| Elon Musk has thrown a wrench in the Pentagon's propaganda machine. The move is akin to revealing the secret location of a tank division. Every soldier knows wars are not won with bullets and bombs but with ideas and ideology. Sure, it's important to cripple the enemy's capacity to wage war, but true victory comes when you eliminate their desire to fight. Battles over ideas are called psychological operations. I brushed up against PSYOPS as a military intelligence collector and analyst intercepting Soviet communications in the 1980s. I always enjoyed flipping through the Soviet military magazines the Russian linguists kept around to keep their vocabulary up to date. They were a lot more interesting than the octal signatures I studied to break codes and much more amusing than the U.S. Army's magazines. Communists prioritized propaganda from the earliest days of the Soviet Union. Vladimir Lenin called his faction the Bolsheviks, which means one of the majority, even though his party was the minority until 1922. The United States has also employed propaganda throughout its history, trying to invoke patriotism, conformity and sometimes white supremacy. The Smith Mundt Act forbids the government from employing propaganda to influence U.S. citizens today, but the Pentagon engages in psychological operations 24 hours a day, seven days a week overseas. On Tuesday, Elon Musk pulled back the curtain on how Twitter executives helped U.S. Central Command mount unacknowledged social media campaigns to influence people in the Middle East to support American interests. No one should be surprised. I wrote about how the Pentagon spent $4.7 billion a year on influence operations back in 2009. I also explored how the Pentagon quietly plants stories in U.S. newspapers to build support for troops on overseas deployments. Many strategists see nothing wrong with the military using social media to shape perceptions around the world to either end or prevent conflicts. We want our enemies to put down their weapons and join our side. The question is what role media companies should play in these operations. When I was covering the Iraq war, generals would get angry when I reported on civilian casualties. Public affairs officers would become enraged when we interviewed anti-American fighters and shared their perspectives on the conflict. One Marine spokesman asked how as an American and a veteran, I could report stories that made the U.S. military look bad during a war. I never doubted my role as a journalist to expose the reality of war. The American people have a right to know how the Pentagon expends the nation's blood and treasure, and in a democracy, they have a right to demand an accounting from their generals. Social media executives face a more challenging dilemma. Twitter, Facebook and others are not news organizations. They take a side whenever they quash an account a hostile power uses to shape Americans' opinions. But should they shut down Central Command's accounts trying to encourage ISIS recruits to defect? Do they tell a two-star general no when he asks for help ending a war? What about the State Department's covert accounts trying to promote democracy in Russia? Musk is not a journalist; he claims Twitter is a public square where people should freely debate ideas. The complicated question is whether to allow anonymity and whether he will extend that to governments too. More importantly, will he allow all governments to use psychological operations to win hearts and minds, or will he censor ideas he finds offensive? Running a media company is not as easy as he thinks. | 
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