Political Warfare is the systematic process of influencing the will and so directing the actions of peoples in enemy and enemy occupied territories, according to the needs of higher strategy.

It is not a new factor in warfare, but its importance has been greatly magnified by the character of modern 'total' war and by technological devices which have created new Instruments for political attack so that it has become the Fourth Fighting Arm. Its exploitation in modern form originated in Germany where, between the two wars, the Nazis evolved a science and strategy for political warfare based on Hitler's own Statement:
"The place of the artillery barrage as a preparation for an infantry attack will in future be taken by revolutionary propaganda. Its task is to break down the enemy psychologically before the Armies begin to function at all."

Their success is undoubted.

The democracies did not have this advantage of preparation (such preliminary measures as were taken being obviously inadequate), which made their task all the more difficult when war broke out, and it was perhaps fortunate for our political warfare agencies that their necessarily experimental stage occurred during the first two years of war when anything we did, however well, would have made no difference to a seemingly triumphant enemy. It would though, have been possible to have minimised the pessimism in occupied Europe resulting from defeat and our failure to do this when it was most needed is surely one of the worst results of the lack of any proper pre-war planning.