Plans and Planning
With most military planning, it is feasible to work from the top down,
define the strategic objective and then work out the actual requirements
of the operation in advance. This is not true of psychological
warfare.[39] The objectives may be defined, and in the process of
definition the general needs of a propaganda agency may be clarified. If
a plan calls for a press or a radio, somebody can requisition a Davidson
Press or a Hallicrafter radio and get ready to use it. But the plan
cannot define goals, set time limits for the achievement of the goals,
relate the goals to one another in a scheduled pre-fixed program of
success, establish terms whereby psychological victory can be told from
psychological defeat.
Psychological victory exists only in terms of the military victory which
it is designed to assist. Psychological defeat, no matter how much
critics or the enemy propagandist may allege it, can be proved to exist
only when an actual defeat makes it real. Psychological plans are always
contingency plans for the assistance of military operations. They are
dependent on the military operation and they cannot be checked against
fact except in terms of the military operations they ostensibly support.
Unfortunately, they were not always written with these reservations in
mind.
=Needs of the Operator: Materials and Guidance.= American officers,
assisting foreign troops, could not plan logistics until they found out
what the foreign troops actually required. How much did they eat, and
what? How much could they carry, and for how long? How much tonnage had
to be sent them, and how often? Such questions had to be asked about the
needs of the individual men before unit planning, not to mention
national planning, became possible at all.
Similarly, in psychological warfare, planning can be made realistic if
it starts with the individual operation for the control of which the
planning is done. Define the operator as anyone having a task in the
actual preparation, production or transmission of propaganda materials,
whether through electric communications or by print. The operator is not
usually a person with a high security classification, yet he plays his
indispensable part in fulfilling the highest and most secret strategy
of the war. How can a plan be written that will be useful in carrying
out the actual (and highly secret) strategy of the war while meeting the
needs of an inexpert individual way down at the bottom of the control
system? The answer is, of course, that no such plan can be prepared.
Different plans are needed for successive phases.
The operator needs simple but basic materials. If he is a producer of
some kind--such as a creative writer, an artist, a singer, a program
arranger, a newscaster who does his own scripts and so on--he is likely
to be a person with ideas of his own. Individual creativeness cannot
usually be turned on and off like a faucet. Low-ranking and disciplined
though the hired writer may be, he is still subject to the inward
frailties of authors if he is any good. (This particular author
sympathized deeply with some poor American Japanese who were given
unbelievably dull outlines and told, "Turn this into exciting Japanese
material! Give it pep! Make it rock them off their _tatami_! But don't
get away from that outline one damn inch!" The _nisei_ rolled their
eyes; they did a poor job, as they knew that they would.)
The person who has to be told day in and day out how to operate is no
operator at all. Psychological warfare is no place for unsuccessful
short-story writers or would-be radio commentators. It demands
professional standards, and it has more than professional difficulties.
Therefore what the operator needs is not technical instruction but
general guidance.
He must be told what he can say, what he cannot say. He should whenever
possible be given some reason for perplexing or cryptic instructions. He
should be helped to become familiar with what we are trying to tell the
enemy. There is nothing classified about that, since the enemy is to be
told it as soon as possible. The guidance given the operator should be:
(1) Plain.
(2) Feasible. (This sounds superfluous, but was not so during World
War II when operators were sometimes told to attack such-and-such an
enemy institution without referring to it directly or indirectly.)
(3) Organized. (The material at OWI was not organized until the last
several months of the war, with the result that hundreds of thousands
of words of propaganda commands remained in force, technically, but
un-indexed and arranged only by weekly form.)
(4) Specific in showing timing. (General controls should not be issued
at the beginning of operations; when revised, the revision should
supersede the revised section, and not be placed beside it. Other
provisions should be given expiration dates, after which they pass out
of effect.)
(5) Mandatory. (Control should be expressed in _do_ or _don't_;
personal advice is better conveyed through informal channels.)
