What is PSYOPS?

I'll answer your question with a short story.

Night 3 of BMQ-L and our section had a couple of smart-asses that managed to get what little time we were supposed to be allowed to cycle sleep, stripped. So while sections 1-4 are peacefully manning C-9's, off doing patrols, or dozing, 5 Section gets to dig trenches through solid bedrock... a job which we've been doing without rest since we first got there. Finally, at 3 in the morning, some guy pulls himself out of a trench to grab water, and nearly skewers himself on a upturned pick. Long story short, the Course Warrant gets involved, some screaming is heard and "congrats troops, because of Private HolyfuckyoualmostbecameahumankebabwhileIwasresponsibleforyou, you all get to start doing normal rotations". I get my first 15 minutes of sleep in 67 hours. It was glorious.

Only thing is, our Swing NCO didn't feel we'd worked off our punishment yet, and because he couldn't task us specifically with digging trenches anymore, EVERYONE got to suffer.

10 minutes into my 15 minutes of sleep my fire-team partner kicks me in the chest. I, slowly realizing that he'd cut my nap short, start to get a little more than slightly pissy. I'm about to shake some sense into him when I see his face. He's absolute mortified. Now, at this point it'd be useful to note that my fire-team partner in BMQ-L was a professional weightlifter, not just local or national, but international too. He's about 250lbs of pure fuck your shit up, and has the attitude to boot. Hilarious as fuck while on standby, but like a silverback gorilla when people start fucking around. Seeing him this scared meant something was seriously fucked up.

Anyway, he's trying to tell me something, but I can't hear him because he's yammering, and somewhere in the woods in the center of our arks there's... wait a second, is that... that sounds like... holy fuck troopaloops it sure as fuck is drum roll a crying woman.

The most terrifying sound you'll ever hear while sleep fucked and in the middle of a buttfuck nowhere mountain range is the piercing wails of a crying, and then screaming woman.

Needless to say, nobody slept, nobody even left their trench. People kept calling contact at the slightest of movements they saw through their scopes, and spec-firing bushes where they swear they heard something. Everything we'd been told about checking our fire and trigger discipline went straight to shit. Hell, people started engaging course staff when they walked past or towards them from behind.

As some of you may expect the Swing NCO had crawled into the treeline and placed an outdoor, Bluetooth speaker about 5 meters into the darkness. He then hooked it up to his phone and started playing horror movie sound effects. The real kicker though, was the fact that he'd apparently gone to the two farthest trenches on either side, as well as the LP (which both had at least 10 meters between them and the next trench) and started chatting them up about local legends (specifically Wendigos) before starting the screaming. They'd been so petrified they'd pissed in their own trenches and one team had started filling the trench back in with themselves still in it. No clue what their rationale for that was though... maybe trying to get better cam and concealment in case the wendigo decided to come munch on their limbs.

But anyway, when morning broke, at the demands of the Course Warrant, the Swing NCO kindly sat us down and told us in a very kindergarten teacher-esque tone, that Wendigo's did not, in fact, exist, and we're not stumbling through the forest trying to find and eat us. Didn't help much in the end, turns out that when you're running on 10 minutes of sleep for 71hrs 50 minutes awake, you're fear instincts take control of most of your logic and reasoning skills. Spec-fire every night out the yazoo till we finally heard the glorious call of 'end-ex'.

And that, OP, is one of the best examples I've personally experienced of psyops. It's the distribution/exploitation of information, and the manipulation of environment to mentally fuck your enemy. In Vietnam the US played whispering voices of the 'dead' in foggy forests to chase NVA out of their spider holes, in Afghanistan the Coalition Forces pointed pistols instead of rifles at uppity locals to get them to comply because Soviets had used exclusively pistols to execute prisoners... In Canada Course Staff use horror movie soundtracks to absolutely ruin your ability to rationally perceive your surroundings.

/r/CanadianForces Thread