of a few dozen posters in a metropolitan area. Before the political propagandist can get the public attention, he must edge his media past the soap operas, the soft drink advertisements, the bathing beauties advertising Pennsylvania crude or bright-leaf tobacco. The consequence is that outside propaganda either fails to get much public attention, or else camouflages itself to resemble and to exploit existing media. Clamorous salesmanship deadens the American citizen to his own government's propaganda, and may to a certain extent lower his civic alertness; but at the same time, salesmanship has built up a psychological Great Wall which excludes foreign or queer appeals and which renders the United States almost impervious to sudden ideological penetration from overseas.

It is not possible to separate public relations from psychological warfare when they use the same media. During World War II, the Office of War Information prepared elaborate water-tight plans for processing war news to different audiences; at their most unfortunate, such plans seemed to assume that the enemy would listen only to the OWI stations, and that the American public releases issued from Army and Navy would go forth to the world without being noted by the enemy. If a radio in New York or San Francisco presented a psychological warfare presentation of a stated battle or engagement, while the theater or fleet public relations officer presented a very different view, the enemy press and radio were free to choose the weaker of the two, or to quote the two American sources against each other.

It must be said, however, that propaganda by any other name is just as sweet, and that the conviction of the propagandist that he is not a propagandist can be a real asset. Morale services provided the American forces with news, entertainment, and educational facilities. Most of the time these morale facilities had huge parasitical audiences—the global kibitzers who listened to our broadcasts, read our magazines, bought our paper-bound books on the black markets. (It was a happy day for Lienta University at Kunming, Yünnan, when the American Information and Education set-up began shipping in current literature. The long-isolated Chinese college students found themselves deluged with good American books.)

The morale services lost the opportunity to ram home to their G.I.-plus-foreign audience some of the more effective points of American psychological warfare, but they gained as propagandists by not admitting, even to themselves, that they were propagandists. Since the United States has no serious inward psychological cleavages, the general morale services function coordinated automatically with the psychological warfare function simply because both were produced by disciplined, patriotic Americans.

In the experience of the German and Soviet armies, morale services were parts of a coordinated propaganda machine which included psychological warfare, public relations, general news, and public education. In the Japanese armies, morale services were directed most particularly to physical and sentimental comforts (edible treats, picture postcards, good luck items) which bore little immediate relation to news, and less to formal propaganda.

News becomes propaganda when the person issuing it has some purpose in doing so. Even if the reporters, editors, writers involved do not have propaganda aims, the original source of the news (the person giving the interview; the friends of the correspondents, etc.) may give the news to the press with definite purposes in mind. It is not unknown for government officials to shift their rivalries from the conference room to the press, and to provide on-the-record or off-the-record materials which are in effect ad hoc propaganda campaigns. A psychological warfare campaign must be planned on the assumption that these civilian facilities will remain in being, and that they will be uncoordinated; the plan must allow in advance for interference, sometimes of a very damaging kind, which comes from private operations in the same field. The combat officers can get civilian cars off the road when moving armored forces into battle but the psychological warfare officer has the difficult task of threading his way through civilian radio and other communication traffic over which he has no control.

Psychological warfare is also closely related to diplomacy. It is an indispensable ingredient of strategic deception. In the medical field, psychological warfare can profit by the experiences of the medical corps. Whenever a given condition arises among troops on one side, comparable troops on the other are apt to be facing the same condition; if the Americans are bitten by insects, the same insects will bite the enemy, and enemy soldiers can be told how much better the American facilities are for insect repulsion. Finally, psychological warfare is intimately connected with the processing of prisoners of war and with the protection of one's own captured personnel.

Psychological warfare is a field to itself, although it touches on many sciences and overlaps with all the other functions of war. It is generally divisible into three topics: the general scheme of psychological warfare, the detection and analysis of foreign psychological warfare operations, and the tactical or immediate conduct of psychological warfare. Sections of this book deal with each of these in turn. In each case it must be remembered, however, that psychological warfare is not a closed operation which can be conducted in private, but that—to be effective—psychological warfare output must be a part of the everyday living and fighting of the audiences to which it is directed.

CHAPTER 3
Definition of Psychological Warfare

Psychological warfare seeks to win military gains without military force. In some periods of history the use of psychological warfare has been considered unsportsmanlike.12 It is natural for the skilled soldier to rely on weapons rather than on words, and after World War I there was a considerable reluctance to look further into that weapon—propaganda—which Ludendorff himself considered to be the most formidable achievement of the Allies. Nevertheless, World War II brought a large number of American officers, both Army and Navy, into the psychological warfare field: some of the best work was done without civilian aid or sponsorship. (Capt. J. A. Burden on Guadalcanal wrote his own leaflets, prepared his own public-address scripts, and did his own distributing from a borrowed Marine plane, skimming the tree tops until the Japanese shot him down into the surf. He may have heard of OWI at the time, but the civilians at OWI had not heard of him.)

