I was watching a movie that took place in Vietnam War and saw that they put large loudspeakers on tanks, boats and even on helicopters. On another TV Series, Generation Kill that took place in Iraq War, they don’t have such things. Soldiers usually sing by themselves.
I’m wondering:
* what was the purpose of loudspeakers?
* why they don’t use it anymore?
In: 219
I was on a Tactical PSYOP team during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. So we were the guys with the loudspeakers. Let me try and answer all your questions:
**”What was the purpose of loudspeakers?”**
We didn’t use them much during the invasion. To the extent they were used, here’s how we used them:
* (1) To direct civilians while handing out aid;
* (2) To make surrender appeals (often before raiding a house);
* (3) To taunt the enemy into attacking;
* (4) To drive through towns giving announcements;
* (5) To torture POWs (to the extent that this happened is open to question and it was a warcrime).
With regards to (3), some fellow PSYOP guys I met during the war said they had success taunting the enemy into attacking with the loudspeaker. The reason you want to taunt the enemy into attacking is because you always won direct fights, the problem was when they ambushed you or sniped or left bombs. With regards to (5) I’ve had fellow PSYOP guys brag about doing that but I don’t know how much it happened. With regards to (2), I did a lot of those before raids but we eventually stopped doing them because units decided they wanted the element of surprise for the raid instead of losing it with a surrender appeal first. We still went on raids, but only did surrender appeals maybe 1/4 of the time when the element of surprise was already lost. We also did some work driving through towns making announcements or helping with the handing out of aid etc. but that was pretty rare. We mostly spent our days patrolling towns and interfacing with the local populace.
We also trained before the war to do the following but I don’t think we actually used it during the war:
* (6) Direct civilians during an evacuation after a chemical attack & for other reasons (but during training leading up to the war we focused on evacuations after chemical attacks because we thought the invasion of Iraq would involve chemical attacks);
* (7) To play tank and other military movement sounds to deceive the enemy as to where the main force is approaching from;
* (8) Playing music or other sounds to harass and keep the enemy awake (I had some nice recordings of alarm clocks and horrible sounds to keep people awake that I never used. I knew guys with recordings of women being raped which was really hard to hear which I… think were actresses… but it was really hard to sleep when someone was blasting that at me during training and disturbingly realistic. Not sure where those recordings came from but they weren’t part of the normal PSYOP).
**”Why they don’t use it anymore?”**
The loudspeaker wasn’t that valuable during this war. Unlike the current Ukraine war where blasting messages across the trenches about how to defect might be of real value, there wasn’t much of a use for loudspeakers in Iraq or Afghanistan. PSYOP teams found their role walking the streets and interacting with the locals to report back what the attitudes of the locals were and building relationships with the citizens as well as giving advice to the local commander. The INTEL and CA guys mostly spent their days in the Mayor’s office exclusively dealing with government officials, so PSYOP and SF were the only Soldiers who spent their days talking with local shopkeepers, school teachers, etc. We had loudspeakers (both mounted on the Humvees and a giant backpack system to carry by foot if needed), but the loudspeaker didn’t find much use. We mostly operated as a HUMINT team in the towns while the actual MI teams sat at the mayor’s office with the city officials all day. But if someone needed a loudspeaker for some operation, most Battalions had a 3-man PSYOP team carrying one with them for any such operation.
I really wish we could have spent more time developing relationships with the families and communities of homes that were raided and whose fathers were arrested to ensure that no one became radicalized, but I wasn’t able to convince my higher-ups that this was a job worth doing. PSYOP teams during these wars were the street-level Soldiers developing relationships with the locals. We were the ones who would discover that the town knew the mayor was a bad guy or what rumors about us or the insurgency were spreading around town. The loudspeaker didn’t particularly find a role in these wars. However, you can imagine how much more useful a loudspeaker would be in a war like Ukraine would be both for surrender appeals, imitating the sounds of military movements as decoys, and for directing civilian populations for evacuation.
**”Why didn’t you see loudspeakers in *Generation Kill*?”**
The Marines didn’t have PSYOP teams back in 2003. I believe they do have them now, but I’m not sure. The Army did assign some PSYOP teams to the Marines during the invasion (and they are some of the very, very few Army Soldiers who now get to wear Marine unit patches as combat patches which the Army has revised policy to disallow going forward). However, those PSYOP teams with loudspeakers would have been assigned as 3-man teams per battalion. The show more-or-less follows a particular company of 1st Marine Recon Battalion, so maybe there was a PSYOP team somewhere in the Battalion but not with the particular company the show focuses on. However, I suspect that there was no PSYOP team attached to the Recon Battalion at all. My bet is that the 1st Marine Division got a company of US Army PSYOP attached to them for the invasion and they pushed down one 3-man PSYOP team to each of their battalions. But I doubt the 1st Recon Battalion got a team assigned to them (but I don’t know). Even if they did, you wouldn’t necessarily see them on the show because the show follows a particular company of the 1st Recon Bat.
As a general point about the mini-series Generation Kill: It’s incredibly accurate and very hard for me to watch. Any motivation I had to write a memoir about my time in the war was killed by that show because it would be just the same stuff but with slightly different details. The show is spot on.
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