The Need to Adopt Deception-Centric Warfare

A new era of hyper-transparent warfare is emerging, and it is having a profoundly erosive effect on American military power. This erosion has been accelerated by the democratization of destruction and precision mass, which are readily available to a wide array of state and non-state actors. To adapt to these new realities, the United States Military must learn new lessons to adapt to this emerging battlespace; it must refocus its military strategy, doctrine, and tactics on the role of deception in wartime. The Department of Defense must relearn how to employ the “Dark Arts” of warfare by taking new lessons from the evolving character of war. To do this, it must look to the ongoing Russian war of aggression in Ukraine: The Ukrainian military has successfully used deception in many of its major combat operations. Ukraine has used tactics such as decoy checkpoints, phony HIMARS, and even dropped speakers projecting Ukrainian soldiers’ voices behind Russian Trenches before all-robotic attack forces captured the Russian position.

The Ukrainians have also employed deception on the operational and tactical levels of war, utilizing techniques such as creating false tracks in fields to simulate the presence of military vehicles and artillery systems, when in fact, no such systems were in that vicinity. Russia, for its part, has also employed deceptive tactics both in Ukraine and against Europe, yet has fallen significantly behind in the deception competition vis-à-vis Ukraine. In the deception competition, Ukraine is the clear victor. This is a shocking development, given the fact that deception has deep roots in Russian strategic and military culture: Known as Maskirovka (маскировка), which involves camouflage, concealment, disguise, and misinformation. This theory has deep roots in Russian and Soviet military culture. The Ukrainian military and security services have done a much better job at Maskirovka, essentially beating the Russian military at their own game.

 Military theorists have long highlighted the importance of deception in wartime and in politics. Thinkers such as  Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, and the author of the 36 Stratagems should be elevated to the top of war college reading lists and curricula, and new capabilities should be designed around, or in light of, deploying deceptive principles.

The proliferation of sensors and precision mass continues to make the battlespace in Ukraine and elsewhere ever more transparent, and therefore, increasingly difficult for the U.S. Military to operate in. This article proposes a concept, repackaged for future and modern warfare, known as deception-centric warfare: in other words, placing military deception and disruption of the adversary’s (The PRC, North Korea, Iran, and the Russian Federation) perception and prediction of how democracies fight at the core goal of warfighting to achieve victory. In other words, it places deceiving our enemies at the central consideration of how the United States and its allies fight adversaries. This is not an entirely new concept; indeed, deception is as old as warfare itself. But how we employ deception in an age of emerging technologies, cognitive, electronic, multidomain, and cyber warfare must change with the ever-evolving character of modern warfare. Thankfully, there are useful texts and doctrines of deception that are useful cornerstones to build on. They include, but are not limited to: Maneuver Warfare and Basil Liddell Hart’s strategy of indirect approach, as well as previously mentioned theorists and texts that are much older, yet ever timeless in their application.

 The United States and NATO must refocus their doctrine on the task of deliberately misleading and shaping how the adversary perceives and predicts Allied operations and movements during battle. This is what Deception-Centric Warfare does. Deception-Centric Warfare is an operational concept in which a military force uses deception as the basis of its tactics and strategies via emerging technologies, cyber and electronic warfare, and by using classical deception tactics and strategies. This is to actively confuse and disrupt the adversary’s OODA loop and decision-making process, as well as to actively disrupt PLA and Russian decision-makers by disrupting their intelligence-gathering systems, therefore disrupting their decision-making in a way that is advantageous to American forces.

 Sun Tzu, a figure both shrouded in historical mystery and a revered strategist, once remarked in The Art of War that “All war is based on deception”, as a larger observation of the nature and character of war; however, in the United States, this is no longer the case, thanks to decades of military superiority. Instead, much of the United States Military’s present doctrine is much more focused on denial, coercion, distribution, or overmatch, which are no longer suitable to American military operations, as America’s own dominance comes to a predictable end. Thankfully, the United States and NATO have well-defined concepts of deception in their military doctrine. However, democratic militaries are often deception-adverse compared to previous major power conflicts. This aversion (or amnesia) to deception in warfare will put democratic nations at a significant military disadvantage if or when a conflict starts with the Axis of Aggressors.

The American national security community (government agencies, private industry, think tanks), thankfully, has very strong foundations to build a concept of deception-centric warfare on. NATO doctrine, for example, defines deception as “ deliberate measures to mislead targeted decision-makers into behaving in a manner advantageous to the commander’s objectives.”

As previously noted, deception is unlikely playing a central role in how America conducts modern warfare. This must change if American forces are to defeat powerful militaries that have a localized advantage. However, Deception-Centric Warfare (DCW) requires much more than just a battlefield strategy. Deception itself is a usable concept for informing force design, force management, and force generation, as well as a role in strategic deterrence, and vice versa. This is especially the case when it comes to out-deceiving adversaries and their moves against free nations such as Taiwan and the Baltic States. The Joint Force should especially focus on how the PLA will likely employ deception in wartime during an attempted Taiwan invasion.

The PLA has a long strategic tradition of employing deception in warfare and geopolitics; however, the centrality of deception in modern Chinese warfare is a topic of much debate among strategists and analysts of all stripes. The U.S. Army TRADOC Command believes deception to be a core tenet of what the PLA terms “System Destruction Warfare”, where an adversary’s system, instead of conventional battlefield capabilities, is targeted. A big problem with these analyses and their implications, however, is that the lack of data and empirical evidence regarding modern Chinese methods of warfighting limits much of these debates and their utility: China’s last major war was with Vietnam in 1979, and there cannot be deceptive tactics or strategies employed by the PLA found in that conflict in publicly available resources. In Korea, there are also very few examples of Chinese deception, even when China entered the war in October of 1950, despite the surprise offensive that pushed the UN Forces back into South Korea. However, if deception is central to the PLA’s way of warfare today, as many say it is, the United States must learn how to out-deceive the PRC, Russia, and other adversaries.

By actively using emerging technologies and new weapons platforms, decoys, and manned systems, deception-centric warfare is possible and very much needed on a scale not seen before in the history of warfare. This is where the DCW steps in: In the Taiwan Strait, for example, the U.S. could use floating decoys of ships, drone/Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) masses to look like fighter aircraft on radar, airfields, and military forces with false heat signatures to confuse PLA forces into exhausting their munitions stockpiles. Additionally, AI-enabled Bot farms could flood PRC intelligence centers with false yet plausible misinformation on American/ROC troop movements. Such deceptive operations could also be used to convince the PRC that the U.S. has much more forces in-theater than previously acknowledged and therefore play a large role in deterring PRC aggression.

This reconception of deceptive warfare, of course, could easily help in deterring, or if need be, win in a Russian Invasion of the Baltic States or deter aggressive actors around the globe. Deception will, of course, not always be suitable for all combat operations. But fighting with deception as a major tool in the American/Allied toolkit will be essential to how the liberal democratic world fights wars in the future. Doing this requires a major recentering of deception into a usable military strategy.

Jack Casey Buckley is a Research Assistant at the Yorktown Institute and an MA candidate in his second year at American University, studying United States Foreign Policy and National Security with an emphasis on cybersecurity and defense policy.