Psychological warfare has become familiar. The problems of psychological warfare for the future are problems of how better to apply it, not of whether to apply it. Accordingly, it is to be defined more for the purpose of making it convenient and operable than for the purpose of finding out what it is. The whole world found out by demonstration, during World Wars I and II.

Psychological warfare is not defined as such in the dictionary.13 Definition is open game. There are three ways in which "psychological warfare" and "military propaganda" can be defined:

• first, by deciding what we are talking about in a given situation, book, conversation, or study course;
• second, by determining the responsibilities and authority involved in a given task;
• or third, by stating the results which are believed to be accomplishable by the designated means.

Plainly, the staff officer needs a different definition from the one used by the combat officer; the political leader would use a broader definition than the one required by soldiers; the fanatic would have his own definition or—more probably—two of them; one (such as "promoting democracy" or "awakening the masses") for his own propaganda and another (such as "spreading lies," "corrupting the press," or "giving opiates to the people") for antagonistic propaganda.14 Definition is not something which can be done once and forever for any military term, since military operations change and since military definitions are critically important for establishing a chain of command.

The first method of definition is satisfactory for research purposes; it may help break a politico-military situation down into understandable components. The second method—the organizational—is usable when there exists organization with which to demonstrate the definition, such as, "Propaganda is what OWI and OSS perform." The third method, the operational or historical, is useful in evaluating situations after the time for action has passed; thus, one may say, "This is what the Germans did when they thought they were conducting propaganda."

Since the first lesson of all propaganda is reasoned disbelief, it would be sad and absurd for anyone to believe propaganda about propaganda. The "propaganda boys" in every army and government are experts at building up favorable cases, and they would be unusual men indeed if they failed to work up a fine account of their own performance. Propaganda cannot be given fair measurement by the claims made for it. It requires judicious proportioning to the military operations of which it is (in wartime) normally a part.

This may be called the broad definition, since it would include an appeal to buy Antident toothpaste, to believe in the theological principle of complete immersion,16 to buy flowers for Uncles on Uncles' Day, to slap the Japs, to fight fascism at home, or to smell nice under the arms. All of this is propaganda, by the broad definition. Since War and Navy Department usage never put the Corps of Chaplains, the PX system, the safety campaigns, or the anti-VD announcements under the rubric of propaganda, it might be desirable to narrow down the definition to exclude those forms of propaganda designed to effect private or nonpolitical purposes, and make the definition read:

This may be termed the everyday definition of propaganda, as it is used in most of the civilian college textbooks.17 For military purposes, however, it is necessary to trim down the definition in one more direction, applying it strictly against the enemy and making it read:

Note that if the communication is not planned it cannot be called propaganda. If a lieutenant stuck his head out of a tank turret and yelled at some Japs in a cave, "Come on out of there, you qwertyuiop asdfgs, or we'll zxcvb you all to hjkl, you etc.'s!," the communication may or may not work, but—in the technical sense—it is not propaganda because the lieutenant did not employ that form of communication planned and designed to affect the minds or emotions of the Japanese in the cave. Had the lieutenant given the matter thought and had he said, in the Japanese language, "Enemy persons forthwith commanded to cease resistance, otherwise American Army regrets inescapable consequences attendant upon operation of flamethrower," the remark would have been closer to propaganda.

Furthermore, propaganda must have a known purpose. This element must be included in the definition; a great deal of communication, both in wartime and in peacetime, arises because of the pleasure which it gives to the utterer, and not because of the result it is supposed to effect in the hearers. Sending the Japanese cartoons of themselves, mocking the German language, calling Italians by familiar but inelegant names—such communications cropped up during the war. The senders got a lot of fun out of the message but the purpose was unintelligently considered. The actual effect of the messages was to annoy the enemy, stiffening his will-to-resist. (Screams of rage had a place in primitive war; in modern military propaganda they are too expensive a luxury to be tolerated. Planned annoyance of the enemy does, of course, have its role—a minor, rare and special one.)

"Psychological warfare" is simple enough to understand if it is simply regarded as application of propaganda to the purposes of war, as in the following definition:

In this sense, "psychological warfare" is a known operation which was carried on very successfully during World War II under the authority of the Combined and Joint Chiefs of Staff. It is in this sense that some kind of a "Psychological Warfare Unit" was developed in every major theater of war, and that the American military assimilated the doctrines of "psychological warfare."

