Military Psyop Propaganda, Memes & You

[EndtheMadnessNow]

Fun to learn that the US military was using fake social media accounts (wut, say it isn't so ?) to combat the idea that Covid originated at Ft. Detrick and instead "amplify truthful information from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about the virus origination in China."

Centcom has not commented on whether these accounts were created by its personnel or contractors. If the organ-harvesting tweet is shown to be Centcom’s, one defense official said, it would “absolutely be a violation of doctrine and training practices.”

Pentagon policy and doctrine discourage the military from peddling falsehoods, but there are no specific rules mandating the use of truthful information for psychological operations. For instance, the military sometimes employs fiction and satire for persuasion purposes, but generally the messages are supposed to stick to facts, officials said.

...Congress in late 2019 passed a law affirming that the military could conduct operations in the “information environment” to defend the United States and to push back against foreign disinformation aimed at undermining its interests. The measure, known as Section 1631, allows the military to carry out clandestine psychological operations without crossing what the CIA has claimed as its covert authority, alleviating some of the friction that had hindered such operations previously.

“Combatant commanders got really excited,” recalled the first defense official. “They were very eager to utilize these new authorities. The defense contractors were equally eager to land lucrative classified contracts to enable clandestine influence operations.”
...
Agranovich also spoke to officials at the Pentagon. His message was: “We know what DOD is doing. It violates our policies. We will enforce our policies” and so “DOD should knock it off,” said a U.S. official briefed on the matter.

In response to White House concerns, Kahl ordered a review of Military Information Support Operations, or MISO, the Pentagon’s moniker for psychological operations. A draft concluded that policies, training and oversight all needed tightening, and that coordination with other agencies, such as the State Department and the CIA, needed strengthening, according to officials.

The review also found that while there were cases in which fictitious information was pushed by the military, they were the result of inadequate oversight of contractors and personnel training — not systemic problems, officials said.

Full article: WaPo | Archived

Phew. What a relief! Greater ?Pentagon/State Dept./CIA ?psyop ?coordination.





It's a really good thing the Pentagon got all this new cyberspace psyop stuff straightened out in the NDAA just before Covid! Imagine if we hadn't appointed a Principal Information Operations Advisor to the Secretary of Defense in time!



NDAA 2020 [PDF] - Dec 9, 2019; Pages 592-594 (546-548) of 1,794 pages.


Flashback...


The Guardian



The sublime aspect of memes


That Newsweek story from last year on the Pentagon's clandestine Army is now more interesting.

Exclusive: Inside the Military's Secret Undercover Army

The largest undercover force the world has ever known is the one created by the Pentagon over the past decade. Some 60,000 people now belong to this secret army, many working under masked identities and in low profile, all part of a broad program called "signature reduction." The force, more than ten times the size of the clandestine elements of the CIA, carries out domestic and foreign assignments, both in military uniforms and under civilian cover, in real life and online, sometimes hiding in private businesses and consultancies, some of them household name companies.