Combatintman

Nine months of my life on operations in the role, two years of my life in a PSYOPs unit and three months of my life on courses suggest otherwise ...

It is my advanced Microsoft Word skills that are the most valuable of that lot to me now

Nine months of my life on operations in the role, two years of my life in a PSYOPs unit and three months of my life on courses suggest otherwise ...

Nine months of my life on operations in the role, two years of my life in a PSYOPs unit and three months of my life on courses suggest otherwise ...

Nine months of my life on operations in the role, two years of my life in a PSYOPs unit and three months of my life on courses suggest otherwise ...

Nine months of my life on operations in the role, two years of my life in a PSYOPs unit and three months of my life on courses suggest otherwise ...

I concur ... My bolds from personal but not well-remunerated experience 😒 at the coal face of PSYOPS and the management level of PSYOPs and Information Ops:
1.  All of our PSYOPs product had to go through the lawyer and to get it through we had to describe the First, Second and Third order effects and then needed command sign-off once the lawyer was happy.  Not only describing those effects was hard work but persuading certain lawyers was a bit of a to-and-fro experience.  That whole process was usually more difficult than designing and putting the product together in the first place.
2.  I was the yeller rather than the yellee by the time I got into the Information Ops game. 😀
3.  Not necessarily lying - our doctrine did allow it, whereas other nations including the US did not.  I can only think of maybe one occasion where we did in my nine months in Afghanistan in the role and that had to be signed off by a two star.  The main reason for not fibbing is that the truth usually catches up with you and then you lose all credibility as a source of information.  You can get it away with it in a fluid tactical situation but not in the insurgency game. but it usually ends up backfiring because inevitably the truth will surface eventually. 

Sorry I should have replied to this earlier ... I've got a few in various stages of readiness on my hard drive that I'll work on.  I'll guarantee at least one of those before Xmas and hopefully more.

Sorry I should have replied to this earlier ... I've got a few in various stages of readiness on my hard drive that I'll work on.  I'll guarantee at least one of those before Xmas and hopefully more.

Sure - I get it but I am still a believer in fact-based narratives.  I suppose we were lucky because we had fairly unsophisticated target audiences who had access to limited mediums so it made our job easier to some extent.  Nonetheless we struggled because we were unable to achieve the persistence and access required for certain target audiences due to the limited physical footprint.
With this conflict, the resources would need to be huge to do info ops justice.  Looking at just the PSYOPs side of it, all of the available mediums are being used and the volume of traffic is huge.  This thread is a small subset of it - by the time you've written a post and hit submit, there are three posts on the thread that you haven't seen.  The potential target audiences - or segments thereof are also potentially massive.  In those conditions of course you could feed echo chambers with big fat fibs and probably get away with it.  I always find it fascinating how a lot of slightly less than factual propaganda/PSYOPs messaging gets recycled today and how certain narratives or labels stick in people's minds, whether factual or not.  The killing of the IRGC chap Soleimani being a classic example - I remember hearing it on al-Jazeera first and the word "assassination" was used.  That gained a lot of traction in many news outlets or sources, some of which who ought to know better:
Soleimani assassination | Today's latest from Al Jazeera
2 years after the U.S. killed Iran's Qasem Soleimani, tensions remain : NPR
Qasem Soleimani - Wikipedia
Afghanistan Reacts to Soleimani’s Death – The Diplomat
Words are certainly important combined with the right target audience analysis you could certainly cause trouble in some of those echo chambers, but it comes back to picking those target audiences from a massive pool. 
I've certainly been following the discussions about the manoeuvring in the Kremlin, what's going on with the nats and all that and having an idle thought or two about how you could influence some of that.  An academic exercise for me really because, despite the great insights from various posters here, I don't have sufficient understanding to really come up with something that would fly.

The other factor is that Ireland is a non-permanent member of the UNSC right now and its diplomats have put in some pretty solid performances which the call for Russia to be booted out of the UNSC is its most recent example.

My bold - not saying it has been happening every day but there have certainly been US bombers flying in that area and as to locking up air defence radars, that is considered a hostile act under various rules of engagement that I have seen.  I certainly recall UK aircraft flying legitimately with flight plans and permission from the owner of the Flight Information Region getting locked up by air defence radars in a country I served in once and when we reported it the lawyers were all over it like a rash and it resulted in a demarche to the country that owned those radars.  As a result, I am not sure fooling around with Russian AD radars by NATO assets is a good option.

The other factor is that Ireland is a non-permanent member of the UNSC right now and its diplomats have put in some pretty solid performances which the call for Russia to be booted out of the UNSC is its most recent example.

What part of "work has also started on a module for Cold War" equals "haven't been doing ANY work"?

Data suggests otherwise ...
Democracy Data Explorer - Our World in Data
 

You seem to have some misunderstandings as to how Elected Governments in the West work ?
The Monarchy has no power at all - its there for the Tourists  . The Prime Minister is always elected by members of his/her own party - works the same in all English based Parliamentary systems around the planet - You get to elect the party - not decide who is in  cabinet . The House of Lords is really  only a historical anomaly in the UK - and we commonwealth citizens generally  like our History . This particular part of the British system has not really been copied  over to  AUS/NZ/CAN  and elsewhere  - but we do get our Honors lists - and people like them .
Governments once elected are free to pursue whatever policies they like - but they do need to keep the electorates happy to some degree - since they are up for re-election again 3-4-5 years  . A Elected Government which chooses to follow unpopular policies won't be in Government for long .
 

Also try Explore the Map | Freedom House
Suggesting that the UK is a "semi democracy" is risible.  In many ways, it's more democratic, whatever that means, than Canada, even though they have the same score in the Democracy Data explorer.  I say this because Canada's governance is highly concentrated in the Prime Minister's Office (PMO), reducing the role of Ministers and Members of Parliament.



 

@Free Whisky has got his own thread about his video here:
 

Data suggests otherwise ...
Democracy Data Explorer - Our World in Data
 

Data suggests otherwise ...
Democracy Data Explorer - Our World in Data
 

Excellent! Cheers ta appreciate it. It’ll help off set my beer tab to @Combatintman😅

He needs 10,000 sales to clear his beer debt to me ... come on folks, pre-order 😉

He needs 10,000 sales to clear his beer debt to me ... come on folks, pre-order 😉

Working title for @sburke's book ... War Special Military Operation and Peace.

He needs 10,000 sales to clear his beer debt to me ... come on folks, pre-order 😉