However, this is only one of several ways of using the term, "psychological warfare." There is, in particular, one other sense, in which the term became unpleasantly familiar, during the German conquest of Europe, the sense of warfare psychologically waged. In the American use of the term, psychological warfare was the supplementing of normal military operations by the use of mass communications; in the Nazi sense of the term, it was the calculation and execution of both political and military strategy on studied psychological grounds. For the American uses, it was modification of traditional warfare by the effective, generous use of a new weapon; for the Germans it involved a transformation of the process of war itself. This is an important enough distinction to warrant separate consideration.

After the excitement had died down, it was found that the novelty of the German war effort lay in two special fields:

• first, the perfect or perfect-seeming synchronizing of political, propaganda, subversive, and military efforts;
• second, the use of the findings of modern psychology for the attainment of military goals.

The Germans set the pace, in the prewar and early war period and United Nations psychological warfare tried to keep up, even though the two efforts were different in scope and character.

In conquering Europe, the German staff apparently used opinion analysis. Much of this analysis has turned out to have been superb guesswork; at the time, it looked as though the Nazis might have found some scientific formula for determining just when a nation would cave in. In the conduct of war, the Germans waged a rapid war—which was industrially, psychologically and militarily sound, as long as it worked. Their "diplomacy of dramatic intimidation" used the war threat to its full value, with the result that the Czechoslovaks surrendered the Sudetenland without a shot and then submitted themselves to tyranny half a year later; the Germans wrung every pfennigs worth of advantage out of threatening to start war, and when they did start war, they deliberately tried to make it look as horrible as it was. The psychologists had apparently taught the German political and military intelligence people how to get workable opinion forecasts; German analysis of anti-Nazi counterpropaganda was excellent. Add all this to strategy and field operations which were incontestably brilliant: the effect was not that of mere war, but of a new kind of war—the psychological war.

The formula for the psychological war is not to be found in the books of the psychologists but in the writings of the constitutional lawyers. The totality of war is a result of dictatorship within government; total coordination results from total authority. The "secret weapon" of the Germans lay in the power which the Germans had openly given Hitler, and in his use of that power in a shrewd, ruthless, effective way. The Führer led the experts, not the experts the Führer. If the Germans surprised the world by the cold calculation of their timing, it was not because they had psychological braintrusters inventing a new warfare, but because they had a grim political freak commanding the total resources of the Reich. Even in wartime, no American President has ever exercised the authority which Hitler used in time of peace; American Cabinet members, military and naval figures, press commentators and all sorts of people are free to kibitz, to offer their own opinions, to bring policy into the light of day. That is as it should be. The same factors which made "psychological warfare" possible in the beginning of the war were the ones which led to Germany's futile and consummate ruin in 1944-45: excessive authority, an uninformed public, centralized propaganda, and secret political planning.

That kind of "psychological warfare"—war tuned to the needs of fanatically sought lusts for power, war coordinated down to the nth degree, waged in the light of enemy opinion and aiming at the political and moral weaknesses of the enemy—is not possible within the framework of a democracy. Even from within Imperial Japan, Pearl Harbor had to be waged secretly as a purely naval operation; those Japanese who would have told the Board of Field Marshals and Fleet Admirals that an unannounced attack was the best way to unify all American factions against Japan were obviously not brought into the planning of the Pearl Harbor raid. The Japanese still had too much of their old parliamentary spirit left over, as Ambassador Grew's reports show; the military had to outsmart the home public, along with the foreigners. In the Western dictatorships, the home public is watched by élite troops, secret police, party cells, and is made the subject of psychological warfare along with the victim nations. Hitler could turn the war spirit on and off; the Japanese did not dare do so to any effective extent. "Psychological warfare" was too dictatorial a measure even for prewar Japan; it is therefore permanently out of reach of the authorities of the United States. After war starts, we are capable of surprising the enemy with such things as incendiary raids, long-range bombers, and nuclear fission; but we cannot startle with the start of war. The United States is not now capable and—under the spirit of the Constitution, can never be capable—of surprising an enemy by the timing of aggression. If the same were true of all other nations, peace would seem much nearer than it does.

German psychological warfare, in the broad sense of warfare psychologically waged, depended more on political background than on psychological techniques. Disunity among the prospective victims, the complaisance of powers not immediately affected, demonstration of new weapons through frightful applications, use of a dread-of-war to harness pacifism to appeasement, the lucky geographic position of Germany at the hub of European communications—such factors made the German war of nerves seem new. Such psychological warfare is not apt to be successful elsewhere except for aggressions by dictatorships against democracies; where the democracies are irritable, tough, and alert, it will not work at all.

