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Another question that bears mentioning is "how high did it go and who knew?" Reuters claims it was out of a central psyops DoD facility and diplomats objected, so it wasn't some wild minor group who got carried away, which was my initial thought. In fact, I'd draw a line directly to Trump, who apparently green-lit other anti-China psyops earlier in 2019. Not to say he directly approved it, but there was a mind-set in the intel community that he encouraged. Furthered by decisions made by Trump's chosen SecDef. The Reuters piece claims it was a sort of originally a tit-for-tat response against China spreading insinuations via their own psyops that the US was to blame for the virus, the Fort Derrick theory. Plus a little uneasiness at China earning some diplomatic wins in the region. Which checks out as expected. And in fact, diplomatic objections, the article claims, normally would have torpedoes such an effort (!), but apparently this kind of regional power struggle was put into the "military" realm, and essentially leaders decided that info-war was okay. Classic organizational behavior and pitfalls. It probably didn't help that the anti-vax effort was lumped in together with the more understandable "it actually was a Chinese virus, not a US one" message. I think then one takeaway is that putting things under a military umbrella makes the military treat it like a military conflict. Something to be very careful about!
Along these same lines, clearly the actual information about the program did not reach the very top immediately either. Apparently the social media companies found out, complained, and when Biden became president, it eventually got internally reviewed and shut down, and this only took a few months. I don't think Presidents normally get briefed about this kind of low-level effort, there are too many of them. Looking more broadly, psyops of various kinds clearly continue as the article makes clear.
I guess a second takeaway here is that messages from the top filter downstream in predictable yet often also unexpected ways. It's almost impressive how the system actually does seem to reflect in small but important ways these messages from the top, truth be told. Like, the dictat was "hey China's been messing with us and people's minds and it's time to give them a taste of it right back" and sure enough, a lot of efforts on that note spring up semi-organically. The psyops and many of these lower-level creations have clearly been militarized and the boundaries aren't very well controlled from the top, which is worrying.
There's also a somewhat unresolved question of how much the US just does what others are already doing, and how much of it is escalation on the part of the US. And obviously, let's step back: is it worth it? I don't really think a lot of the mil-ind-govt complex is doing a good enough job thinking through these things. I wouldn't go so far as to say that this is unexpected or deliberate evil on the government's part, clearly their motivations at least mostly make sense, but certainly some evil things can happen. Think Thucydides trap kind of stuff. That's why I think we view this in the lens of organizational behavior. It's also worth noting that we found out about this only 3-4 years later. That's actually a positive point to the US system -- we often find out about the bad things we do, and that allows us (at least in theory) to debate them and see if we want to be better (or not). Internally even, clearly some people found this effort highly distasteful, and eventually the internal apparatus even agreed. In many governments and systems, this might never come to light, internally or externally. For example, China does this kind of thing probably fairly often. Do the Chinese people find out about what their own government is doing? Almost certainly not. And as an aside, I count this as a minor piece of evidence that the Biden administration is much more trustable when it comes to being thoughtful about foreign policy than the Trump admin.
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