For now, U.S. forces drop leaflets, not bombs, on Iraq

ABOARD THE USS CONSTELLATION-Chief Petty Officer Christopher King grabs a sheet of oversized paper from a big stack that has just come clicking off a high-speed copy machine. He holds the sheets up to the fluorescent lights in the aircraft carrier's cramped print shop and makes sure the images on the front and back of each sheet are aligned. King then takes the rest of the nearly 500 sheets off the copier and over to a cutting machine. Then, with the hydraulic hiss and metallic chomp of 600 lbs of pressure, the sheets are cut into rectangles.

With that, the latest rounds of ammunition in the psychological war against Iraq are complete.

Since the Constellation deployed to the Persian Gulf about five months ago, its print shop has churned out about 3.5 million leaflets that have been dropped over Iraq by Navy F-18 fighter planes. Copied and cut into three-inch-by-six inch sheets, the leaflets have various messages written in Arabic with photo illustrations designed to inform Iraqis about the allied role in the region.

One urges Iraqis to stay away from surface-to-air missiles sites with pictures of destruction. Another warns Iraqis about the dangers of weapons of mass destruction, showing troops in gas masks. A third includes a drawing of a radio tower and gives Iraqis a radio frequency they can tune into for information. All of the leaflets have the same purpose: To win over the hearts and minds of Iraqi citizens, even as hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops are poised to launch an attack against their country.

"This keeps us a little bit busier than usual," says King, who oversees the five-person printing operation. The crew completes about 500 printing jobs a month, including not just the leaflets but everything from crew training manuals to personalized letterhead for the ship's senior officers.

Rear Adm. Barry Costello, commander of the Constellation Battle Carrier Group, says psychological operations are already playing a "huge" role in the U.S. led campaign to topple Saddam Hussein. He says the U.S. has received feedback that Iraqis are grateful for the warnings to stay away from possible missile sites and are listening to U.S. radio broadcasts out of Kuwait.

Lt. Kurt Mole, information warfare operations officer on the Constellation, says this deployment marks the first time a carrier has printed its own leaflets. "The Army is usually the expert in psychological operations. The Navy has always been capable of doing it, but as of late there has been a push to increase it and the leaflets are a big part of it," he adds.

Increasingly, all the military services are recognizing the importance of psychological operations. Over the past decade, in regions such as the Balkans and Afghanistan, the United States has learned it has the hardware to easy overwhelm any forces, but just as vital is the battle for the support of a nation's residents during and after a war. In the 1991 Persian Gulf War, thousands of Iraqi soldiers surrendered with leaflets urging them to give up in hand. Some even clutched dozens of leaflets, falsely believing it would buy them favored treatment.

Kings says the Navy upgraded the Constellation's printing capabilities before its current deployment by purchasing two high-speed printers for $17,000 apiece. Together, the printers can churn out half a million leaflets in 24 hours. In the past, the Army would have designed and printed the leaflets and shipped them from Ft. Bragg, N.C., to sea. Now, the Army simply e-mails leaflet designs to the Constellation for printing.

"Within 24 hours we can go from printing to dropping," says Mole. If the test of the on-board printing operation continues to be successful, other carriers are likely to get high-speed printers to make their own leaflets. Now other carriers in the region receive their leaflets from the Constellation.

Once printed, leaflets are stuffed-3,000 at a time-by groups of 15 sailors from various departments on the ship into 11-inch diameter cylinders that look like oversized toilet paper rolls. It takes about 10 to stuff each cylinder. The cylinders are then loaded-20 at a time-into the empty canister of a now-defunct, Vietnam-era Rockeye cluster bomb, and loaded onto F-18 bombers, which can carry as many as 120,000 leaflets in two canisters on a single mission. Up in the air, the canister is dropped and split open with a small fuse.

Leafletting from fighter aircraft is developing into a more and more exact science. Military planners not only scrutinize the messages they'll deliver, but have studied how the leaflets drop to determine the optimum weight. Heavier paper, about three times the weight of office copier paper, provides the most direct delivery, falling in fast, concentric circles.

"If it fluttered like a feather it'd probably would wind up in Saudi Arabia," Mole says.