Cox Enterprises, Inc. March 20, 2003
U.S. Plan To Overwhelm Saddam Has A Psychological Component
By George Edmonson
From the beginning, psychological warfare has been a major weapon in the U.S. arsenal arrayed against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
Using everything from the highly publicized explosion of a huge bomb to spreading millions of Arabic-language pamphlets detailing methods of surrender, the push has been to shorten the conflict and reduce its toll _ even to achieve victory without a fight.
"I think that the psy-ops (psychological operations) that the military's engaging in preceding the attacks probably is done with greater planning and foresight than in previous encounters," said psychology professor Gregory Hall, who chairs the department of behavioral and political sciences at Bentley College in Massachusetts.
When Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made his first public statement Thursday after the initial strike on Baghdad, he directed much of it to Iraqi officers and political leaders. Their leader was doomed, Rumsfeld said.
"What will follow will not be a repeat of any other conflict," he said of the pending attack. "It will be of a force and scope and scale that has been beyond what has been seen before."
Give up, Rumsfeld told Iraqis, or face death.
As the likelihood of war increased in recent weeks, so did the intensity of the psychological operations.
U.S. and British planes in the southern no-fly zone began dropping leaflets in Iraq last fall, but the nature of those leaflets changed this week.
Pamphlets produced by the U.S. Army's 1,200-member 4th Psychological Operations Group at Fort Bragg, N.C., which also did work for operations in wars ranging from Vietnam to Kosovo, first dealt mainly with the anti-aircraft operations. Written in Arabic, they urged Iraqis manning those sites not to take hostile actions toward the planes flying overhead.
But earlier this week, the allied pilots dropped the first "capitulation messages" _ almost 2 million leaflets spread across 29 military and civilian sites that detailed steps to take to surrender. Among them: display white flags on vehicles and do not approach coalition forces.
U.S. psychological operations forces have also been broadcasting into Iraq, using specially outfitted planes known as Commando Solos. The programming is a combination of music and information, including warnings to civilians on how they can avoid incoming attacks.
Ben Abel, a spokesman for the psychological operations group, said its work is tailored to each operation. "I'd say that each instance is fairly unique."
Mark Parillo, a military historian at Kansas State University, said the latest efforts may be having more impact than they did in the past because the appeals are stronger and better targeted.
"We have better information now and more extensive psy-ops experience and data from which to work," Parillo said.
Rumsfeld said Thursday that there is evidence that the behavior of Iraqis is beginning to "tip and change" as they realize the ultimate fate of Saddam's regime.
Battlefield psychology isn't limited, of course, to words. Weapons as well as troops work that way, too.
"The whole thing is just steeped in the psychology of fear and terror," said Piers Wood, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who commanded artillery units in Vietnam and is now a senior fellow at GlobalSecurity.org. "And everybody since Alexander and his phalanx has been practicing 'shock and awe.'"
Take the 21,000-lb. bomb that was field tested earlier this month in Florida. Unlike most weapons tests, the U.S. Air Force went out of its way to publicize the spectacular explosion of its largest conventional bomb with video and still photographs. And the abbreviation for Massive Ordnance Air Burst, MOAB, was quickly transmogrified into Mother of All Bombs, a play on Saddam's one-time vow to create the Mother of All Battles.
Then there are the more than 250,000 troops, outfitted with a vast array of arms and poised on aircraft carriers and at airfields. U.S. officials credited the pressure they created with forcing whatever degree of cooperation Saddam exhibited.
Even the initial strike on a leadership compound Baghdad carried a psychological component. Not only did it appear to represent a deviation from the war plans that had been bandied about for weeks _ kicking off with massive air strikes _ it also would have created questions among the Iraqi leadership about how the United States knew where to strike and what degree of safety could be maintained.
Employing the strategy of shock and awe, the goal is, in the words of Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "to have such a shock on the system that the Iraqi regime would have to assume early on that the end is inevitable."
A chief architect of the shock and awe strategy, military strategist Harlan Ullman, spoke of the concept in terms that included a psychological element: "What we are saying is that what we want to do is to impose on the Iraqi military leadership the same kind of psychological effects so that when the war starts _ or even better, before the war starts _ pre-emptive surrender is the choice."
Air Force Col. Gary Crowder, who handles strategy with the Air Combat Command, described the force that the United States and its allies will employ as unimaginable in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. He said at a Wednesday briefing that the initial phase of the war likely would involve 3,000 or more precision-guided missiles and bombs aimed at precise targets.
One element to bear in mind, Parillo said, is that for such an intense attack to work, it usually must achieve the results quickly. Otherwise, he said, shock can be replaced with resolve, and the adversaries begin to feel, "Well, you've made my life miserable. I'm going to do everything I can to return the favor."
George Edmonson's e-mail address is gedmonson(at)coxnews.com.
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