The psychological warfare which remains as a practical factor in war is therefore not the Hitlerian war of nerves, but the Anglo-American application of propaganda means to pre-decided strategy. Let him who will advocate American use of the war of nerves! He will not get far with commentators publishing his TOP SECRET schedule of timing, with legislators very properly catechizing him on international morality, with members of his own organization publishing their memoirs or airing their squabbles right in the middle of the operation. He would end up by amusing the enemy whom he started out to scare. Psychological warfare has its place in our military and political system, but its place is a modest one and its methods are limited by our usages, morality, and law.

• 1. Source (including Media)
• 2. Time
• 3. Audience
• 4. Subject
• 5. Mission

These factors are given in approximate order of importance to the analyst, and provide a good working breakdown for propaganda analysis when expert staffs are not available. The five factors can be remembered by memorizing the initial letters in order: S-T-A-S-M. The last factor, "Mission," covers the presumed effect which the enemy seeks by dissemination of the item.

Without going into the technique of field propaganda analysis (described below, page 115), it is useful to apply these analysis factors to the definition of some subordinate types of military propaganda.

Source is the most important. If the source is open and acknowledged,the government issuing it is putting the propaganda on the record before the world, and must therefore issue the propaganda with a certain amount of dignity and with an eye to the future. If the source is faked, then it is important for the government or army to make sure that the faking is a good job, and that the propaganda cannot readily be traced back. Two very different techniques are employed. Open sources require responsible public officials, preferably men with international reputations, who will get the best effect from use of the name and facilities of the government. Use of an open source usually (but not always) implies belief of the disseminator in the veracity of his materials. Fabricated sources require persons adept at illicit imaginativeness, impromptu forgery, and general devilment, combined with a strong sense of discipline and security. The United States was so chary of mixing the two kinds of propaganda during World War II that it operated them in different categories, giving rise to the three following types:

• White propaganda is issued from an acknowledged source, usually a government or an agency of a government, including military commands at various levels. This type of propaganda is associated with overt psychological operations.
• Grey propaganda does not clearly identify any source.
• Black propaganda purports to emanate from a source other than the true one. This type of propaganda is associated with covert psychological warfare operations.

White propaganda is shown in figure 4 which does everything possible to make the message the official message of the British and American governments. The border is done up in handsome banknote fashion; the great seals of the nations are handsomely displayed; the signatures of the commanding generals are shown as further attestation of the openness and good faith of the issuer of the propaganda.

Figure 38 was also prepared by British-American authority; it too had the job of making Germans surrender. But in this case, nothing was done to make the British-American source evident; indeed, every effort was made to hide the source, so that the German who read it would think that it came from within his own territory. The two different kinds of propaganda were both of them needed; each supplemented the other but they had to be kept apart as far as possible.

In the field of radio, the difference between Covert and Overt was even more plain. During World War II, the ether over Europe was filled with appeals from radio stations both public and covert in character. The British spoke to the Germans over B.B.C., making no effort to conceal the fact that they were British. But they also spoke to the Germans over clandestine stations, which pretended to be free-lancing Nazis, German army stations, or freedom group operations. The Germans, comparably, beamed official German news to the United States in English; but they also pretended to be Americans broadcasting from an isolationist radio in the American mid-west. In some cases, the belligerent powers used the identical radio transmission facilities for overt and covert propaganda. Radio Saipan, under the Americans, was most of the time the relay for the acknowledged San Francisco programs; intermittently OSS borrowed it, and it then became a "Japanese" station. (Under such conditions, black radio cannot remain black very long.)

In terms of the timing, propaganda can be subdivided into two further categories, strategic and tactical. Strategic propaganda is conducted with no immediate effect in view. Its purpose is to wear down the enemy by psychological changes that may extend over months. Figure 19, warning the Germans of the remote future, is an example of this in leaflet form. Tactical propaganda is operated to accomplish an immediate short-range purpose, and normally does not cover a long time-span. Only in a few cases, such as leaflets for a besieged enemy unit, is tactical propaganda run for a purpose that encompasses a long delay between the operation and the expected result. These two forms may be defined as follows:

• Strategic propaganda is directed at enemy forces, enemy peoples, and enemy-occupied areas in their entirety, and—in coordination with strategic planning—is designed to effectuate results planned and sought over a period of weeks, months, or years.
• Tactical propaganda is directed at specific audiences, usually named, and is prepared and executed in support of localized combat operations.

