In 1980, as a “PSYOP Research & Analysis Team Leader”, Aquino c0-authored MindWar – an internal U.S. Army paper about the future of psychological operations. While this document was only intended for the eyes of government policymakers, it accidentally became public. And it caused quite a stir.

“Is the government involved in invasion of the mind beyond the blundering, haphazard legacy of the infamous MKULTRA experiments? Even more unsettling, do such efforts extend beyond conventional scientific research to dark and arcane arts whose very existence is the stuff of legend?”
– MindWar book description

The least one can say is that MindWar was visionary. It accurately predicted the 4th generation of warfare which focuses on bypassing armies in order to “attack population, culture, and institutions”. And the best way to accomplish this was, of course, through mass media.

“In its strategic context, MindWar must reach out to friends, enemies and neutrals alike across the globe – neither through primitive “battlefield” leaflets and loudspeakers of PSYOP nor through the weak, imprecise, and narrow effort of psychotronics – but through the media possessed by the United States which have the capabilities to reach virtually all people on the face of the Earth.

These media are, of course, the electronic media – television and radio. State of the art developments in satellite communication, video recording techniques, and laser and optical transmission of broadcasts make possible a penetration of the minds of the world such as would have been inconceivable just a few years ago.”
– Michael A. Aquino and Paul E. Valley, “MindWar”

The ultimate goal of MindWar is to make people willingly do what they’re supposed to do, while not realizing they’ve been pushed towards that decision at every step of the way.

“For the mind to believe in its own decisions, it must feel that it made those decisions without coercion. Coercive measures used by the operative, consequently, must not be detectable by ordinary means. There is no need to resort to mind-weakening drugs such as those explored by the CIA; in fact the exposure of a single such method would do unacceptable damage to MindWar’s reputation for truth.”
– Ibid.

Did you think the movie Inception was some far-fetched fairytale?

They do love their symbolism.