Global Security and Intelligence Studies Volume 5, Number 1, Spring / Summer 2020 | Page 47

Psychology as a Warfighting Domain
to their former colleagues to convince
them to defect. According to Colburn
Lovett, a USIS Foreign Service officer,
this led to hundreds of enemy defectors
in the area. Similarly, Project Falling
Leaves used armed teams of ex-Viet
Cong members to deeply penetrate
enemy territory in order to conduct
face-to-face communications with Viet
Cong soldiers. They also used loudspeaker
teams, leaflet drops, radio, and
television to spread ex-Viet Cong members’
messages to defect (Goldstein and
Findley 1996). By having former colleagues
try to influence the Viet Cong
and North Vietnamese army, the US
sought to appeal to their emotions and
once again appealed to people’s sense of
social identity.
The Vietnam War involved psychological
methods of warfare from
both sides. The Viet Cong and North
Vietnamese Army relied heavily on
fear tactics among their own people
(Goldstein and Findley 1996), while the
South Vietnamese and the United States
influenced the enemy population using
a blend of methods from traditional
media, to loudspeakers, to face-to-face
conversations. Some of these methods,
such as Chau’s Census-Grievance program
and Operations Roundup and
Falling Leaves allowed for fewer casualties
while increasing the number of defectors.
Psychological warfare took on
a multi-pronged approach to attempt
to achieve victory in Vietnam. There
are many well-known lessons learned
from the Vietnam War, but psychological
warfare practitioners can also learn
from this conflict, particularly how to
engage populations during irregular
warfare. The methods used to influence
adversaries have continued to evolve
from these more overt methods of psychological
warfare to a more hidden
and subtle approach.
A Fire Hose of Fake News:
Disinformation in the
Age of Information
Psychological warfare between
world powers continues to evolve
and be used today. During the
2016 US presidential elections, the
American public started to become familiar
with terms like “trolls,” “bots,”
and “fake news.” While Russia’s technique
of using active measures and
RCT was not new, US society’s move to
the internet and social media as sources
of information enabled new ways to use
these methods. In 2015, Russia enacted
their largest targeted hacking campaign
in order to find compromising materials
on US political leaders. They were
able to access much of the information
from the Democratic National Committee
(DNC) servers, but the Republican
National Committee (RNC) servers
are postulated to have had less usable
information due to migration to newer
hardware (Watts 2019). Russia’s attack
on US democratic processes consisted
of trolls, bots, cyber-attacks, and staterun
propaganda efforts.
Russian trolls used a mixture of
spreading disinformation and strategically
timing their amplification of facts
in order to cause the most chaos and
distrust among the US populace. Trolls,
coupled with the use of bots, allow Russia
to disseminate a large amount of “in-
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