Thread by @DavidCranmerUn1

Army investigates psyops officer for role in Washington on day of Capitol riot | US Capitol breach | The Guardian

Rainey, 30, is assigned to the 4th Psychological Operations Group at Fort Bragg, according to Maj Daniel Lessard, a spokesman for 1st Special theguardian.com/us-news/2021/j…

Forces Command. Known as Psyops, the group uses information and misinformation to shape the emotions, decision-making and actions of American adversaries.

On 21 June 2010, an announcement was made that the military intends to rename psychological operations, or PSYOP, to Military Information Support Operations. The decision, made a few days earlier by Admiral Eric Olson, Commander, United States Special Operations Command and

Army's Chief of Staff General George Casey, was propagated through a memo dated 23 June 2010.[3] By October 2017, the U.S. Army Special Operations Command (USASOC) reverted its decision changing their name back to PSYOP stating, "Psychological operations refers to the name of

units, while MISO refers to the function that soldiers in PSYOP units perform"

The unit is based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina and is a part of the 1st Special Forces Command (Airborne), under the United States Army Special Operations Command. The 4th POG was constituted 7

November 1967 in the Regular Army as Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 4th Psychological Operations Group. Originally activated 1 December 1967 in Vietnam, it was inactivated 2 October 1971 at Fort Lewis, Washington, and reactivated 13 September 1972 at Fort Bragg.

4th POG(A) currently consists of a headquarters company and three regional PSYOP battalions (POB) and one dissemination battalion. The 3rd POB is currently part of 4th POG(A) that supports both 4th POG(A) and 8th POG(A) and provides both with radio, television,

digital-audio-visual and print assets for developing MISO products such as leaflets, posters, handbills, newspapers, radio and television broadcasts.[6] The three regional POBs are regionally oriented and support the regional combatant commands in the planning and production of

MISO programs:

Since prehistoric times, warlords and chiefs have recognized the importance of weakening the morale of opponents. In the Battle of Pelusium (525 BC) between the Persian Empire and ancient Egypt, the Persian forces used cats and other animals as a psychological

tactic against the Egyptians, who avoided harming cats due to religious belief and spells.

Currying favor with supporters was the other side of psychological warfare, and an early practitioner of this was Alexander the Great, who successfully conquered large parts of Europe

and the Middle East and held on to his territorial gains by co-opting local elites into the Greek administration and culture. Alexander left some of his men behind in each conquered city to introduce Greek culture and oppress dissident views. His soldiers were paid dowries to

marry locals[9] in an effort to encourage assimilation.
Genghis Khan, leader of the Mongolian Empire in the 13th century AD employed less subtle techniques. Defeating the will of the enemy before having to attack and reaching a consented settlement was preferable to facing his

wrath The Mongol generals demanded submission to the Khan and threatened the initially captured villages with complete destruction if they refused to surrender. If they had to fight to take the settlement, the Mongol generals fulfilled their threats and massacred the survivors.

Tales of the encroaching horde spread to the next villages and created an aura of insecurity that undermined the possibility of future resistance.

Genghis Khan also employed tactics that made his numbers seem greater than they actually were.

Another tactic favored by the Mongols was catapulting severed human heads over city walls to frighten the inhabitants and spread disease in the besieged city's closed confines.

During the early Qin dynasty and late Eastern Zhou dynasty in 1st Century AD China, the Empty Fort Strategy was used to trick the enemy into believing that an empty location was an ambush, in order to prevent them from attacking it using reverse psychology.

In August 1914, David Lloyd George appointed Charles Masterman MP, to head a Propaganda Agency at Wellington House. A distinguished body of literary talent was enlisted for the task, with its members including Arthur Conan Doyle, Ford Madox Ford, G. K. Chesterton, Thomas Hardy,

Rudyard Kipling and H. G. Wells.

In 1917, the bureau was subsumed into the new Department of Information and branched out into telegraph communications, radio, newspapers, magazines and the cinema. In 1918, Viscount Northcliffe was appointed Director of Propaganda in

Enemy Countries. The department was split between propaganda against Germany organized by H.G Wells, and propaganda against the Austro-Hungarian Empire supervised by Wickham Steed and Robert William Seton-Watson; the attempts of the latter focused on the lack of ethnic cohesion

in the Empire and stoked the grievances of minorities such as the Croats and Slovenes. It had a significant effect on the final collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Army at the Battle of Vittorio Veneto.

