Stardate 20011210.0610 (On Screen): Sun Tzu tells us that "Supreme excellence in war lies in defeating your enemy without a fight." This article describes a psyops group which has been involved in the war in Afghanistan. Psyops is interesting because it's the only effective form of non-lethal offensive weaponry we have. Dreams about bombing with anesthetics instead of shrapnel, or using paralysis beams instead of bullets, remain only illusions. Such non-lethal weapons as the military has deployed are intended primarily for control of civilian populations in occupied cities and are useless on the battlefield. But psyops can do that: its goal is to convince enemy soldiers to surrender, or to desert, or to not resist. Sometimes it is difficult to judge its effectiveness but it's almost never completely useless and sometimes it is very effective indeed. It's been with us for a long time, but modern psyops are to those of fifty years ago as modern bombers are to fifty-year-old bombers; similar in principle but much more efficient in practice.
Of course, psyops is at its most effective when delivering a true but devastating statement to the enemy, such as the image of Omar as a chained dog following bin Laden around in that one flyer. (Heh-heh-heh...) (discuss)
Of course, like anything else, psyops can be incompetent. For example, every account I've read says that "Tokyo Rose" was a dismal failure.
