Except, it's a story as old as time. Everybody ever has attempted to influence the beliefs of others. It's a mark of the shallowness of american military intellectual culture that they think they can slap a few new words on this then, like magic, germinate some new insights.
The problem is, convincing anybody of anything is very hard.
>Except, it's a story as old as time. Everybody ever has attempted to influence the beliefs of others.
Using ranged weapons is a tale as old as time, but the invention of the bow and arrow and the invention of the ICBM are still very different. Trying to convince people when you had to talk to them face to face is different than being able to mass print reading materials. Trying to convince people through a limited available bandwidth of a radio station is different than being able to have one of a thousand cable channels. Communicating with a mass audience is different than being able algorithmically modify your communication on a per person basis. It's a mark of the shallowness to dismiss the current information environment and its ability to manipulate mental blind spots as nothing new.
Sure, technique have advanced - but honestly, given what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq, the US military is clearly more on the level of throwing faeces than firing arrows, let alone ICBMs.
Given the speed of their collapse, I'm willing to bet there were more people in Afghanistan who believe in lizard people than who believed in the state they built. Ditto Iraq.
I think the biggest problem is, once the words are out of your mouth, you lose control of the message. If you look at something like christianity, you can see there's absolutely no practical way to stop people from taking a message in any and every way possible, no matter how clear it is. Usually, the worst offenders are those who are exceptionally convinced.
The problem is, convincing anybody of anything is very hard.