When you think of a graphic design job, what do you think of? Maybe a bunch of Macs in an open-plan brick building, gentlemen in eyeglasses running around, and walls covered in type-centric concert posters. Neck-deep in the job hunt during a time when there are no jobs, I’ve had to get creative (and be flexible) about the kinds of design jobs I would consider.

The internet design community is focused on these fantastic, very avant garde things. So much so that it’s easy to forget that someone’s out there making the brochures for your bank, like the fellow I met at the auto-mechanic last week. Not glamorous, as even he admitted to me, but someone has to make this stuff. (Incidentally, he had a new white Porsche.)

Let’s go even further, though: I’m not sure where this came to me, but I started thinking about the illustrators and designers who make PSYOP (1) leaflets for the military. In a bizarre way, it’s pretty fascinating. The idea of dropping bombs — they really are bombs, but more about that later — filled with promotional material not unlike what Mr. Porsche makes for his bank; on a battlefield!

Make no mistake, I’m a dove when it comes to the subject of foreign policy. Boiling these leaflets down to excercises in illustration or graphic design is pretty ridiculous since they’re actually instruments of war. But at the same time, there are obviously lots of compelling reasons to learn about them.

In doing a bit of research on the subject, I learned some fascinating things. Psychological warfare itself has a long history. Alexander the Great, for instance, had battle helmets crafted for what would’ve been 20-foot-tall giants and had them strewn about villages to (probably effectively) scare the crap out of enemies. Genghis Khan was so brutal in his methods that pretty soon would-be enemies just conceded defeat instead of fighting back. In more modern times, bomber squadrons in Vietnam dropped stacks of the Ace of Spades card before carpet bombing areas. Soon enough, just dropping the cards rather than the actual bombs was effective in clearing out enemy positions. Interestingly, the Viet Cong employed their own PSYOP tactics, many of which leveraged the unpopularity of the war back home. A popular line they co-opted from anti-war protests was “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” Many U.S. soliders cited this as having a large effect on troop morale (2).

Back to interesting design jobs, though. With the advent of aircraft in fighting wars, psychological warfare also took to the air in the form of printed leaflets. Originally they were dropped in what amount to wooden boxes full of the things, but today’s leaflet conveyances are decidedly more complex (3). The PDU-5/B (4) is specifically made for dispensing leaflets and whose design was adapted from a cluster bomb. (And yes, sadly these leaflet bombs can be quite dangerous, as a young girl was killed by one in Afghanistan.)

Herbert A. Friedman, on the PSYOP campaign in Afghanistan (5):

The bombing of Afghanistan began on October 7. Along with the bombing, the United States Air Force also dropped food packets for the Afghan refugees. Aerial propaganda leaflets were not dropped the first week due to high winds. The first leaflet drop took place on October 15, coordinated with Coalition radio broadcasts. EC-130-E Command Solo aircraft from the 193rd Special Operations Wing flying out of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, broadcast to the Afghan people. The modified C-130 can broadcast radio or TV signals – AM, FM and HF. It broadcasts across the band from 45 kilohertz to 1000 megahertz.

On October 15th the United States government released illustrations of the first two leaflets dropped on Afghanistan. It reported that a single B-52 Stratofortress bomber had dropped 385,000 leaflets over the eastern town of Ghazni, the northwestern town of Sheberghan, and between Sheberghan and the western city of Herat.

The first leaflet depicts an American soldier shaking hands with an Afghan citizen. The photograph is in full color, the text in bright blue. The leaflet was written in Pashto (spoken by the Afghan ethnic majority Pashtun) and Dari (a Persian dialect spoken by the minority Tajiks). The leaflet states on the front, “The partnership of nations is here to help.” The back of the leaflets says, “The partnership of nations is here to assist the people of Afghanistan.” The leaflet is coded AFD10c.

