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The concept of psychological warfare emerged in Nazi Germany and was later adopted by the USA.

The word is a translation of the German “Weltanschauungskrieg” (war of worldviews). Wall Street Lawyer William Donovan “Wild Bill” was one of the first to use it in the context of public relations in the USA. President Franklin Roosevelt appointed him as Director of the new U.S. intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, predecessor of the CIA) who saw “psychological warfare” as an important stratagem for “engineering of consent” in the public mind (see Chomskys & Hermans “propaganda model”).

Donovan viewed an understanding of Nazi psychological tactics as a vital source of ideas for “Americanized’’ versions of many of the same stratagems. Use of the new term quickly became widespread throughout the U.S. intelligence community. . . Donovan was among the first in the US to articulate a more or less unified theory of psychological warfare. . . As he saw it, the “engineering of consent” techniques used in peacetime propaganda campaigns could be quite effectively adapted to open warfare. Pro-Allied propaganda was essential to reorganizing the U.S. economy for war and for creating public support at home for intervention in Europe, Donovan believed. Fifth-column movements could be employed abroad as sources of intelligence and as morale-builders for populations under Axis control. He saw “special operations” — meaning sabotage, subversion, commando raids, and guerrilla movements — as useful for softening up targets prior to conventional military assaults. (Simpson. Science of Coercion, 1994, p. 24)

Oxford University Press; January 1996
ISBN: 9780198023623
Title: Science of Coercion
Author: Christopher Simpson
Imprint: Oxford University Press (US)

See also: ahrp.org/1941-the-term-psychological-warfare-was-a-nazi-concept-adapted-and-americanized/

“Science of Coercion provides the first thorough examination of the role of the CIA, the Pentagon, and other U.S. security agencies in the evolution of modern communication research, a field in the social sciences which crystallized into a distinct discipline in the early 1950s. Government-funded psychological warfare programs underwrote the academic triumph of preconceptions about communication that persist today in communication studies, advertising research, and in counterinsurgency operations. Christopher Simpson contends that it is unlikely that communication research could have emerged into its present form without regular transfusions of money from U.S military, intelligence, and propaganda agencies during the Cold War. These agencies saw mass communication as an instrument for persuading or dominating targeted groups in the United States and abroad; as a tool for improving military operations; and perhaps most fundamentally, as a mfeans to extend the U.S. influence more widely than ever before at a relatively modest cost. Communication research, in turn, became for a time the preferred method for testing and developing such techniques. Science of Coercion uses long-classified documents to probe the contributions made by prominent mass communication researchers such as Wilbur Schramm, Ithiel de Sola Pool, and others, then details the impact of psychological warfare projects on widely held preconceptions about social science and the nature of communication itself. A fascinating case study in the history of science and the sociology of knowledge, Science of Coercion offers valuable insights into the dynamics of ideology and the social psychology of communication.”

Source: www.ebooks.com/en-us/272659/science-of-coercion/christopher-simpson/

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