The History of Psychological Warfare. Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger
not need to study the whole nature of war, in order to find his own job. Tradition, military skill, discipline, sound doctrine—these have done the job for him. Sun Tzu, Vegetius, Frederick, Clausewitz and a host of lesser writers on war have established the place of combat in war, and have appraised its general character.
How much the traditional doctrines may be altered in the terrible light of atomic explosion, no one knows; but though the weapons are novel, the wielders of the weapons will still be men. The motives and weaknesses within war remain ancient and human, however novel and dreadful the mechanical expedients adopted to express them.
Warfare as a whole is traditionally well defined, and psychological warfare can be understood only in relation to the whole process. It is no mere tool, to be used on special occasion. It has become a pervasive element in the military and security situation of every power on earth.
Psychological warfare is a part of war. The simplest, plainest thing which can be said of war—any sort of war, anywhere, anytime—is that it is an official fight between men. Combat, killing, and even large-scale group struggle are known elsewhere in the animal kingdom, but war is not. All sorts of creatures fight; but only men declare, wage, and terminate war; and they do so only against other men.
Formally, war may be defined as the "reciprocal application of violence by public, armed bodies."
If it is not reciprocal, it is not war, the killing of persons who do not defend themselves is not war, but slaughter, massacre, or punishment.
If the bodies involved are not public, their violence is not war. Even our enemies in World War II were relatively careful about this distinction, because they did not know how soon or easily a violation of the rules might be scored against them. To be public, the combatants need not be legal—that is, constitutionally set up; it suffices, according to international usage, for the fighters to have a reasonable minimum of numbers, some kind of identification, and a purpose which is political. If you shoot your neighbor, you will be committing mere murder; but if you gather twenty or thirty friends, together, tie a red handkerchief around the left arm of each man, announce that you are out to overthrow the government of the United States, and then shoot your neighbor as a counterrevolutionary impediment to the new order of things, you can have the satisfaction of having waged war. (In practical terms, this means that you will be put to death for treason and rebellion, not merely for murder.)
Finally, war must be violent. According to the law of modern states, all the way from Iceland to the Yemen, economic, political, or moral pressure is not war; war is the legalization, in behalf of the state, of things which no individual may lawfully do in time of peace. As a matter of fact, even in time of war you cannot kill the enemy unless you do so on behalf of the state; if you had shot a Japanese creditor of yours privately, or even shot a Japanese soldier when you yourself were out of uniform, you might properly and lawfully have been put to death for murder—either by our courts or by the enemies'. (This is among the charges which recur in the war trials. The Germans and Japanese killed persons whom even war did not entitle them to kill.)
The governments of the modern world are jealous of their own monopoly of violence. War is the highest exercise of that violence, and modern war is no simple reversion to savagery. The General Staffs would not be needed if war were only an uncomplicated orgy of homicide—a mere getting-mad and throat-cutting season in the life of man. Quite to the contrary, modern war—as a function of modern society—reflects the institutional, political complexity from which it comes. A modern battle is a formal, ceremonialized and technically intricate operation. You must kill just the right people, in just the right way, with the right timing, in the proper place, for avowed purposes. Otherwise you make a mess of the whole show, and—what is worse—you lose.
Why must you fight just so and so, there and not here, now and not then? The answer is simple: you are fighting against men. Your purpose in fighting is to make them change their minds. It is figuratively true to say that the war we have just won was a peculiar kind of advertising campaign, designed to make the Germans and Japanese like us and our way of doing things. They did not like us much, but we gave them alternatives far worse than liking us, so that they became peaceful.
Sometimes individuals will be unpersuadable. Then they must be killed or neutralized by other purely physical means—such as isolation or imprisonment. (Some Nazis, perhaps including the Führer himself, found our world repellent or incomprehensible and died because they could not make themselves surrender. In the Pacific many Japanese had to be killed before they became acceptable to us.) But such is man, that most individuals will stop fighting at some point short of extinction; that point is reached when one of two things happens:
Either, the defeated people may lose their sense of organization, fail to decide on leaders and methods, and give up because they can no longer fight as a group. This happened to the American Southerners in April, 1865. The President and Cabinet of the Confederate States of America got on the train at Richmond; the men who got off farther down the line were "refugees." Something happened to them and to the people about them, so that Mr. Davis no longer thought of himself as President Davis, and other people no longer accepted his commands. This almost happened in Germany in 1945 except for Admiral Doenitz.
Or, the defeated people can retain their sense of organization, and can use their political organization for the purpose of getting in touch with the enemy, arranging the end of the war, and preparing, through organized means, to comply with the wishes of the conquerors. That happened when Britain acknowledged American independence; when the Boers recognized British sovereignty; when Finland signed what Russia had dictated; and when Japan gave up.
Sometimes these things are mixed. The people might wish to make peace, but may find that their government is not recognized by the enemy. Or the victors may think that they have smashed the enemy government, when the new organization is simply the old one under a slightly different name, but with the old leaders and the old ideas still prevailing.
It is plain that whatever happens wars are fought to effect a psychological change in the antagonist. They are then fought for a psychological end unless they are wars of extermination. These are rare. The United States could not find a people on the face of the earth whose ideas and language were unknown to all Americans. Where there is a chance of communication, there is always the probability that one of the antagonistic organizations (governments)—which have already cooperated to the extent of meeting one another's wishes to fight—will subsequently cooperate on terms of primary advantage to the victors. Since the organizations comprise human beings with human ways of doing things, the change must take place in the minds of those specific individuals who operate the existing government, or in the minds of enough other people for that government to be overthrown.
The fact that war is waged against the minds, not the bodies, of the enemy is attested by the comments of military writers of all periods. The dictum of Carl von Clausewitz that "war is politics continued by other means" is simply the modern expression of a truth recognized since antiquity. War is a kind of persuasion—uneconomical, dangerous, and unpleasant, but effective when all else fails.
Ideology.
An ideology is a system of deep-rooted beliefs about fundamental questions in human life and affairs.11 Ideology also plays a part in psychological warfare. A difference in beliefs which does not touch fundamentals is commonly termed a difference of opinion. You may believe in high tariffs; and I, in no tariff. You may believe in One World; I may not. You may support Republicans; I, Democrats. Despite these differences both of us can still believe in dollars as a method of paying income, in marriage as a system of setting up the family, in private property for most goods industrial or personal, in the Government of the United States, in majority rule, in democratic elections, in free speech, and so on.
If our difference of opinion is so inclusive that we can agree on nothing political, our differences have gone from mere opinion into the depths of ideology. Here the institutional framework is affected. You and I would not want to live in the same city; we could not feel safe in one another's presence; each would be afraid of the effect which the other might have on the morals of the community.