American PSYOP comes in three distinct flavors: white, gray, and black. White ops are overt, while gray and black are the secret ones the state won’t admit to being behind and which come in varying shades of the truth. Their purposes vary, including propaganda, information, disinformation, misinformation, and all-kinds-of-other-formation. Daniel Lerner was somewhat of a pioneer in American PSYOPS, and he categorizes the differences as follows:

• White [Omissions + Emphasis]
  Truthful and not strongly biased, where the source of information is acknowledged.
• Grey [Omissions + Emphasis + Racial/Ethnic/Religious Bias]
  Largely truthful, containing no information that can be proven wrong; the source may or may not be hidden.
• Black [Commissions of falsification]
  Intended to deceive the enemy.

The specifics of what those designations entail is a bit in-depth for this article, but information on the topic abounds (6).

There are some interesting lessons in visual communication to be learned from these leaflets. During World War II, Japanese leaflets dropped on American G.I.s depicted, rather graphically, their girlfriends back at home with other men. Adult reading material was hard to get on the front-lines so the cards turned out to be very popular among American soldiers. In Somalia in 1992, the U.S. military had very few translators on hand. One translation that was meant to read “United Nations” actually said “Slave Nations”. In Psy-Ops: The Fine Art Of War Propaganda, Ian Urbina relates a similar failure:

Often more confusing than convincing, psy-ops can suffer hugely from the smallest graphical errors. A T-shirt used in Cambodia to try to deter kids from entering certain unsafe zones featured a boy squatting over a mine that he was poking with a stick. The silk-screened shirt was yanked from production, according to one account, when angered villagers kept asking why American personnel were distributing images of kids defecating over land mines. The squatting boy was eventually redrawn.

More successfully, American forces in Afghanistan employed illustrations of Osama Bin Laden playing chess with local leaders on a board shaped like Afghanistan. Given the huge popularity of chess in the region, these leaflets were a particular hit with the local community.

Mr. Urbina also talks about the importance (and difficulty) in communicating a message simply and across language and cultural barriers:

Framing an understandable message is always tough. When using comic strips, captions need to be as concise and simple as possible. Yet, even in small amounts, the use of text raises questions. One has to wonder, for example, whether it was really effective to drop millions of text-based leaflets on Afghanistan, where barely 30 percent of its 27 million people can read. In all cases, well-crafted animations are a must, and for the highest quality drawings the 4th at Bragg sometimes opts to contract out. In 2000, it hired DC Comics to produce special versions of Superman and Wonder Woman comic books, in the languages of the Balkans, Central America, Africa and Southeast Asia, to educate locals on the dangers of land mines. But even Superman can be a bit confusing at times. Though widely understood in some contexts, thought bubbles appearing above a cartoon character’s head left some readers, especially rural ones, completely baffled, according to press accounts.

All service branches have their own brand of PSYOP, but the largest program is run by the Army, and most of that is handled by the 4th Psychological Operations Group based at Fort Bragg (6). Of course, the CIA has a hand in all this business as well. What I couldn’t really get a clear picture of from my research, though, and what intrigues me the most about the whole thing, is where this stuff actually gets done. I’m talking about where these things get drawn, laid out, thought up. What is that work environment like? Do these illustrators work in fatigues? Do they also shoot guns at things when they’re not busy drawing? Is their background in psychology, art, or did they just fall into this during their time in the service? I just can’t get my head around the whole thing, but I sure would like more information. White ops information, preferably.

Editor’s note: Developement of The New Minimum has consumed a lot of my time recently. This being the first issue, I didn’t get to spend as much time on this article as I would’ve liked. Future articles that don’t coincide with lots of design and coding should be a bit more polished.

1. (1) Wikipidea, Psychological Operations
2. (2) Psy-Ops: The Fine Art Of War Propaganda, by Ian Urbina
3. (3) PSYOP leaflet dissemination, by SGM Herbert A. Friedman (Ret.)
4. (4) Wikipedia, PDU-5B dispenser unit
5. (5) PSYOPS in Iraqi Freedom, by Herbert A Friedman
6. (6) Wikipedia, Psychological Operations (United States)