by Cam Rea
Midterms are coming up, and there is speculation about just about everything, from military installations becoming more self-sufficient to exercises involving the temporary burial of military casualties in the event of conventional warfare. Now, add UFOs, classified military technologies, and the predictions people keep making about an impending global crisis or conflict, religious or not, and you start to see a familiar pattern emerge.
Understandably, some people look at these developments and believe the government is preparing for something catastrophic. Others dismiss the concerns as conspiracy theories. And depending on how you look at it, I can understand both sides. However, much of what’s being reported isn’t necessarily unusual or mysterious. Much of it falls into that gray area: the everyday minutiae of governmental preparedness that most people don’t really think about.
When it comes to national defense, none of this is particularly new. The military has developed contingency plans, improved infrastructure resilience, prepared for casualties, and worked on classified technologies for decades. The same goes, to a lesser extent, for civilian infrastructure. These things happen all the time. People, for the most part, don’t notice them. The military, along with the government, prepares for all kinds of possibilities, including scenarios within scenarios, many of which may never happen. That’s the whole point of preparedness.
Nevertheless, people will interpret these activities through speculation, fear, and incomplete information. And it certainly doesn’t help when commentators and news outlets take ordinary military preparations and present them as evidence that some major crisis is right around the corner. But then again, controversy creates cash.
Now, here’s where I think things get interesting. What happens when all this public speculation becomes strategically useful? Whether through deliberate manipulation, selective disclosure, or simply letting misinformation circulate, governments can benefit from where people direct their attention. Sometimes that attention is drawn toward a perceived threat while the real activity happens elsewhere. Other times, the lack of public attention is just as useful.
The strategic value of controlling public attention lies in the government’s ability to manufacture or exploit distractions while pursuing objectives it would rather keep hidden. By creating or amplifying perceived threats, or “boogeymen,” governments can redirect public attention away from sensitive activities, including classified military projects and technological developments.
This creates an interesting social dynamic between the majority and the minority. The majority becomes absorbed in the prevailing narrative, while a smaller minority questions it, recognizing that something else may be occurring beneath the surface. However, without concrete evidence, that minority struggles to substantiate its suspicions. Consequently, the majority may dismiss these individuals as conspiracy theorists, eccentrics, or simply “kooks.” In effect, social conformity becomes a mechanism of control. The government doesn’t necessarily have to discredit its critics because the public can do that work for it.
During peacetime, this mechanism can operate differently. When there is no immediate threat of war or national emergency, public interest in military affairs and classified technological developments tends to diminish. People become occupied with everyday life, allowing government programs to proceed with relatively little public scrutiny. However, when suspicious activity does attract attention, speculation and disagreement can obscure the underlying reality. The public becomes preoccupied with debating competing explanations rather than investigating what is actually happening.
The UFO (Sorry, UAP) phenomenon offers an interesting historical example. While the public debated extraterrestrial visitors, the United States was secretly developing advanced reconnaissance aircraft, including the U-2 and A-12 OXCART. Some sightings involved classified aircraft, and officials sometimes provided misleading explanations to protect those programs. Whether deliberately manufactured or exploited, public speculation can serve secrecy’s interests.
The broader implication is that social control does not always require direct government intervention. It can emerge through manipulating attention, exploiting uncertainty, and the natural pressures of social conformity. Most people may unknowingly reinforce an official narrative, while those who question it are marginalized through ridicule rather than formal censorship.
Ultimately, the strategic advantage lies not merely in controlling what people know, but in influencing what they choose to investigate, what they dismiss, and whom they consider credible. In such circumstances, the government may conceal activities in plain sight not because no one is looking, but because public attention is directed elsewhere.
On the flip side, controlling public attention isn’t necessarily limited to keeping something hidden. Something can be out in the open and still go largely unnoticed. That’s the interesting thing about an open secret. Public attention can also undermine confidence in something already out in the open. It’s a weapon with many faces. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be our own government doing it. An outside adversary could exploit these same social and psychological dynamics, especially when the objective isn’t to conceal an activity but to make people question an institution’s legitimacy.
Consider the role organizations, including NGOs (non-governmental organizations) operating domestically, can play in shaping public opinion. Take the Overton window, for example. An idea that might initially be considered unacceptable can, through discussion, repetition, and exposure, gradually become acceptable. Kind of like when a radio station keeps playing a song you can’t stand, hoping that eventually you’ll come around, decide it isn’t so bad after all, and maybe even go out and buy a copy.