(6) Non-security or low-classified. (This material, for the operators,
should be accessible to the operators. Often the most important
operator--the best newsman, the most effective leaflet artist--may be
a rather doubtful citizen, an alien, or even an enemy volunteer. He
cannot follow guidances unless he knows them, and it makes a farce of
security for his superior to be able to tell him the guidance, so that
he can memorize it, but not able to give him the document itself.)
These rules, though simple, are not always easy to follow. Here is an
example of a bad guidance:
CLASSIFIED
Without superseding instructions concerning religion, we may use the
occasion of the Sacred Banyan Tree Festival to needle the Provisional
President. Make a dramatic story of the President's life. Undermine
his use of religion to bolster the dictatorship.
Caution: do not mention religion. Do not indulge in scurrilous
personal attacks. Material concerning our information of the
President's biography is highly classified and must not be used.
The exaggeration may seem apparent, but it is a fair sample of the worst
directives as actually issued and many, though not quite so bad, were
near it. The same guidance in more acceptable form would read:
UNRESTRICTED
(Expires 24 September, week following Festival.) Standing instructions
make Banyan Tree Festival difficult topic with which to deal. If
operators can suggest means of referring to Festival without violating
prohibitions against religious offense, encourage them to try.
Monitoring and diplomatic sources show that Provisional President is
utilizing Festival to consolidate his position. If he can be attacked,
do so.
The other need of the actual operator is material. The script writer
needs actual texts of everyday enemy speech in order to keep his slang
and idiom up to date. The artist needs correct photographs of enemy
cities in wartimes so that the leaflet picture he makes will not look as
outmoded as a crinoline or a Model T. All of them need all the
information they can get about their own country--good handbooks,
dictionaries, elementary histories, textbooks in fields which they may
not know. It is amazing how hard it is to explain America to foreigners;
the American soon finds out how little he knows his own country, and
needs information about his own background along with current materials
concerning the enemy.
Where radio propaganda is in question, the script-writers and
broadcasters will read the enemy radio propaganda if they do not get
enough fresh non-propaganda material concerning their audience. Sooner
or later this will degenerate into alternate soliloquies of the radio
men on each side, each watching the other to see if he got a rise out of
him last time. OWI people frequently expressed idiot glee at having made
Radio Tokyo frantic. The OWI men were the first to admit that their glee
was pointless, since it was the Japanese broadcaster and not the
Japanese audience who responded. But for lack of current information
about the enemy the propagandist will refer to his own professional
opponent. There is, of course, a very substantial difference between a
change in enemy propaganda occasioned by a real inroad which one's own
propaganda had made in enemy opinion, and a change that consists simply
in angry or smart backtalk. Finding that difference is the
responsibility of propanal, not of the operator.
=Pre-Belligerent Planning.= Pre-belligerent planning differs from
regular planning in that it does not have the substantial context of
actual military operations to make it realistic and urgent. Like all
plans, the pre-belligerent plan should enumerate the facilities
available, the basic course of action to be followed, and the limits
within which offensive propaganda will be permitted. In fairness to the
planners themselves, as well as to the authorities who will fit this
plan into related military, economic, or political plans, the plan
should define the proper scope of propaganda as applied to the
contemplated situation.
One of the most useful functions of the pre-belligerent plan lies in the
periodic exercise which it gives in propaganda discipline. Information
and intelligence agencies frequently see their jobs so technically that
they lose sight of the need for coordination within the mechanism of an
entire government. Press relations people try to get stories in the
papers. Radio people try to maintain listener interest. Educational
officers are concerned with the teachability of their materials.
Spokesmen of the different agencies in related fields (such as shipping,
air transport, currency control, social welfare) are apt to comment on a
particular situation without reference to the needs of an inclusive
national policy. How much advice was handed out on the occasion of the
ultimatum to Tito? The Jugoslav authorities plainly risked
politico-psychological pressure from us; they came prepared for the
consequences; but both American official and private opinion expressed a
wild medley of recommendations, suggestions, and analysis. Federal
officials showed no better discipline than did the private citizens.
Pre-belligerent planning may be forced on the United States by eventual
international crises, but before that stage is reached, private and
governmental persons working in the informational field might do well to
consider how readily they could offer or enforce cooperation in the
event of a real emergency.
