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Propaganda has been defined (above, page 39). It remains to distinguish some of the other technical and professional terms which apply in this field. In operational terms, propaganda can be distinguished by the consideration of five elements:18

 1. Source (including Media)

 2. Time

 3. Audience

 4. Subject

 5. Mission

These factors are given in approximate order of importance to the analyst, and provide a good working breakdown for propaganda analysis when expert staffs are not available. The five factors can be remembered by memorizing the initial letters in order: S-T-A-S-M. The last factor, "Mission," covers the presumed effect which the enemy seeks by dissemination of the item.

Without going into the technique of field propaganda analysis (described below, page 115), it is useful to apply these analysis factors to the definition of some subordinate types of military propaganda.

Source is the most important. If the source is open and acknowledged,the government issuing it is putting the propaganda on the record before the world, and must therefore issue the propaganda with a certain amount of dignity and with an eye to the future. If the source is faked, then it is important for the government or army to make sure that the faking is a good job, and that the propaganda cannot readily be traced back. Two very different techniques are employed. Open sources require responsible public officials, preferably men with international reputations, who will get the best effect from use of the name and facilities of the government. Use of an open source usually (but not always) implies belief of the disseminator in the veracity of his materials. Fabricated sources require persons adept at illicit imaginativeness, impromptu forgery, and general devilment, combined with a strong sense of discipline and security. The United States was so chary of mixing the two kinds of propaganda during World War II that it operated them in different categories, giving rise to the three following types:

 White propaganda is issued from an acknowledged source, usually a government or an agency of a government, including military commands at various levels. This type of propaganda is associated with overt psychological operations.

 Grey propaganda does not clearly identify any source.

 Black propaganda purports to emanate from a source other than the true one. This type of propaganda is associated with covert psychological warfare operations.

White propaganda is shown in figure 4 which does everything possible to make the message the official message of the British and American governments. The border is done up in handsome banknote fashion; the great seals of the nations are handsomely displayed; the signatures of the commanding generals are shown as further attestation of the openness and good faith of the issuer of the propaganda.

Figure 38 was also prepared by British-American authority; it too had the job of making Germans surrender. But in this case, nothing was done to make the British-American source evident; indeed, every effort was made to hide the source, so that the German who read it would think that it came from within his own territory. The two different kinds of propaganda were both of them needed; each supplemented the other but they had to be kept apart as far as possible.

In the field of radio, the difference between Covert and Overt was even more plain. During World War II, the ether over Europe was filled with appeals from radio stations both public and covert in character. The British spoke to the Germans over B.B.C., making no effort to conceal the fact that they were British. But they also spoke to the Germans over clandestine stations, which pretended to be free-lancing Nazis, German army stations, or freedom group operations. The Germans, comparably, beamed official German news to the United States in English; but they also pretended to be Americans broadcasting from an isolationist radio in the American mid-west. In some cases, the belligerent powers used the identical radio transmission facilities for overt and covert propaganda. Radio Saipan, under the Americans, was most of the time the relay for the acknowledged San Francisco programs; intermittently OSS borrowed it, and it then became a "Japanese" station. (Under such conditions, black radio cannot remain black very long.)

In terms of the timing, propaganda can be subdivided into two further categories, strategic and tactical. Strategic propaganda is conducted with no immediate effect in view. Its purpose is to wear down the enemy by psychological changes that may extend over months. Figure 19, warning the Germans of the remote future, is an example of this in leaflet form. Tactical propaganda is operated to accomplish an immediate short-range purpose, and normally does not cover a long time-span. Only in a few cases, such as leaflets for a besieged enemy unit, is tactical propaganda run for a purpose that encompasses a long delay between the operation and the expected result. These two forms may be defined as follows:

 Strategic propaganda is directed at enemy forces, enemy peoples, and enemy-occupied areas in their entirety, and—in coordination with strategic planning—is designed to effectuate results planned and sought over a period of weeks, months, or years.

 Tactical propaganda is directed at specific audiences, usually named, and is prepared and executed in support of localized combat operations.

Another set of distinctions can be set up, depending on the relationship of the propaganda operation to the simultaneous hostile propaganda operations, namely offensive or defensive propaganda. Before the advent of World War II, this distinction appeared to be significant but experience on almost all fronts indicated that it meant little when applied to day-in day-out necessities of actual practice. Propaganda is so intimately keyed to the news and opinion situation that it does not usually bear elaborate pre-operational analysis. Elaborate planning very often ends up in the locked files; the distinction of offensive and defensive means little in routine work. However, for the sake of the record, the distinction can be listed:

 Defensive propaganda is designed to maintain an accepted and operating form of social or other public action. (Soviet propaganda for the Five Year Plans is a conspicuous instance.)

 Offensive propaganda is designed to interrupt social action not desired by the propagandist, or to predispose to social action which he desires, either through revolutionary means (within the same society) or international, either diplomatic or belligerent (between different societies).

Another set of distinctions arises from the purpose which the propaganda officer or group may have in mind for the people whom he addresses. These distinctions, like offensive-defensive, are theoretical rather than practical, and did not often appear in the actual operations, although all the more hush-hush plans made elaborate references to them:

 Conversionary propaganda is designed to change the emotional orpractical allegiance of individuals from one group to another.

 Divisive propaganda is designed to split apart the component subgroups of the enemy and thereby reduce the effectiveness of the enemy group considered as a single unit. (An instance is provided by the Allied effort to make German Catholics think first as Catholics, then as Germans.)

 Consolidation propaganda is directed toward civil populations in areas occupied by a military force and is designed to insure compliance with the commands or policies promulgated by the commander of the occupying force.

 Counterpropaganda is designed to refute a specific point or theme of enemy propaganda. (Japanese charges of American atrocities usually followed American charges of Japanese atrocities.)

Except for those terms that are firmly rooted in the literature of propaganda, most of the distinctions can be forgotten; the basic distinctions are those determined by the task involved, and not by the propaganda content.

World War II brought up a very sore issue between military and civilians with respect to propaganda in areas with unsettled governments—such as Darlanist North Africa, Communist China, all of Siam. (See, also, discussion of World War II, below, page 77 ff.) In these areas every military act involved the definition of the political relations of the United States Government to the governments locally enjoying authority. Were we at war with them, or not? And so on. In these cases, politics itself became a vital foundation to propaganda, especially when the local authorities were themselves active in the propaganda field. The American theater and unit commanders had to decide what kinds of political promises they could or could not make. In this job, they had a more difficult task than did the British, who possessed in the Political Warfare Executive a pooling facility which coordinated foreign policy with propaganda.19 Could we promise freedom from France to the Algerians? Or immunity to the Siamese who re-doublecrossed in the matter of allegiance and got ready to subvert the Japanese? Or the Yenan people who wanted us to highjack the Generalissimo as a price of their support? Or the Indonesians who might oppose the Japanese and already opposed the Dutch? Such questions transcended propaganda. Their decision made propaganda, or unmade it; but the deciding power was outside the authority of the propaganda people.

Political warfare is therefore, in administrative terms, a higher-level activity than propaganda, and may be defined as follows:

Political warfare consists of the framing of national policy in such a way as to assist propaganda or military operations, whether with respect to the direct political relations of governments with one another or in relation to groups of people possessing a political character.

Such policy-framing does not normally fall within the authority of the Army or Navy, though these may be consulted and called upon to effect appropriate military action. An outstanding instance of the use of political warfare was President Roosevelt's impromptu enunciation of the theme "Unconditional Surrender" at Casablanca. The theme affected not only our propaganda, but the types of surrenders which American generals could accept from Germans.