The Army’s favorite psychological operation soldiers want you. The Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group (Airborne), the same group that put out the eerie recruitment video “Ghosts in the Machine” last year, released a new installment on social media this month. And it wants the viewer to know what psychological warfare is.
See for yourself:
If it seems ominous, that’s the point. This is the unit’s idea of a recruitment video. The 4th Psychological Operations Group, based out of Fort Bragg, is focused on Military Information Support Operations (MISO), better known as psychological operations, or PSYOP.
The unit has been putting out striking, montage-filled recruiting ads in recent years. A Department of Defense’s Inspector General report last year found that the Army did not have enough PSYOP soldiers in its ranks to help fight an information war against peers such as Russia or China.
As with past recruitment videos, the new one touches on great counterintelligence ploys, Patton’s “Ghost Army” from World War II, with video showing the inflatable decoy tanks used for it. “There is another force applied in combat that we generally don’t think of as a weapon of war. That weapon is words. Words are weapons,” the voiceover intones.
Along with old films of subterfuge and surrendering enemy armies, there’s plenty of modern video, including drone footage of an eerie masked soldier waving. The unit once again brings in ghost imagery — drawing from Fleischer Studio’s iconic ghosts from their Koko the Clown cartoons — but also works in quite a bit of obviously computer-generated imagery that looks just slightly off. The effect is an unsettling montage of footage where there’s always something being toyed with. Maybe that’s intentional, given the unit’s entire mission and methodology.
In fact, the whole final sections of the ad before “Join PSYOP” is a barrage of subliminal images, with quick frames showing Koko the Clown, snarling ghosts dressed up like modern soldiers, Internet memes including Pepe the Frog and more. “Anything we touch is a weapon,” a subtitle says near the end.
Last year, after “Ghosts in the Machine” came out, a PSYOP reservist pointed out that the video is more a recruitment piece than an actual example of a psychological operation. This new one fits that same mold, although the imagery is rife with nods to subversion, subliminal messaging and other tools that are useful to psyops.
The Army has been putting additional resources and attention towards information warfare, including standing up new units meant to counter digital campaigns from adversaries and conduct wider public affairs battles against disinformation, but the 4th Psychological Operations Group, set up more than five decades ago, is a hardened veteran of the information war.
