Psychological WarfareLinebarger, Paul Myron Anthony
History
Psychological Warfare
Linebarger, Paul Myron Anthony
Psychological warfare
=Profile of Opinion.= Opinion analysis can present a _profile of enemy
opinion_. To make a profile, proceed as though assembling a photo-strip
map taken by an aerial camera. Take the whole enemy country and divide
it into major groups by percentages. Select, particularly, those groups
you are interested in addressing. If you have _kamikaze_-minded
collaborators, send them in to the enemy country to ask a thousand
enemies the same question, selecting the thousand the same way that the
total population is made up. If the country is 32% Catholic, the
thousand interviewees should include 320 Catholics. If the country is
36% urban and 61% rural (3% unexplained), get 610 of your interviewees
from the country. The questions do not have to be asked in precisely the
same form, but they should bear on precisely the same issues. When your
agents come back you have a poll. If you do not have agents, then use
the percentages from reference books, and try to estimate how many
definite groups have what specific grievances. You are then in a
position to proceed.
=Interrogation.= When processing prisoners of war, it is an excellent
idea to deal with them for morale intelligence as well as for general
and assorted military information. Questions should not aim at what the
prisoner thinks he thinks about God, his leader, his country, and so on,
but should concern themselves with those things which most interest the
prisoner himself. Does his wife write that the babies have enough
diapers? How is the mail service? Is he worried about war workers
getting his prewar job? How much money is he saving? How is the food?
How were the non-coms--did they treat him right? Did he get enough
furloughs? Does he think that anybody is making too much money at home?
Most men carry over into military services the occupational interests
which they had as civilians. A carpenter in uniform, even though he may
be a good infantry top sergeant, is still a carpenter, and information
can be obtained from him as to the problems of skilled labor, of union
members, of the poorer city dwellers, and so on.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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