Global Security and Intelligence Studies Volume 5, Number 1, Spring / Summer 2020 | Page 45

Psychology as a Warfighting Domain
(Thomas 2004). In this case, understanding
the psychological characteristics
of US decision-makers allowed
Russia to compete with the US through
psychological manipulation.
The Cold War was a fertile environment
for the germination of
non-traditional warfare means. Two
superpowers were placed head-to-head
in a battle for supremacy without the
ability to rely on traditional schools of
thought for international relations and
military strategy. Both sides began to
replace air superiority and decisive battles
with espionage and proxy war. Beginning
with their development of Maskirovka
in turn of the twentieth century,
the Soviet Union was well positioned
to develop RCT, a mathematical, cybernetics-based
solution to controlling
their adversaries’ decision-making abilities.
This new approach to vying for
supremacy, combined with the intense,
specific research of the Institute for US
and Canadian Studies, allowed for the
refinement needed to enable RCT. The
Soviet Union could effectively use RCT
to hijack the Observe, Orient, Decide,
and Act (OODA) loop, created in the
fifties and typically used widely by the
US military to describe decision-making.
By understanding how a target
orients and decides, RCT allowed the
Soviet Union to predict behavior and
insert a counter to create a “reorientation.”
There is present and significant
evidence that the Soviet Union was able
to master a new, innovative approach
to grey-zone conflict and would have
had no reason to abandon such a useful
school of thought in recent years. The
former Soviet Union has continued to
influence US decision-making through
psychological warfare in recent years,
which the authors explore further on in
this article.
Ghosts and Grievances
in the Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was another
period of conflict in which the
US and other nations sought to
amplify their effectiveness through psychological
means. One example of this
is reminiscent of how the Egyptian’s
beliefs were used against them. In Vietnam
in 1967, there was a widely held
Buddhist belief that spirits of the dead
uneasily walked the Earth unless their
relatives buried them properly. The
primarily Buddhist North Vietnamese
and the Viet Cong were dying far
from home. These beliefs and facts led
to the creation of Operation Wandering
Soul. This operation was an effort
by US soldiers to lower enemy morale
and create fear and confusion (Hoyt
2017). The Sixth Psychological Operations
Battalion (Sixth PSYOP) paired
with the US Navy to broadcast audio
consisting of Buddhist funeral music,
unearthly sounds, and distressed voices
of “ghosts” speaking of how they were
now in Hell, wandering the Earth (Shirley
2012). While the United States used
audio as a ruse previously in WWII
during the “Ghost Army” recordings,
the use of audio during the Vietnam
War served as a way to take advantage
of cultural and religious beliefs that the
dead will wander the world looking for
their bodies unless properly buried. The
US was not solely responsible for this
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