Faceless people, invisible hands: New Army video aims to lure recruits for psychological operations

FORT LIBERTY, N.C. — The video is disturbing, with terrifying images of faceless people, fire and soldiers. The voice-over is a cascade of recognizable historical voices while the screen plays cryptic messages touting the power of words, ideas and ‘invisible hands’.

Hints about its origins are tucked into frames as they flash by: PSYWAR. The military’s psychological war soldiers use their brand of mental battles to bring in what the service needs: recruits. And if you find the video intriguing, you may be the Army’s target audience as it is recruiting soldiers for Special Operations Command.

The video, released in the early hours of Thursday, is the second provocative recruitment ad that itself is an example of the kind of work the psyop soldiers do to influence public opinion and wage the war of words abroad. It’s called ‘Ghost in the Machine 2’ and arrives two years after the opening video was quietly posted to the device’s YouTube site and sparked a firestorm of online chatter.

“It’s a recruiting video,” the Army major who shot the video said, speaking to The Associated Press before publication. “Someone who looks at it and thinks, wow, that was effective, how was it constructed – that’s the kind of creative mindset we’re looking for.”

The soldier, a member of the 8th Psychological Operations Group based at Fort Liberty, North Carolina, also shot the first video. He asked that his name not be used to protect his identity, as is common practice among special forces troops.

Psyop units are used for a range of missions that can range from simple leaflets to more sophisticated propaganda and messages aimed at misleading the enemy or forming opinions on foreign territory. It is illegal for the US military to conduct psychological operations on Americans.

Army Special Operations Command leaders and Special Forces recruiters hope a new wave of talk inspired by the video will help attract recruits to an often invisible and little-known job.

“From a tactical level, the psyop mission is extremely difficult to show and tell,” said Lt. Col. Steve Crowe, commander of the Special Forces Recruiting Battalion. And it’s the job in the Army’s Special Forces that recruiters say is the hardest to fill.

Across the military, forces have struggled to meet recruitment targets, with most falling well short of their targets in recent years. The military, the largest service, has had the most problems; it has missed its target by about 15,000 soldiers over the past two years. But most services say things are improving this year.

Army Special Operations recruiters, who recruit from already serving soldiers, say they are reaching about 75% of their total target of between 3,000 and 4,000. Of these, they must deploy approximately 650 active duty soldiers annually for psychological operations.

Officials blame the country’s low unemployment rate, increased competition from companies, which can pay more and offer similar benefits, and a slow return after several years of COVID-19 pandemic restrictions that kept recruiters from visiting schools and other attend public events.

The recruiting struggle at Army Special Operations Command mirrors that of the larger Army. The recruiters said they are responsible for calling in different types of special forces – the best known are the Green Berets and the Delta Force, but there are also Civil Affairs, Psychological Operations and the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, known as the Knight Stalkers. .

The military has said it plans to reduce the number of psyop soldiers but is still struggling to fill the ranks.

Perhaps the most celebrated psyop took place in World War II, when the so-called American Ghost Army outsmarted the Germans using inflatable tanks, radio hoaxes, costumes and impersonations. In what was called Operation Viersen, the soldiers used the bouncy castles, sound vans and fake headquarters to lure German units away from the point on the Rhine where the 9th Army was actually crossing. Some of the last surviving members of the unit recently received the Congressional Gold Medal at a ceremony in Washington.

Nowadays, psyop activities are often classified. But one of the last U.S. service members to die in Afghanistan — killed by a suicide bomber at Abbey Gate during the chaotic 2021 evacuation — was a psyop soldier: Army Staff Sgt. Ryan Knauss, 23, from Corryton, Tennessee. His job that day was largely crowd control and influence, using a megaphone to communicate with the frenzied crowd of Afghans and get them moving in the right direction.

A more recent example is aid to Ukraine. US psychological operations soldiers have been advising and assisting Ukrainian forces in their efforts to counter Russian disinformation campaigns since 2014. Following the Russian invasion in February 2022, Ukrainian forces used a range of tactics – including leaflets and social media – to lure Russian forces into surrendering. tell them how and where to give themselves up.

About half of the psychological operations troops are young people who join when they enlist. The rest are recruited from the existing ranks of the army. The command’s recruiters focus on the internal audience, which has its own challenges.

A growing obstacle, according to Crowe and Army Maj. Jim Maicke, executive officer of the Special Forces Recruiting Battalion, is that regular soldiers across the Army have less interaction with special operations forces today than during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In those conflicts, soldiers often worked side by side with commandos, or were deployed to the same bases and had a better view of what they were doing.

“Things generally went quite well. And the reason, in our view, was the whole interaction that took place between special operations and conventional forces,” Crowe said, adding that soldiers were allowed “behind the curtain to see how we operate. We don’t have that anymore.”

It is especially difficult for psyops soldiers, whose work is often less visible than that of the more celebrated army commandos and not always understood.

“We’re all nerds for sure,” said the Army major who created the ad. “But we’re all nerds in different ways.” Typically, those drawn to the work are “planners,” he said. “They’re writers, they’re great thinkers. They’re ideas people.”

Often, he said, they are creative people, such as artists and illustrators, but others are technical experts who can bring these ideas to life in videos or online messaging.

The new video ‘Ghost in the Machine’ is aimed at that audience.

Recruiters say the first video was successful.

“I think what he does with ‘Ghost in the Machine’ is he tells you what psychological operations are, and shows you, without telling you in words,” Crowe said. “You watch the video and you think, OK, this is how I’m going to influence and change behavior.”

On a recent recruiting trip to the Citadel, South Carolina Military University, recruiters brought a psyop officer and a civil affairs officer to speak to the cadets.

“We had a very limited amount of time to engage approximately 450 cadets,” said Maicke, a graduate of the college. “And the psyop officer chose to give a brief introduction and then immediately turn on the ‘Ghost in the Machine’ video. He ended with, ‘If anyone has any questions about this, I’m here,’ and business boomed.”

About six months after the first video was released, the command began investigating soldiers who signed up for the psyop mission and participated in the assessment and selection course. More than 51% said the video had a moderate to high degree of influence on their decision to apply for the job, recruiters said.

That, the Army major said, is the purpose of the second video, which ends with a crescendo of music, images of military troops marching with their arms raised in surrender, and a question streaming across the screen: “Do you believe in the power of words and ideas. Will you. We believe.” The last frames say PSYWAR and show the website: goarmysof.com.