Mind-Munitions

306
The New World Information Disorder
such as requests to stay off the roads at certain time so that the
convoys could get through. During Operation Restore Democracy,
the operation to restore democratically elected President Aristide to
power in Haiti during 1994, the upgraded Volant (now Commando)
Solo airborne broadcasting platform transmitted messages onto
local television and radio frequencies under the umbrella of ‘Radio
Democracy’. Although an actual military invasion was pre-empted
on that occasion, it remained essential to communicate with a
largely illiterate population about how to behave once the troops
arrived. PSYOPS teams then produced leaflets, posters, news sheets,
radio and television programmes to explain US intentions to local
audiences in an attempt to lubricate military operations taking
place in the midst of civilians.
What used to be called peacekeeping missions were now being
described as ‘operations other than war’. The extent to which
many western armed forces have professionalized their approach
towards these new kinds of operations meant that PSYOPS had to
adapt the traditional ‘Surrender or Die’ messages disseminated to
enemy soldiers or the ‘Resistance is Futile’ messages targeted at
enemy civilians. Essentially, there were two reasons for this. The first
is that international interventions, as they succeeded the peacekeeping
operations of the Cold War, no longer involved merely
keeping opposing warring factions apart. Soldiers were traditionally
trained to fight soldiers. Now they had increasingly to interact
with civilians. The second factor is that the traditional battlefields
of the past, where soldiers knew the Rules of Engagement and the
limits of their ability to behave in certain ways, have transformed
into a new kind of environment where new skills other than war
fighting are necessary if the objectives of the intervention are to be
achieved. In other words, in operations like the ‘humanitarian
intervention’ in Kosovo in 1999, or Bosnia before it, the real work
begins after the battle in order to pre-empt the need for further
military action.
Since the armed intervention by NATO air power to expel the
Serb armed forces from Kosovo from March to June 1999 and the
establishment since then of KFOR, the region tends only to make
the headlines when things go wrong. Without getting distracted
into debates about whether ‘bad news’ defines the media’s agenda,
NATO attempted to avoid such headlines by an ambitious information
campaign designed to stabilize the region’s ethnic hatreds and