A Written Estimate of the Situation.
Roughly speaking, this is the case. An attempt to apply the outline given in FM 101-5, Appendix I, would produce only a lamentable parody of a military document.
The situation of the military unit possessing Psychological Warfare facilities has relatively little to do with the capabilities of the Psychological Warfare unit. The morale of one's own men should have no effect whatever on the output of the radio script writers and the leaflet writers.
In combat operations, military forces meet. In Psychological Warfare, they do not. In combat operations, it is impossible for two hostile units to occupy the same territory for any length of time without both of them degenerating into a chaos of armed mobs. In Psychological Warfare operations, both sets of operations can be conducted in the same media, can address themselves to the same basic human appeals, can use the same music, the same general kind of news account, and so on.
Furthermore, no modern army ever went into operation with certain units designated as wholly and exclusively defensive, and certain others as wholly and exclusively offensive. (The Great Wall of China is the world's most celebrated example of purely defensive planning, yet it protected Chinese offensive bases for twenty-one hundred years.) But in Psychological Warfare, the Japanese-language short-wave broadcasts from San Francisco had no imaginable effect on the American forces in the Pacific. The only people who could understand them were the Japanese-language officers in G-2 and ONI offices; their personal vexation did not matter.
The offensive operations of combat troops are predicated upon finding the enemy, effecting contact, and either destroying the enemy or making him yield terrain. The defensive operations of combat troops, contrariwise, are planned with a view to resisting an enemy who has been met.
In Psychological Warfare, operators and enemy do not effect contact. The audience cannot strike back through a radio set; the enemy reader cannot throw a leaflet back at the bomber which has dropped it on him. When American planes bombed German radio stations, they did not do so because the flight commander was trying to get German propaganda off the air; they did so because the Americans were trying to break up the entire German communications network. It is almost impossible to pinpoint radio transmitters and printing presses with such accuracy as to deny the enemy all chance of talking back. In a purely physical sense, there are only two sets of measures whereby an actual defense can be set up against Psychological Warfare. Each is a measure of desperation; neither is considered effective; the Americans did not bother with either in World War II.
The first physical defense consists of radio jamming and of the planned interception of enemy leaflet raids. Radio jamming is ineffectual except in the case of an enemy possessing hopelessly inferior signal equipment. (The Japanese tried to jam our radio at Saipan, just as the Germans tried to jam BBC. They impeded reception, but they never succeeded in blocking it out altogether.)
The second physical defense consists of destroying reception facilities. It is possible to sweep an occupied territory and to sequester almost all the radio sets in use. It is possible to issue a military order that any soldier or civilian found in possession of enemy printed matter will be court-martialed and punished. These measures are useful to dictators having secret police, and among armies having the Prussian level of discipline, with the enlisted men regarded as robots. It is not to be expected that they would work against Americans.