Experts from Sweden’s Psychological Defence Agency (PDA) are visiting New Zealand. They’re talking with researchers, military and civil defence people on decision-making during a grey-zone or “hybrid” war.
A casual read of the PDA’s website illustrates its focus is on slapping Swedes out of an uncritical mindset that everything they read on the internet is true. Their advice for private individuals is to be aware that foreign powers use disinformation, misleading information and propaganda to harm Sweden and its interests. Don’t be fooled about everything you read on the internet, think twice about the reason YOU are reading what you are, and in the context you are reading it. Check the article’s sources and verify or triangulate its information content.
Really good advice: not everything you read is what it seem – milk sometimes masquerades as cream.
Which is why this article in Singapore’s The Strait Times on the 13 August 2026 is giving me pause for thought… Surely, IF the USA is actually running out of ammunition … it wouldn’t tell anyone.
Wouldn’t the state of a country’s ammunition stocks be like… a really BIG national secret? You really wouldn’t want your potentially enemies to know you’re down to shooting potato balls out of potato guns, right?
And does reading about the USA’s lack of ammunition make you, as a reader, feel safer or more vulnerable?
Trump’s name appears 12 times in what is an unflattering appraisal of his presidential management. So maybe this article – which doesn’t reference a single number of stock quantity or change – isn’t really about the world becoming a lot more dangerous with newly empowered moderns Vandals and Goths threating to pillage and burn down metaphorical “Rome”.
It’s probably more of a slag-off against Trump by Andreas Kluth who might not like him but needs to be more subtle than simply saying “Trump’s a Dick!”.
But might this article, reproduced in a “credible source” like The Strait Times, be to an uncritical reader, “misinformation”, in a SPA sense?
It reminds me of a story I heard recently about Gary Powers and the U2 Spy Plane incident of the 1960’s. For many years (since 1958), the USA thought its spy plane was flying over Russia undetected – it was too high, too quick, and after many fly-overs, the Russians still hadn’t complained about their airspace being invaded by a foreign power. In 1960, the Russians shot Gary Powers down by the first of three S-75 Dvina surface-to-air missiles.
It turns out that Russia knew absolutely of every airspace incursion by the Americans. Every single time a U2 went over they detected the plane, and made no comment. They remained silent not because each incident was undetected. They remained silent because, up until the S-75 Dvina they lacked an arsenal capable of shooting the plane down at that height.
To have complained about each incursion would have revealed two strategic facts: the USSR’s radar capability was significantly more advanced than the American’s appreciated, and secondly, their weaponry has incapable of addressing the incursion. So each time a U2 flew over their lips were sealed up until the point their new S-75 Dvina did the talking.
THATS how you treat strategic information. 🙂