When most of us think of war, we picture tanks and artillery, soldiers firing weapons, and things blowing up.
Though there’s a lot more to war than these violent, explosive moments. War and conflict have a large element of preparation, organization, bureaucracy, and also mental and emotional control.
This makes sense if you think about it: the most powerful weapon in the world is control of the minds of human beings.
This is where psychological operations come into play (psyops). Whereas now various psyops out of the Pentagon are getting busted wide open and the military is trying to respond.
Botched Psyops Causing Concern Among Brass
The Pentagon is currently undergoing an overhaul of looking at its psychological warfare and info war strategies, due to hitting certain roadblocks.
In particular, a number of sock puppet accounts are being booted off platforms like Twitter and elsewhere for breaking platform rules, which is annoying and causing headaches for military brass.
Social media is one important battlespace for information war and psyops; being partly deprived or interrupted in that domain is of concern.
Places like Facebook (“Meta”) and Twitter are taking down a number of accounts that are fake, something the Stanford Internet Observatory recently reported on.
Some of these recent removals are related to the US military and psyops, including psyops related to spreading fear of Russia in Central Asia. This isn’t exactly surprising and it makes perfect sense these kinds of operations would be going on.
What is surprising and disturbing is leftist platforms like Twitter are interfering with the US military and the military has incompetent enough ops to get busted off a civilian platform.
It's a really good thing the Pentagon got all this new cyberspace psyop stuff straightened out in the NDAA just before covid, phew! Imagine if we hadn't appointed a Principal Information Operations Advisor to the Secretary of Defense in time! https://t.co/zJE4QfDHpA pic.twitter.com/W2SeJwekI8
— 12 Ball (@BoltzmannBooty) September 19, 2022
Why is This Even Happening?
The Pentagon’s main media representative, Brigadier General Patrick Ryder, said all info ops are in full accordance with the law.
He said the Pentagon is “committed” to following the law. OK, sounds nice. What about America’s various enemies? They obviously don’t follow the law in their operations, so why is the head of the Pentagon giving an apology and PR tour?
The military is permitted to use fake accounts under national security provisions, in fact, even though some understandably find it controversial and may wonder what they’re doing with them and who, exactly, has oversight.
Part of the reason the military does care more about this is they don’t want to get too many wires crossed and have different departments or intelligence agencies overlapping or even conflicting in their messaging and personas.
It’s certainly true somebody needs to be in charge and there shouldn’t be blank checks written to carry out any info ops some mid-level person thinks would be smart.
Though at the same time, the fact this has broken into the public and come up in Washington Post and elsewhere is kind of worrisome. Shouldn’t national security matters be staying behind the curtain?
The Pentagon ordered a sweeping audit of how it conducts clandestine information warfare after major social media companies identified and took offline fake accounts suspected of being run by the U.S. military in violation of the platforms’ rules. https://t.co/woMZRnbReN #PSYOP
— Bob Wilson (@aoindependence) September 19, 2022
The Current Sitrep
Biden’s regime continues to oversee a declining force posture in the intel community and military leadership. Information war should stay clandestine and should not be revelations in the national media.
