A Military Unit in the Pentagon Engages in a War of Clandestine Information and Here Are the Tools

Twitter's and Facebook's discovery of fake social media accounts prompted the Pentagon to launch a review of its own psychological warfare operations, according to several defense and administration officials.

Last month, Big Tech took off about 150 bogus personas and media sites created in the United States suspected of being run by the American military to promote pro-West disinformation in violation of the platforms’ rules.

Patrick Ryder, the Pentagon spokesman, said that Facebook and Twitter did not release any further information to the Pentagon.

But, according to him, the review was “an opportunity” for the Pentagon to evaluate the current work there.

 

US Clandestine Information

After the White House and federal agencies mounting concerns over the Defense Department’s attempt to manipulate audiences, the undersecretary of defense for policy, Colin Kahl, ordered the military commands engaged in psychological operations online to give “a full accounting of their activities by next month,” for a sweeping audit of how it conducts clandestine information, The Washington Post read. Two officials familiar with the matter claimed that the US Central Command "is among those whose activities are facing scrutiny."

After requesting anonymity, the researchers said that the fake accounts involved "posts from the summer that advanced anti-Russia narratives citing the Kremlin’s 'imperialist' war in Ukraine and warning of the conflict’s direct impact on Central Asian countries."

The CIA and the State Department have been anxious about the military’s use of clandestine tactics.

"Hey, don't amplify our policies using fake personas, because we don’t want to be seen as creating false grassroots efforts,” the first defense official said, blaming the Defense Department.

Meanwhile, another diplomat commented: “Generally speaking, we should not be employing the same kind of tactics that our adversaries are using because the bottom line is we have the moral high ground. We are a society that is built on a certain set of values. We promote those values around the world and when we use tactics like those, it just undermines our argument about who we are.”

 

What Issues to Address?

The accounts shut down included "a made-up Persian-language media site that shared content reposted from the US-funded Voice of America Farsi and Radio Free Europe," according to the researchers’ report.

Another account was claimed to operate on behalf of United States Central Command (Centcom), having purview over military operations across 21 countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central and South Asia.

One of the fake accounts published an inciting tweet claiming that some family members of Afghan refugees who died had claimed that the bodies being returned from Iran were missing some organs. It is noteworthy to say that the tweet was part of an article posted on a US military-affiliated website.

In 2020, Facebook took off fictitious personas accounts claimed to be created by Centcom to counter disinformation spread by China saying the Coronavirus responsible for Covid-19 was created at a US Army lab in Fort Detrick, Md.

These accounts were used to amplify information from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about the virus’s origination in China.

Though authorized by law and policy, the White House pressed the Pentagon to clarify and justify its policies in using alternative social media accounts.

Kahl wanted, by his review, to know "what types of operations have been carried out, who they’re targeting, what tools are being used and why military commanders have chosen those tactics, and how effective they have been," several officials said.

“You have to justify to me why you’re doing these types of things,” this was the message essentially.

The Pentagon system and doctrine impede the military to peddle falsehoods. However, there are no particular rules imposing the use of truthful information for psychological operations.

The US military sometimes "employs fiction and satire for persuasion purposes," for example, but generally, the messages are supposed to stick to facts, officials said.

 

Goals and Tools

Psychological operations to support US narratives overseas are not something new in the military.

There was extensive use of psychological operations in World War II, from the strategic to the tactical. Their planning started before the US entry into the war, with the creation of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA), under Nelson Rockefeller, with the responsibility for psychological operations targeted at Latin America.

These operations were used extensively during the Korean War and Vietnam.

Psychological operations were particularly valuable during the 1991 Gulf War due to the reluctance of many in the Iraqi military to engage in combat.

The popularity of western social media across the globe has led to an expansion of tactics, including the use of artificial personas and images, sometimes called “deep fakes.”

These tactics are soft media wars in which no blood is shed. It is rather the mind which is washed in different and multiple ways to finally confuse between the scene and reality, causing a kind of social, political, and security chaos.

Psychological operations are defined as planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences with the aim of influencing their emotions, motivations, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.

These modern social networks are actively used by governments around the world, where the United States, China, and Russia are the most active. Disinformation campaigns on social media represent one of the most prominent and common challenges in the context of psychological warfare against states and institutions.

Perhaps, the most prominent consequence of the relative modernity of social media and foreign disinformation campaigns is that efforts to combat all of this are still nascent, and technological trends indicate that detecting misinformation will become more difficult in the coming years, as the spread of artificial intelligence is opening up new possibilities for spreading disinformation, making these campaigns an increasingly attractive option for potential adversaries looking to spread chaos.