Another set of distinctions can be set up, depending on the relationship of the propaganda operation to the simultaneous hostile propaganda operations, namely offensive or defensive propaganda. Before the advent of World War II, this distinction appeared to be significant but experience on almost all fronts indicated that it meant little when applied to day-in day-out necessities of actual practice. Propaganda is so intimately keyed to the news and opinion situation that it does not usually bear elaborate pre-operational analysis. Elaborate planning very often ends up in the locked files; the distinction of offensive and defensive means little in routine work. However, for the sake of the record, the distinction can be listed:

• Defensive propaganda is designed to maintain an accepted and operating form of social or other public action. (Soviet propaganda for the Five Year Plans is a conspicuous instance.)
• Offensive propaganda is designed to interrupt social action not desired by the propagandist, or to predispose to social action which he desires, either through revolutionary means (within the same society) or international, either diplomatic or belligerent (between different societies).

Another set of distinctions arises from the purpose which the propaganda officer or group may have in mind for the people whom he addresses. These distinctions, like offensive-defensive, are theoretical rather than practical, and did not often appear in the actual operations, although all the more hush-hush plans made elaborate references to them:

• Conversionary propaganda is designed to change the emotional orpractical allegiance of individuals from one group to another.
• Divisive propaganda is designed to split apart the component subgroups of the enemy and thereby reduce the effectiveness of the enemy group considered as a single unit. (An instance is provided by the Allied effort to make German Catholics think first as Catholics, then as Germans.)
• Consolidation propaganda is directed toward civil populations in areas occupied by a military force and is designed to insure compliance with the commands or policies promulgated by the commander of the occupying force.
• Counterpropaganda is designed to refute a specific point or theme of enemy propaganda. (Japanese charges of American atrocities usually followed American charges of Japanese atrocities.)

Except for those terms that are firmly rooted in the literature of propaganda, most of the distinctions can be forgotten; the basic distinctions are those determined by the task involved, and not by the propaganda content.

World War II brought up a very sore issue between military and civilians with respect to propaganda in areas with unsettled governments—such as Darlanist North Africa, Communist China, all of Siam. (See, also, discussion of World War II, below, page 77 ff.) In these areas every military act involved the definition of the political relations of the United States Government to the governments locally enjoying authority. Were we at war with them, or not? And so on. In these cases, politics itself became a vital foundation to propaganda, especially when the local authorities were themselves active in the propaganda field. The American theater and unit commanders had to decide what kinds of political promises they could or could not make. In this job, they had a more difficult task than did the British, who possessed in the Political Warfare Executive a pooling facility which coordinated foreign policy with propaganda.19 Could we promise freedom from France to the Algerians? Or immunity to the Siamese who re-doublecrossed in the matter of allegiance and got ready to subvert the Japanese? Or the Yenan people who wanted us to highjack the Generalissimo as a price of their support? Or the Indonesians who might oppose the Japanese and already opposed the Dutch? Such questions transcended propaganda. Their decision made propaganda, or unmade it; but the deciding power was outside the authority of the propaganda people.

Political warfare is therefore, in administrative terms, a higher-level activity than propaganda, and may be defined as follows:

Such policy-framing does not normally fall within the authority of the Army or Navy, though these may be consulted and called upon to effect appropriate military action. An outstanding instance of the use of political warfare was President Roosevelt's impromptu enunciation of the theme "Unconditional Surrender" at Casablanca. The theme affected not only our propaganda, but the types of surrenders which American generals could accept from Germans.

CHAPTER 4
The Limitations of Psychological Warfare

Psychological warfare cannot be known simply in terms of what it is; it must also be understood in relation to the limits which are imposed on it. The limitations can be described under four headings:

• political limitations;
• security limitations;
• limitations arising from media;
• limitations of personnel.

Like all limitations, these are handicaps only to the person who lacks the courage and resourcefulness to turn them into assets. Propaganda is dependent on politics, even for such front-line requirements as "definition of the enemy," yet intelligent exploitation of political goals yields valuable results. Security is an asset to any army; its price is rarely too high a price to pay for protection, but a selective and flexible censorship can lead to positive advantages. Media—that is, the actual instrumentalities by which propaganda is conveyed—are the ordnance of psychological warfare. They limit the performable job but they also make it possible in the first place. And as in any military operation, success depends most of all on proper use of personnel.

Each of these merits discussion. The experience drawn upon has, in almost all instances, been that of World War II. As in most other fields, common sense runs a close second to experience as a guide in new methods of struggle.