[Illustration: _Figure 51: Basic Types: Start of War._ This leaflet
embodies almost all possible mistakes in psychological warfare. It was
prepared to explain why war came between America and Japan, but was not
even begun until many months after Pearl Harbor. The heading and style
are official and formal. The message is no more than a footnote to
history. Its last fault redeemed it; no arrangements were made for
dropping it.]
=Psychological Warfare Plans.= A general plan for psychological warfare
expresses the aims of the portion of the war (either in point of time,
or with respect to a stated area) to which it refers. It states the
maximum goals which psychological warfare can, with honest realism, be
counted on to accomplish if all goes well. It indicates the minimum
effect, which (unlike combat operations) can fall precisely at zero.
The general plan then goes on to state the conditions which will govern
the operating agencies. The important part of this section lies in
guessing where the operating agencies are likely to need coordination
and where not. If the plan is to reveal highly important and therefore
secret strategy, it should merely sketch the broad outlines of the
processes intended, leaving to experts the responsibility of determining
specific _do's_ and _don'ts_. In such a case, however, the plan should
not leave room for inter-agency or inter-personal doubt as to where the
interpretive function lies. Too often, highly formal agreements are
interpreted out of existence by propagandists who are interested in
adding their own proposals to those set forth and agreed upon in the
plan. When definition of the plan in operational terms[40] is needed,
the location of the sub-definer should be made very plain unless the
propaganda establishment itself happens to be remarkably well organized
and in no further need of definite prescriptions of function.
The inclusion of actual political and military goals in a propaganda
plan is an exceedingly ambitious undertaking. The goal, "To foster a
spirit of nationalism and independence among the Eastern Arachosian
people to the end that they may revolt and set up their own pro-Allied
government," is a commitment beyond the reach of normal propaganda. It
comes closer to requiring all the facilities of the operating state,
financial, diplomatic, covert, and paramilitary, to put it into effect.
The goal, "To give sympathetic circulation to Eastern Arachosian
autonomist sentiments so as to promote interference with the occupying
power," is much more nearly attainable. Military goals are often
described by propagandists as attainable by means of propaganda alone,
but there is no known example of psychological warfare having attained a
strictly military goal without assistance by other means of warfare.
Goals such as "the defeat of ----," "the surrender of ----," or the
"destruction of ----," have no place in practical propaganda planning,
since they are pretentious or deceptive. More legitimate are the goals
actually obtained by propaganda, such as "encouragement of a spirit of
factionalism which may assist defeat ...," "promotion of war-weariness
that will make the process of surrender more easily accomplished ...,"
and "appeals for the destruction of ----." Such points may appear minor,
but it is the overstatement of the propaganda case that has many times
goaded disinterested outsiders into becoming skeptics or opponents.
Political and military goals can be described only in terms of hopes;
effective psychological goals--goals resting in the form of opinion
which it is desired to create--are very concrete. If enemy surrender is
desired, propaganda leaves to the operator no further scope for revenge
themes which will frighten the enemy away from surrender. If the enemy
leader is to be discredited on the basis of having poor military
judgment, the contrasting good judgment of the enemy general is a
necessary ingredient. The psychological goals have to be framed in terms
of how much the enemy listener, the Propaganda Man, can stand and can
believe. (See page 153.) Since he listens irregularly, furtively, and
half-antagonistically, propaganda will defeat itself if it shifts from
goal to goal with logical but finespun dexterity. Psychological goals
are attained only by sustained, consistent patterns of propaganda; they
have to be plain, repetitive, and insistent. Political and military
goals can be anything the planners feel like including as a pious wish.
They might as well consist of a current re-statement of political and
military aims for the subject or area at the time of planning. They are
beyond the reach of practical psychological warfare.
