 action has a reaction. May be a physical or political reaction, there certainly will be a psychological reaction. If you don't take steps to control this psychological effect, it will control you. For example, Saddam Hussein did not anticipate the nations of the world uniting to eject his troops from Kuwait. The art and science of controlling the psychological dimension of a situation is called psychological operations. Psychological operations or PSIOP is a supplementary weapon system that can increase the relative combat power of friendly forces and adversely affect the combat power of the opponent. This may be accomplished by attacking the identified vulnerabilities and susceptibilities of opposing forces through a planned and coordinated program. PSIOP can assist the warfighting commander and serve as a force multiplier in several ways. It allows the commander to communicate with the opposition. That night we dropped approximately 20,000 safe conduct passes and then the following morning proceeded by a loudspeaker broadcast and surrender appeals and Marines went in and the entire PDF dignity battalion organization surrendered without firing a shot. Many of those people hanging on to those little surrender appeals that have been dropped the previous night. We were tasked for helicopter operations and we had mass defections and people that had just pockets of personnel that hadn't fled yet. Eight percent of the enemy POWs either had in their possession or had seen our leaflets and of those some 70% did what the leaflets told them to do, abandon their equipment, follow the procedures for surrendering, go south towards Mecca to seek refuge across the border. Secondly PSIOP assists the commander in communicating with non-combatants to ensure their safety. First thing we would do is we'd roll up with a rifle company. I'd give the company commander and we would decide that we were going to broadcast into the house to try to clear out innocence before we went and hit it. And in three or four pieces we took 50 or 60 people out of a house before the troops went and cleared it. I'm personally convinced that the civilian casualty toll would have been significantly higher had we not had these people spread out throughout the city to keep the civilians out of the line of fire. The newspaper, the Rajah, absolutely worth its weight in building because it really is a great way of communicating with the Somali people. It actually represents something they don't have as a newspaper. It's a way of reinforcing our benevolent image. While the basic principle of psychological operations is that everything we say must be true, there are ways that PSIOP can assist with military deception at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels, amplifying the effects of deception operations. In Desert Storm, many of the leaflets were designed to convince the Iraqis that we were going to conduct an amphibious landing. Some of the leaflets were overprinted with the insignias of American units. While that would not mean anything to the soldiers in the field, any that got to Iraqi intelligence could lead to false conclusions as to where forces from those units were going to attack. PSIOP's application is not limited to crisis or conflict. They can make significant contributions in peacetime as well. After the Soviets left Afghanistan, thousands of civilians who had fled to Pakistan began to return. But the road home was a dangerous one. Every route held mines, booby traps, and unexploded ordnance. To help the returnes PSIOP personnel developed a mine awareness campaign. This was so successful it was adopted by the United Nations and is still being used. Once the war in Kuwait was over, American soldiers pitched in to help the Kuwaitis. Psychological operations assisted by providing information in the form of radio, video, printed products, and face-to-face communications with the civilians trying to rebuild their lives. In Bosnia, the United States airdropped supplies to starving refugees. But first, PSIOP specialists designed and produced more than a million leaflets dropped by the Air Force to persuade warring factions not to interfere with the aid mission. They also warned the refugees of the dangers associated with the airdrops. Excuse me. I've got you on the par. Drift is three right. Got you. Closer to home PSIOP teams called Military Information Support Team, or MISTS, working through U.S. Ambassadors, are helping Latin American and Caribbean countries in the fight against drugs and in building a brighter future. PSIOP teams assist host nations in developing and producing products that are distributed by host nations, not in the United States. And at home, when Hurricane Andrew slammed into Florida, the skills and assets of psychological operation soldiers were put to work for civilian relief organizations, helping the survivors by providing vital information. What these guys have shown an extreme flexible way of doing business. They're doing humanitarian relief and humanitarian information systems instead of the normal psychological operations. They're running the radio station, they're printing, doing everything that they would normally do on mission lives, but with a little bit different touch to it. And to inform those not reached by radio or the newspaper, loudspeaker teams went through the devastated area broadcasting information to measure the impact of what you all do. Plus the fact that I like to look at your soldiers in good shape physically and look sharp morale appears to be pretty damn high and maybe it's because you can see some tangible results of what you're doing. Success comes from training. People who train for psychological operations train as soldiers first, but they also get intensive training and the skills needed to design and create effective products, including advanced individual training, basic and advanced NCO courses, regional studies, PSYOP officers course, languages and a master's degree in international relations. It all gets put together when the chips are down somewhere in the world and it gets put together from the top down. If we do have to go to war the psychological operations are going to be absolutely a critical critical part of any campaign that we must get involved in. The first task is to determine what psychological operations is expected to accomplish. This must be in line with overall objectives both up and down the chain of command. Then you have to analyze the audience, who they are, what appeals to them, what are they afraid of. PSYOP uses a cadre of experts for this purpose. It is also very easy in PSYOP business for us to think of people again in our own image with our own experience in Saudi Arabia where you kind of message that I would have thought of putting in PSYOP pamphlet was not what a Saudi and a Muslim would have thought. So I think it really I guess probably underscores the challenge of psychological operations. It isn't an easy business. It is one that is very complex because you need to understand a lot about the culture of the country that you're in, the history of it, who the faction leaders are, and you really have to become politically very sophisticated in the PSYOP business and culturally sophisticated to be able to run effective PSYOP's program. Next the products must be designed and produced. The guiding principle in creating products is that it must be true and credible. All of the news that we broadcast on Voice of the Golf was taken from major news agencies like United Press International, Associated Press, and Reuters. In addition to that we also aired testimonials from Iraqi prisoners which urge their soldiers, their fellow soldiers to come south to surrender to defect and all of this was done on their part voluntarily. We tied not only the broadcast product but the leaflet drops to the air campaign against the sector and regional operation center and basically the message was don't turn on your radar and if you do we will blow you away and of course that's exactly what we did. Our objectives are clear. Saddam Hussein's forces will leave Kuwait. The legitimate government of Kuwait will be restored to its rightful place and Kuwait will once again be free. All psychological operations need to support national objectives. This means that PSYOP must be approved throughout the chain of command. In peacetime the U.S. ambassador to the country in question is part of that approval chain. In wartime the PSYOP objectives flow from the national command authority through the unified command sync who will normally be given PSYOP approval authority. Whenever possible PSYOP products should be tested before they are distributed. Only after all this is done can the most visible part the actual dissemination take place. Finally we assess the impact of the products. This allows us to make future products even more effective. To plan psychological operations each regional sync has a PSYOP staff planning officer who is supported by the fourth psychological operations group at Fort Bragg. A staff planning officer will usually task a PSYOP assessment team to analyze the situation and suggest products to use or actions to carry out. The important point of the PSYOP preparation the battlefield is that it has to begin before the war starts. It's really too late to wait until the first round is fired before you begin to prepare the battlefield psychologically. It takes time, it takes some effort and it needs to begin as early as possible. It has both capabilities of being creating a very benevolent image as we want to in a humanitarian mission or a very you know baseball bat image if you want to if you've got some of the shoot magic you want to make sure that he knows what the cost is of doing business with you it continues to shoot on you so PSYOPs can really cover that entire range of if you want to call out warnings. So I think you're going to see PSYOP is an automatic part of every joint task force that you're going to see for him. I don't think there's any operation that we'll ever conduct without having PSYOP end up from it. I can guarantee you that.