After watching the United States Army PsyWar recruiting video, one can infer that America is the superior country when it comes to psychological warfare. However, the “Ghosts in the Machine” video is more than just an experiment in suspense and horror. It’s a tool against a threat that has gone largely unnoticed by American leadership. The United States is currently in the midst of an unconventional war that is being waged in the hearts and minds of its people, a war that aims to destroy the nation’s will to defend itself and undermine democratic values.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is behind this psychological warfare, which is part of its unrestricted hybrid warfare campaign. According to a recent report by the Washington-based Hudson Institute, cognitive operations are a significant part of the CCP’s tactics to subvert U.S. security. These operations employ psychological warfare to control the enemy’s cognitive thinking and decision-making. As the primary propaganda organ of the Chinese military, the ultimate objective of cognitive operations is to manipulate a country’s values, national spirit, ethos, ideologies, cultural traditions, and historical beliefs to make it abandon its theoretical understanding, social system, and development path, and achieve strategic goals without having to fight. In other words, it’s a military campaign that seeks to convince Americans to abandon their way of life without a fight. So, as American citizens are fed this idea of superiority, the Chinese government is making strides in the dark.
According to a report by the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, the CCP’s psychological warfare is a long-standing government strategy that exploits foreign media to deliver Chinese propaganda. Its objective is to destabilize and interfere with the political processes of the United States by offering a “sugar-coated pill,” something that is easy to swallow but lethal to consume. This often comes in the form of anti-American propaganda disguised as domestic information and proliferated online.
The roots of the CCP’s psychological warfare go deep, and their influence can be seen across Western media. Twitter bots, sponsored newspaper articles, and state-sponsored misinformation are just a few of the ways in which the CCP’s tendrils have spread. The war over the narrative of China’s rise and the PLA’s intentions against the United States is ongoing, and it has been going on for decades.