In a far-off conflict zone, a U.S. military plane flies overhead, releasing leaflets imploring militants to abandon their cause and warning civilians to avoid certain areas that may come under attack. Individuals below catch the notes and turn them over in their hands when, suddenly, the sheets begin to speak to them. This may sound like the opening scene in a near-future, sci-fi war movie, but it’s an actual project that U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) has been working on, according to a report from Defense One. They’ve even developed a prototype and are hoping to find a company who can improve on the design and have a product ready for a combat evaluation as soon as the end of 2018.

The speaking leaflet is reportedly about the width of four typical sheets of paper that you’d find in your printer. Inside there are the electronics and speaker necessary to store and playback the message, along with solar-powered photovoltaic batteries. SOCOM won't say whether it's using graphene or some other advanced material, but the entire arrangement remains flexible and the goal is for the final product to be “printable” just like any other piece of paper. This would allow U.S. military psychological warfare specialists to quickly add traditional textual and graphical messages to a 4-by-6-inch writeable surface on the outside to go along with the recorded speech.

CENTCOM via The Washington Post This is the kind of leaflets that the U.S. military is dropping now.

There are a number of immediate benefits to this concept, the most important of which is getting around the issue of illiteracy in the target population. Text on a leaflet is worthless if the intended audience can’t read it. This is hardly a new issue. While the U.S. military has leaned heavily on planes dropping leaflets to quickly and cheaply spread propaganda or other informational messages across a desired area for decades, studies have repeatedly questioned how many people are actually reading them. In the past, American forces have gone so far as to drop notes that instruct individuals to tune into specific frequencies for propaganda radio broadcasts.

DOD A leaflet that U.S. forces dropped over Iraq in 2003, with a translated version on the left, listing radio frequencies broadcasting informational messages.

Graphical themes don’t always get the message across properly, either. In September 2017, the U.S. military had to publicly apologize for one leaflet it dropped in Afghanistan, which superimposed the Shahada, the profession of faith in Islam, in Arabic on a dog. Many Muslims see this animal as unclean and saw the combination of symbolism, which was meant to be a jab at the Taliban, who use the Shahada as their flag, as highly offensive. Audio messages can be a good alternative to printed leaflets, but it has historically been even harder to focus them in the right places. Aircraft with huge speakers are probably the most effective means of doing so in a way that people on the ground can’t ignore, but those planes also have to fly low- and slow-enough to broadcast clearly, making them vulnerable to hostile forces on the ground.