A. Boston University Professor Perry Mehrling has passed away. His books on Fischer Black (2005) and the Federal Reserve (2011) were really important for me as I transitioned out of the Futures Studies and Strategic Foresight community and into a mesolevel new institutionalism focus. They are models of how to write financial history: Black’s period at Goldman Sachs and his 1986 paper on noise is revelatory. In 2024, I taught Mehrling’s final book Money and Empire: Charles P. Kindleberger and the Dollar System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022) for Dr Remy Davison at Australia’s Monash University.
Mehrling is perhaps best known for his popular course on The Economics of Money & Banking. You can find its lectures on Coursera, the Institute for New Economic Thinking, at Boston University, as a YouTube hosted MOOC, and as YouTube interviews and lectures. His staff page at Boston University is already now a dead link. Perhaps a lesson here is to harness online networks. Have key material available from multiple sources, rather than just your primary institutional affiliation.
A second lesson is that being a Professor - even a well published and respected one - is just a job from an institutional view - and you will be replaced by the administration. Sarah Jaffe summed this up in the title of her book Work Won’t Love You Back (London: Hurst Publishers, 2021). Make sure you put your life energies into people who truly value you: anyone under very specific circumstances may be completely expendable if cost-benefit analysis, risk transfer, and value capture requires it.
B. It’s very fashionable now in some circles to talk about active measures, disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda. There’s a whole generation of new scholars who (mistakenly) consider much of this new (in a post-fact sense) and who aren’t even really aware of what was going on in 1999-2000.
And then there’s the Political Warfare Executive (PWE) of the United Kingdom.
I first heard of the PWE via LTC Dr Michael A. Aquino’s mention of Ellic Howe’s psychological operations (PSYOP) work during World War II involving astrology. I regret that we did not discuss this further. Dr Aquino and I briefly discussed during my PhD studies the work done by the Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency) on the senior NSDAP leadership in Nazi Germany. Walter Langer wrote a psychoanalytic informed psychological profile for the OSS in 1943 of Adolf Hitler; its 1972 public version turned up for me in a secondhand bookstore in Melbourne, Australia. In 1999, the CIA released a declassified version. Contemporary historians believe that the Langer report is unreliable: Laurence Rees takes Langer to task in his recent book The Nazi Mind: 12 Warnings From History (London: Viking, 2025).
The OSS remains foregrounded in the public’s mind and in the publishing sub-genre of intelligence studies and military history. That’s in part because the backlist focus is largely still on three periods: World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War. Thus, author Lisa Rogak’s recent book Propaganda Girls: The Secret War of the Women in the OSS (London: Footnote, 2026) can be read simultaneously in multiple ways. It’s a war-time study. It addresses the gender imbalance in most military history books. It’s about non-kinetic (and information) warfare - including its logistics and support functions. It is also both a morale booster and even a ‘how to’ manual for dealing with Russia-Ukraine War active measures. Rogak’s book turned up as a new collection purchase in the Werribee branch of Wyndham Council’s community library system.
The PWE is lesser known because it was a compartmentalised, siloed unit with strict information and dissemination controls. Terry Stiastny has researched and penned a comparable book to Rogak: Believable Lies: The Misfits Who Fought Churchill’s Secret Propaganda War (London: WH Allen / Penguin, 2025). It appeals to readers of Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series who have (value) migrated (in a product line extension via intellectual property licensing) to the Apple TV hit series (six seasons to date) - except that for both Rogak and Stiastny, the threat environment was very real. Stiastny has conducted informative interviews with the True Spies podcast and Times Radio.
For the Lowy Institute’s Sam Roggeveen, Australian liberal democracy is undergoing a phase transition. During war-time, the PWE in the United Kingdom functioned institutionally as a guardrail to counter the risk of democratic backsliding. It used the Black Arts: disinformation, black propaganda (non-attributable), psychological operations, unconventional warfare, cognitive / hybrid / narrative warfare, samizdat publications, underground newspapers, pirate radio, and what hedge funds now call alternative data. It was equivalent to the Second Foundation (1953) in Isaac Asimov’s original trilogy (1951-53): Hari Seldon’s psychohistory was very likely going to fail in its initial formulation—so a Plan B capability that would remain hidden was needed.