National-level and general staff level plans have to be made up in much
the same way. If the plan is good it will provide for its own
circulation to all government instrumentalities which do in fact conduct
propaganda in the particular field involved. It does no good to adopt a
plan for the encouragement of the Filipinos and the inducement of
cooperation among the Filipino officials of the Japanese-sponsored
Republic (which means a tone of conciliation toward Filipino leaders or
officials who hold puppet titles) if a cabinet member keeps calling
publicly for the immediate execution of any Filipino who ever had dinner
with a Japanese. It is useless to try to cooperate with Communist
guerrillas in West K'tai on the argument, "We all oppose the Axis
together! Ideologies don't matter when brave men fight side by side"--if
at the same time the guerrillas know we have a strong domestic campaign
on against Communism. Telling a Communist that ideologies don't matter
is like saying to a Jesuit, "Let's skip the superstitions, Father, and
leave religion out of it. Get down to business." To some kinds of
people, ideology _is_ business. The broad propaganda plan should make
choices that reflect the judgment of the reviewing officers. If they are
made in a vacuum, without taking into consideration the actual opinion
of the audience group, they might as well not be made at all.
Propaganda plans must be circulated to non-propaganda agencies in order
to make sure that routine public relations or announcements of current
or contemplated action, and statements of basic policy do not contradict
or neutralize the plan once it is put into effect. Frequently months of
propaganda work can be undone by a tactless speech from somebody in the
same government but in an unrelated agency. Authoritative circulation of
the plan--which means that the plan must be neither long nor
over-secret--can help forestall such mistakes. Speech clearance,
requiring review of all official and policy-making speeches in advance
of delivery, is the surest safeguard against overt collision between
different spokesmen. In World War II it was applied with some success,
but the exceptions were so conspicuous that the effective coordination
passed almost unnoticed.
=Strategic and Consolidation Plans.= Advance psychological warfare plans
for concrete military operations not only require a statement of the
propaganda operation to be performed with facilities and personnel who
are expected to remain static, but demand that the psychological warfare
personnel, together with the needful gear, be moved right along with the
advancing forces. This makes planning more definite, and those parts of
the plans that do not require psychological or political prescription of
content can be written in standard military form.
Wise consolidation plans give urgent priority to the restoration of the
home-grown informational media and recreational facilities of the
occupied territory. Definite anticipation of shortages in radio
facilities, newsprint, ink, paper, and other supplies can ensure prompt
reopening of consolidated facilities under way. The propaganda operators
may tell higher echelons that the local people are not competent, cannot
be trusted, and so on, but General MacArthur's experience in Japan would
seem to indicate that no army can carry on consolidation propaganda as
efficiently as the conquered civilians themselves can, provided the
civilians have:
(1) Reasonable though restricted freedom of utterance, so that they
can know what they may or may not say;
(2) Prompt liaison for security and policy clearance, so that they can
get an authoritative yes-or-no answer on proposed projects, enabling
them to maintain operation without intolerable delays;
(3) Friendly professional assistance in meeting material and staff
shortages;
(4) A series of phases, marking off the forms and methods of control
so that the controlling staff can plan for a first phase of doing its
own publishing and broadcasting, a second phase of letting the local
people work under license with close supervision and technical help,
and a third phase of permitting them freedom within the normal
censorship limits of military government. The American DISCC's
(District Information Services Control Commands) in the American Zone
of Germany did an excellent job in moving rapidly from phase one to
phase two in 1945 and 1946.
=Contingency Plans.= Frequently the chiefs of government and services
know of an operation or danger that may arise, which will change the
character of the war. Such were the North African landings, the Italian
surrender, D-day itself, the joining of the American and Russian forces
in Germany, Hitler's death. For such contingencies, it is desirable to
have plans ready stating the reaction of the government to the event.
Such plans can be prepared and distributed to select personnel, and
downgraded or released, together with any needed last-minute change,
when the first word comes through that the event is officially to be
recognized. Profoundly secret contingencies--such as Hiroshima day--do
not lend themselves to such treatment.
It must be repeated that plans are effective only when transposed into
plain, simple, usable guidances for the actual operatives. When a plan
is so secret or so involved that the only people who could carry it out
are not allowed to know anything about it, it becomes a sad
self-defeating effort.