MISO: The U.S. Military's Information Operations

In 2010, the Pentagon decided that the words «psychological operations» — PSYOP, the term used since the Second World War — sounded too sinister and renamed them MISO: Military Information Support Operations. The rebrand was criticised inside and outside the military as an exercise in cosmetics, and in 2017 U.S. Special Operations Command partially restored the PSYOP label for its units. Behind that war of acronyms lies a substantive reality: the set of capabilities with which the U.S. military tries to influence the emotions, motivations and behaviour of foreign audiences.

What MISO actually is

According to U.S. joint doctrine (publication JP 3-13.2), MISO are «planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behaviour of foreign governments, organisations, groups, and individuals». Three elements of that definition matter:

• Foreign audiences: by law, MISO cannot target the American public. The boundary has grown porous in the internet age, producing several documented scandals.
• Selected information: doctrine insists MISO works preferably with truthful information («white PSYOP»), though history includes episodes of deception («black») and ambiguous attribution («grey»).
• Support to military objectives: MISO is not general state propaganda but a capability serving specific commanders and campaigns.

From the Second World War to Iraq and Afghanistan

The American psychological-warfare tradition was born in the Second World War with the Office of War Information and the Army's propaganda units, was professionalised in Korea and Vietnam — where leaflet and loudspeaker campaigns reached industrial scale — and was institutionalised with the creation of the Army's psychological operations groups. The 4th Psychological Operations Group (Airborne), based at Fort Liberty (formerly Fort Bragg), is today the principal unit.

The Iraq and Afghanistan wars were the high point and the beginning of a credibility crisis. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on information campaigns — newspapers, radio stations, leaflets, programmes contracted to private companies — whose effectiveness was repeatedly questioned by the GAO itself and by the press. The loudest scandal broke in 2011, when Rolling Stone revealed that a general had ordered PSYOP techniques to be used against visiting U.S. senators in Afghanistan to secure more funding; the subsequent investigation found no crime, but the episode fixed public suspicion about where the foreign audience ends and the domestic one begins.

Why the name changed (twice)

The 2010 switch from PSYOP to MISO responded, according to official documents, to the need for a term better reflecting the integration of these operations into the information environment and reducing the pejorative charge of «psychological». Field veterans protested: they argued the new name was confusing, that the old one carried accumulated deterrent value, and that the change was a flight from the real debate about what these units should and should not do. In 2017, Special Operations Command restored «PSYOP» as the designation of its forces while keeping MISO as the name of the activity. The coexistence of both terms still generates confusion in the literature.

MISO in the social-media age

The migration of public debate to digital platforms transformed the field. Congressional reports and journalistic investigations have documented Pentagon programmes operating on social media in theatres such as the Middle East and Central Asia, some of which were dismantled by the platforms themselves: in 2022, Meta and Twitter removed account networks they attributed to influence operations associated with the U.S. military — an unprecedented episode showing the tension between platform rules and «white» state operations.

The current doctrinal debate turns on three questions: how to compete in an environment where adversaries such as Russia or China do not distinguish between informational war and peace; how to measure the effectiveness of influence operations, an unresolved task acknowledged by the manuals themselves; and how to preserve credibility — the central asset of white PSYOP — when the public assumes everything is manipulation.