After Bullets Fly: War of Words
Noah Shachtman
The barrage of ballistics against al-Qaida is accompanied by a centuries-old propaganda technique: political information designed to educate the enemy. By Noah Shachtman.
C-130E Commando Solo planeU.S. Air Force
High above Afghanistan, flying broadcast centers are reinforcing bombing runs and missile strikes with information assaults.
These C-130E Commando Solo planes, airing pro-American radio and television messages, have seen action in almost every U.S. military operation since Vietnam. The aircraft could play an especially vital part in the current conflict, because there's no "Radio Free Afghanistan" to tell the United States' side of the news.
But experts in and out of government are expressing doubts about the effectiveness of the Commando Solo and other "psychological operations" in Afghanistan, where a half-dozen different languages hold sway over a largely illiterate, technology-less population that's less concerned about who rules their capital than worried about how to fill their stomachs.
There are only six of the 100-foot-long, 155,000-pound aircraft, assigned to an Air National Guard unit, the 193rd Special Operations Wing in Middletown, Pennsylvania. With an 11-person crew, the $70 million Commando Solo can broadcast its own signal over AM and FM radio, UHF and VHF television bands, as well as override existing signals­ as it did during operations in Bosnia.
"This is a chance for (the Afghans) to hear, in their own language, what our mission is, and why we're here," said Ed Rouse, a former major with the Army's 4th Psychological Operations Group ­-- the team that records the programs disseminated by the Commando Solos. This 1,145-person unit, based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, is the only active-duty group devoted to "psyops," as these missions are called in military jargon.
"Similar to Bosnia and Serbia, there are people on the ground (in Afghanistan) that aren't naturally friendly to us," he continued. "They've heard America is Satan. And they take this as gospel, because they haven't heard anything else. There are only three radio stations in the country, all controlled by the government."
"This is not a move to cause a general uprising," added Jay Farrar, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "The idea is to plant the seeds for understanding that a change in government would be good for (the Afghans) and to be supportive when that happens."
But such messages are only effective if the people have the technology to receive them. That's hardly the case in Afghanistan.
"Most Afghans have not had an ability to keep up on the news. They're just scratching out their day-to-day existence," Farrar said. "They didn't even know about the World Trade Center, for the most part."
So the U.S. military, as they did in Vietnam, will likely airdrop single-channel transistor radios so that Afghans can hear the U.S. point of view. These radios may be bundled with the approximately 37,500 packages of food being dropped daily from C-17 cargo planes. The food itself is also a form of psyops, with every pork-free, Muslim-friendly meal containing a stencil of an American-flag and a message that it "is a gift from the United States of America."
In one form or another, psyops have been used for centuries. During the American Revolution, the colonists used wind-blown leaflets unfavorably comparing British and American soldiers' pay. In the Civil War, the Confederates received flyers telling soldiers to go home and take care of their troubled families.
The first airplane-distributed propaganda came in 1912, during the Italo-Turkish War, when citizens of Tripolitania were each offered a gold coin and a sack of wheat if they surrendered.
But psyops "really became an art in World War II" as radio became widespread, Rouse said. The British aired English lessons for their German would-be invaders that began with phrases like "your boats are sinking" and "the Channel crossing's ... water is cold."
The Axis powers parried with the notorious "Axis Sally" and "Tokyo Rose," who blended popular music broadcasts with voices of discouragement to the Allies.
Sally and Rose's Cold War descendent, "Hanoi Hannah," taunted American G.I.s in Vietnam with statements like "nothing is more (confusing) than to be ordered into a war to die or to be maimed for life without the faintest idea of what's going on."
American forces there responded by attempting to exploit ancient local myths -- like that of 13th-century hero Tran Hung Dao ­-- and by using a modern, airborne broadcast facility.
By the time of the Gulf War, psyops were being credited with encouraging widespread defections in Saddam Hussein's forces. At Failaka Island in Kuwait, a dangerous U.S. amphibious assault became unnecessary when the island's entire garrison of 1,405 Iraqi defenders surrendered after listening to messages broadcast from American helicopters.
It's an effect unlikely to be reproduced in the current conflict.
The Defense Science Board, a Defense Department advisory panel, recommended in 2000 that the Commando Solo program be scrapped. It cited the plane's limited, 480-kilometer broadcast range and the ease with which its signal is interrupted by uneven terrain and thick vegetation.
As an alternative, the military could go low-tech, using leaflets as their primary means of communicating with the Afghan people. B-52 bombers and F-16 fighters usually distribute these printed materials, according to Jane's Defense Weekly, dropping MK-129 "leaflet bombs" that hold 100,000 to 120,000 flyers each.
But the leaflets are unlikely to be very effective. Only 27.5 percent of Afghan males are literate, and fewer than 6 percent of the women can read, said Fiona Hill, a foreign policy studies fellow at the Brookings Institution. Those who can read are split among a myriad of languages -- including Uzbek, Tajik, Turkmen, Pashto, Dari and Farsi -- all of which "we don't speak," Hill said.