The plan for Operation Bodyguard set out a general strategy to mislead German high command as to the exact date and location of the invasion. Planning began in 1943 under the auspices of the London Controlling Section (LCS). A draft strategy, referred to as Plan Jael, was

presented to Allied high command at the Tehran Conference.

The British "Double Cross" anti-espionage operation had proven very successful from the outset of the war,[25] and the LCS was able to use double agents to send back misleading information about Allied invasion plans.

The use of visual deception, including mock tanks and other military hardware had been developed during the North Africa campaign. Mock hardware was created for Bodyguard; in particular, dummy landing craft were stockpiled to give the impression that the invasion would take place

near Calais. When members of the PRG were assassinated, CIA and Special Forces operatives placed playing cards in the mouth of the deceased as a calling card. During the Phoenix Program, over 19,000 NLF supporters were killed.[28] The United States also used tapes of distorted

human sounds and played them during the night making the Vietnamese soldiers think that the dead were back for revenge.

The CIA made extensive use of Contra soldiers to destabilize the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.[29] The CIA used psychological warfare techniques against the Panamanians by delivering unlicensed TV broadcasts.

In cyberspace, social media has enabled the use of disinformation on a wide scale. Analysts have found evidence of doctored or misleading photographs spread by social media in the Syrian Civil War and 2014 Russian military intervention in Ukraine, possibly with state involvement.

30] Military and governments have engaged in psychological operations (PSYOPS) and informational warfare on social networking platforms to regulate foreign propaganda, which includes countries like the US, Russia, and China.[

Most of these techniques were developed during World War II or earlier, and have been used to some degree in every conflict since. Daniel Lerner was in the OSS (the predecessor to the American CIA) and in his book, attempts to analyze how effective the various strategies were.

•White propaganda (Omissions and Emphasis): Truthful and not strongly biased, where the source of information is acknowledged.
•Grey propaganda (Omissions, Emphasis and Racial/Ethnic/Religious Bias): Largely truthful, containing no information that can be proven wrong;

the source is not identified.
•Black propaganda (Commissions of falsification): Inherently deceitful, information given in the product is attributed to a source that was not responsible for its creation.

Lerner points out that grey and black operations ultimately have a heavy cost, in that the target population sooner or later recognizes them as propaganda and discredits the source. He writes, "This is one of the few dogmas advanced by Sykewarriors that is likely to endure as an

axiom of propaganda: Credibility is a condition of persuasion. Before you can make a man do as you say, you must make him believe what you say."[36]:28 Consistent with this idea, the Allied strategy in World War II was predominantly one of truth (with certain exceptions).

In the German Bundeswehr, the Zentrum Operative Information and its subordinate Batallion für Operative Information 950 are responsible for the PSYOP efforts (called Operative Information in German). Both the center and the battalion are subordinate to the new Streitkräftebasis

(Joint Services Support Command, SKB) and together consist of about 1,200 soldiers specialising in modern communication and media technologies. One project of the German PSYOP forces is the radio station Stimme der Freiheit (Sada-e Azadi, Voice of Freedom),[39] heard by thousands

of Afghans. Another is the publication of various newspapers and magazines in Kosovo and Afghanistan, where German soldiers serve with NATO.

In June 2015, NSA files published by Glenn Greenwald revealed details of the JTRIG group at British intelligence agency GCHQ covertly manipulating online communities.[45] This is in line with JTRIG's goal: to "destroy, deny, degrade [and] disrupt" enemies by "discrediting" them,

planting misinformation and shutting down their communications.

Dedicated psychological operations units exist in the United States Army. The United States Navy also plans and executes limited PSYOP missions. United States PSYOP units and soldiers of all branches of the military are prohibited by law from targeting U.S. citizens with PSYOP

within the borders of the United States (Executive Order S-1233, DOD Directive S-3321.1, and National Security Decision Directive 130). While United States Army PSYOP units may offer non-PSYOP support to domestic military missions, they can only target foreign audiences.
A

U.S. Army field manual released in January 2013 states that "Inform and Influence Activities" are critical for describing, directing, and leading military operations. Several Army Division leadership staff are assigned to “planning, integration and synchronization of designated

information-related capabilities."