Now, once that idea becomes acceptable, you take it a step further. You do what Edward Bernays called crystallizing public opinion. You take those loose, shifting opinions and begin shaping them into something more solid and cohesive. In other words, first you make the idea acceptable. Then you crystallize that acceptance into something that becomes part of the prevailing public narrative. And eventually, questioning that narrative may carry its own social consequences.
That doesn’t mean these organizations are necessarily acting on behalf of an adversary. But it shows how public opinion can shift over time. Different actors, even without coordinating or knowing one another, can end up advancing similar objectives.
Now, take that idea beyond simply shaping public opinion. What happens when these same mechanisms are used to create distrust in the political process itself? Organizations, activists, and other political actors can influence public perceptions of institutions through their activities, statements, and legal challenges. When intimidation, misconduct, or deliberate obstruction enters the picture, the consequences can become far more serious.
Here’s the interesting part: you don’t necessarily have to change an election’s outcome to damage public confidence in it. Sometimes, convincing people the process is compromised is enough.
And that brings us to something particularly sensitive: our elections, and how an adversary might exploit public uncertainty to undermine confidence in them.
In a situation like that, the psychological objective could be more important than the technical attack itself.
For example, this doesn’t mean such an event will happen, or even that it’s particularly likely. It’s simply a hypothetical scenario worth considering.
Let’s say an attack aims to disrupt a nationwide election. The lights stay on. The internet works. Television stations continue broadcasting. Social media remains operational. However, conflicting election results, unexplained reporting delays, fabricated announcements, and rumors of compromised voting systems begin to circulate.
We’ve seen similar disruptions and controversies on a more localized scale. Now imagine the uncertainty spreading nationwide.
The objective wouldn’t necessarily be to prevent people from casting their votes. It could be to make people question whether their votes mattered in the first place. To some extent, we already see this kind of distrust today, but this hypothetical situation would take it considerably further. And that introduces a much more complicated strategic problem.
American elections are decentralized, with paper records, local election administration, audits, and established certification procedures. These safeguards let people verify election results without relying on electronic reporting systems.
But here’s the problem. You don’t necessarily have to compromise the electoral system itself to undermine public confidence in it.
Disrupt electronic reporting, and people will immediately question what happened and why. Even if the paper ballots remain legitimate and the counting procedures function exactly as intended, the mere disappearance of one familiar component can create suspicion. You’ve taken something off the table; you removed a food item off the tray, and that alone may be enough to spook people.
It reminds me of the Twilight Zone episode The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street. If anyone remembers that episode, the residents end up doing much of the destructive work themselves, driven by suspicion and fear, with little understanding of what’s actually happening.
And that’s where the psychological objective becomes more significant than the technical attack. Even with safeguards in place, disrupting one familiar component could be enough to cast doubt on the entire process in the public mind.
An adversary doesn’t necessarily have to destroy a functioning institution. It may be enough to convince people that the institution can no longer be trusted.
An institution can remain operational while becoming illegitimate in the eyes of the people it serves. But for how long? It might survive another 50 years, continuing to function through established laws, bureaucratic procedures, and institutional authority. However, over time, people may simply stop caring. They lose confidence, become indifferent, and eventually abandon their belief in the institution’s purpose. The institution remains intact, but its foundation slowly rots away.
Anger usually means people are still willing to fight for something they believe in, while apathy suggests they’ve stopped believing it’s worth saving. But people can move back and forth between the two, sometimes becoming angry enough to act, other times indifferent enough to do nothing. And that back-and-forth can create its own kind of chaos before things eventually settle. It reminds me of that familiar saying, “Out of chaos comes order,” often associated with Nietzsche. But here’s my question: what kind of order comes out of that chaos, and who ultimately benefits? Because order still looks like chaos in wait.
Without trust, there is no faith. Without faith, legitimacy erodes. And without legitimacy, an institution may continue to exist, but its authority becomes increasingly difficult to sustain.
An institution doesn’t have to collapse to become irrelevant. It only has to outlive the people’s belief in its purpose.
REFERENCES:
1. Haines, Gerald K. (1997). “A Die-Hard Issue: CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947–90.” Studies in Intelligence. Central Intelligence Agency.
https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/cia-role-study-UFOs.pdf
2. Mackinac Center for Public Policy. (n.d.). “The Overton Window.” Mackinac Center for Public Policy.
https://www.mackinac.org/OvertonWindow
3. Bernays, Edward L. (1923). Crystallizing Public Opinion. New York: Boni and Liveright.
https://dn760102.eu.archive.org/0/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.1607/2015.1607.Crystallizing-Public-Opinion.pdf
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.” Wikipedia. Originally aired 4 March 1960; written by Rod Serling for The Twilight Zone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monsters_Are_Due_on_Maple_Street