Recently, Cambridge Scholars Publishing has released a two volume PWE syllabus, compiled and edited by Professor Erwin J. Warkentin of Memorial University of Newfoundland (volume one on mass deception & table of contents; and volume two on words at war & table of contents). Available copies are rumoured to have allegedly survived chew related stress testing by Newfoundland Labrador Retriever puppies. This is a major contribution for several reasons, albeit likely of interest only to research specialists. It has primary documentation. It offers institutional-organisational insights on developing a coherent knowledge base and on pedagogical methods. It is a model syllabus for the contemporary era.
At its heart the PWE dealt with more than mass psychology or strategic communication. This is the surface level material that outsiders can understand (“Psychological Operations is like Mad Men era advertising”). At its core it is about shaping a person’s ontological sense of what Reality is. There is a coherence-decoherence spectrum here that is better known in psychiatric treatment of Schizotypal and Schizoid personality disorders (in which effective reality-testing is absent), in the treatment of Autism Spectrum Disorder (which has advanced beyond Applied Behavior Analysis to contemporary mentalisation oriented practices), and in experimental psychology conducted during the CIA’s MK-Ultra program, and more recently during the George W. Bush administration at Guantanamo Bay using enhanced interrogation techniques that have crossed the line into state sanctioned torture.
Developing syllabi is key to military operations and training that scale up the deployment readiness of conventional forces: the end goal or outcome of the professional military education of war-fighters. It can also educate civilian audiences during the Phase Zero transition from peace to hybrid or grey zone conflict that involves indirect, asymmetric, non-attributable actions - including those taken by proxies, surrogates, and non-state actors. All of this is part of unconventional warfare, which is a subset of irregular warfare (that differs in its morphological form from conventional warfare). This is well known and understood in the United States war college system. It is not as well understood in civilian universities - in part because most civilian academics study this at arms length: they have never directly experienced the psychology and the volatility oriented aftermath of a ‘mass casualty’ terrorist attack; joined a cult or a new religious movement for an extensive period of time; or seen directly what the shadow side of total institutions (sociologist Erving Goffman) are like. Even that is up for potential critique: no-one is sacrosanct.
This is an area of interest to me. When I first taught for Swinburne University of Technology TAFE (at an equivalent community college level) in 2003, I had to develop or co-develop syllabi at short notice for Online Customer Service and Economy & Society units. The 1998-2003 period of my Disinformation website editing and writing involved this as day-to-day, emergent, and at times crisis event driven content development. In my 2017 to 2025 teaching with Swinburne Online and at Monash University, I often sought to bridge knowledge gaps via noting other relevant material (such as Perry Mehrling on Charles P. Kindleberger noted above). In some cases this was well received; in some student evaluations, not so well received.
In 2017-2025, I ran a self-funded exploratory research agenda in the Temple of Set on Metis (cunning intelligence) that led to some very interesting and cautionary life experiences in 2023 to 2025. During this time period, I studied the late Central Intelligence Agency expert Barton Whaley’s syllabus on deception and counterdeception, and his pioneering work on stratagem warfare and military deception, how being double crossed and betrayed works institutionally, and how mllitary deception planners are trained. I’ve been looking at United States and Australian military doctrine. DeepL platform translation using generative artificial intelligence has given me affordable access to some key material.
Professional scholarly associations are key to this. I have access to a syllabus archive for political science and international relations as an International Studies Association member. Last week I joined the Society for Military Historians whilst reading Stephen Morillo with Michael F. Pavkovic’s What Is Military History? (3rd ed.) (London: Polity, 2017). It is very doubtful that I could do much of this in a traditional Postdoc or Lecturer role, because it can be scary and even taboo for some people.
The US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth reflects this widespread view. In his State of the Force address (delivered on 23rd September 2026), Hegseth decried several groups of people that included “weirdos”. That fits with Hegseth’s revival of the warrior ethos, his emphasis on United States-led deterrence, and even his Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches religious beliefs. The OSS, the PWE, and the latter’s Cold War successor the Information Research Department (in the United Kingdom) all show otherwise, and decisively so.
To prevent Phase Zero from shifting into Phase One (in which conventional or physical war breaks out), divergent, creative, and even antinomian or taboo thinking is needed. Real adversaries frankly don’t care if feelings get hurt. But Hegseth also overreaches here: “weirdos” provide unique human capital. The OSS, the PWE, the IRD, and other lesser-known departments are the historical proof of that in economic volatility, social conflict and polarisiation and combat and war-time conditions.
Contemporary syllabi to PWE is needed. It will be a fun exercise. Let’s see what happens.