For over a century, the United States military has released millions of propaganda leaflets from aircraft into enemy territory, betting that psychological messaging could shift allegiances and break morale. Yet the core question persists: does any of it actually work?
The practice began in earnest during World War I, when the U.S. dropped more than 3 million leaflets behind German lines by plane and hydrogen balloon. The narrative that followed claimed success. Decades later, during World War II and every major conflict since, the military continued the campaign with increasing scale and sophistication.
What the public rarely saw were the doubts buried in classified documents. A declassified 1971 Air Force report on the Vietnam War exposed a glaring problem: the leaflets often violated basic rules of persuasion. Between 1968 and 1971, the U.S. and South Vietnamese government dropped roughly 5 billion leaflets annually over Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, often in massive dumps from C-130 cargo planes that Air Force analysts sardonically dubbed "B.S. Bombers."
The reality on the ground told a different story. Captured soldiers explained they used the leaflets to roll cigarettes. Other prisoners said their units treated them as toilet paper. Some soldiers simply collected them as souvenirs. The leaflets, the Air Force found, diverged so widely from what people actually observed that they lost all credibility.
Despite such evidence, leafleting never stopped. In the Gulf War of the early 1990s, the military produced 29 million leaflets and claimed they persuaded 44 percent of the Iraqi army to desert, induced over 17,000 defections, and prompted more than 87,000 surrenders. Those figures remain difficult to verify and have never been independently confirmed.
The deeper contradiction lies in who sees these messages. The leaflets are created in the name of the American people yet remain almost entirely unknown to them. Meanwhile, for Afghans, Iraqis, and others living under U.S. military operations, the leaflets become a routine fact of life, another form of material falling from the sky alongside bombs.
A Hidden Archive Surfaces
Khajistan, a New York-based digital archive group, has begun collecting and displaying these forgotten propaganda tools. Since 2022, the organization has gathered hundreds of leaflets from U.S. operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, alongside materials from World War II campaigns against Japan. Now, an interactive exhibit called Office of War Information has opened at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, giving American audiences their first real look at what was made in their name.
Saad Khan, Khajistan's founder, grew up in Pakistan and has personal experience with conflict. "I come from war," he said simply when asked why he began the collection effort. The organization, named after a city near Herat, Afghanistan, focuses on stories and materials from communities typically excluded from mainstream narratives.
The exhibit recreates a wood-paneled office from an earlier era. Genuine American propaganda posters supporting the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviets hang on one wall. An old television loops scenes from American sitcoms. On the floor, thousands of replica leaflets are printed continuously, and visitors can input catalog numbers on vintage computers to read translations and historical details.
Patterns emerge quickly across the materials. Leaflets dropped on Japan during World War II contain threats that sound strikingly similar to modern rhetoric. One reads: "Your homes will be destroyed, factories will vanish, and your family killed. America is capable of producing earthquakes that will cause damage a thousand times greater than that of 1923."
Leaflets for Iraq typically contained dense text, apparently accounting for higher literacy rates. Those for Afghanistan relied more heavily on images. Both regularly caricatured Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. As the campaigns advanced into more recent decades, anime-style imagery appeared with increasing frequency.
Khan noted that much of the imagery carries troubling undertones. "Dehumanization is at the core of this," he said. "Thinking that you can drop shit on people like this and believe they will change their mind. There's racism in this."
The leaflets technically qualify as "white" propaganda in military terminology, meaning they carry an overt message the propagandist claims to believe, with the source clearly identified. Yet classification alone does not convey innocence. Each leaflet carries assumptions about the people they target and what persuasion might accomplish.
Khan offered a blunt assessment of the effort's true purpose. "These leaflets are just trash, like on the floor," he said. "They're dropped so that, after the war, when Congress summons the guy, he can say we dropped the leaflets before we bombed them. This is self-serving for Americans, like how America bombs and then sends non-profits. It's part of that system."
The exhibit does not definitively answer whether propaganda leaflets achieve military objectives. But it does reveal a long history of claims divorced from evidence, messaging divorced from reality, and a public kept largely unaware of operations conducted in their name.
Author James Rodriguez: "The Pentagon spent a century dropping leaflets with no solid proof they changed minds, but plenty of proof that prisoners used them for cigarettes and worse."
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