Mind-Munitions

The Gulf War of 1991 297
Radio transmissions from land-based and airborne transmitters
aboard a converted EC 130 (the ‘Volant Solo’) broadcast under the
name ‘The Voice of the Gulf’. These broadcasts warned that the
‘Mother of All Battles’ would turn out to be the ‘Mother of All
Defeats’ in their efforts to encourage desertion, defection or surrender.
Although the precise figure is unknown, around 70,000 Iraqi
soldiers surrendered because of the coalition’s success in getting
this message across by various means. This made the coalition, and
especially the Americans who dominated the PSYOPS campaign,
feel that they had demonstrated a desire to save lives – even enemy
lives – rather than conduct a brutal campaign, not least because –
although again estimates vary – more Iraqi soldiers may have been
saved than slaughtered. PSYOPS thus entered the new decade with
a renewed reputation for altering the face of battle without the need
for mass slaughter. Despite popular suspicion – and indeed some
political nervousness and even some surviving military qualms
about its use – PSYOPS had become a ‘combat force multiplier’
capable of saving lives on both sides at cheaper costs than modern
high-tech weapons and with an additional moral premium that
persuading people to stop fighting and surrender was more acceptable
than sending them home in body bags.
One question mark about this was caused by the uneasy relationship
between military PSYOPS in its white form and CIA-backed
PSYOPS in its covert form. The latter consisted of black radio
transmitters posing as Iraqi stations manned by internal enemies of
Saddam Hussein. Because no one could supposedly detect the
genuine source of messages broadcast by these stations, they were
able to deviate from the official coalition line that Desert Storm
was about the liberation of Kuwait and not about the overthrow of
Saddam Hussein, which was never a declared war aim in 1991.
Black radio stations therefore carried messages encouraging an
internal revolt inside Iraq, but when signs of success in doing this
appeared towards the end of the war in the form of the Kurdish
and Shia uprisings, no actual military support was forthcoming
from the West. This was another classic example of the dangers of
policy and propaganda getting out of step. The very covert nature
of black propaganda, the fact that it is unattributable and even
unaccountable, does make it a dangerous survivor from the era of
Total War and Cold War. Whether it was an appropriate weapon
for democracies in the years that followed remained to be seen.