Chapter I: Deception in War and Key Principles

There are many definitions for deception. The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as “the act of hiding the truth, especially to get an advantage.”¹ Nearly all definitions in the literature that explore deception are similar. Donald Daniel and Katherine Herbig describe military deception as “the deliberate misrepresentation of reality done to gain competitive advantage.”² According to Charles Cruickshank, deception is “the art of misleading the enemy into doing something, or not doing something, so that his strategic or tactical position will be weakened.”³ And in Strategic Denial and Deception, Roy Godson and James Wirtz describe it as “a nation’s effort to cause an adversary to believe something that is not true.”⁴

An effective way to deceive humans is to have them engage in self-deception. As Conrad Crane wrote, “It is easier to deceive us than most of our enemies.”⁵ Norman Dixon explores this phenomenon in On the Psychology of Military Incompetence, describing how interwar Royal Navy battleship advocates disregarded all evidence about the potential future impact of aircraft in the maritime environment. This august group of senior officers needed no encouragement to deceive themselves—and the British government—in their efforts to save battleships.⁶ It is a fruitful area of exploration for the conduct of military deception if such behavior can be nurtured in our adversaries.

Military doctrinal publications have also defined deception. U.S. Joint Doctrine describes the purpose of deception as to “deter hostile actions, increase the success of friendly defensive actions, or to improve the success of any potential friendly offensive action.”⁷ The U.S. Marine Corps doctrinal publication on this topic described deception as “the art of convincing the enemy or adversary we will do something other than what we are actually planning to do.”⁸ Finally, NATO doctrine on military deception describes it as “deliberate measures to mislead targeted decision makers into behaving in a manner advantageous to the commander’s objectives.”⁹

Russian and Chinese doctrine also emphasizes deception, with Russian deception activities famously encapsulated in the concept of maskirovka, the Russian term for “disguise” or “camouflage,” which has a larger meaning. As Morgan Maier writes: “Like other complex cultural ideas, Russia’s conceptualization of deception defies simple definitions. While the conceptualization of deception in Russia shares similarities to Western thought, it also possesses its own unique characteristics. For the last 50 years, the West has considered maskirovka synonymous with deception. Maskirovka’s central theme is the presentation of a believable falsehood to conceal the truth. Maskirovka seeks to create a false reality for the target audience.”¹⁰

The roots of deception in Chinese doctrine reach back to the ideas and writings of Sun Tzu. The enduring centrality of deception in Chinese military thought is embedded in contemporary doctrine. This has been explored in recent reports by the RAND Corporation, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Center for Naval Analyses.¹¹ These reports explore specific People’s Liberation Army (PLA) strategies to manipulate the thinking and actions of enemy forces in different domains. Recent Chinese joint doctrine promotes feints, false signals, and misinformation, ensuring adversaries remain uncertain about PLA intentions. Additionally, PLA Air Force and Navy doctrine stresses the use of decoys, camouflage, and fake communications to mislead enemy commanders.¹² And unlike in Western practice, in Chinese deception, doctrine describes how it is the responsibility of commanders to personally create deception plans, rather than have deception staff officers create them.¹³

The essence of military deception is changing the perception of an enemy commander, by misleading them or reinforcing an idea that is unproductive (or disastrous) for the force they lead. It should either increase ambiguity (A-type deception) or reduce ambiguity by building up attractiveness of the wrong alternative (M-type deception).¹⁴ Deception is thus also an information operation because its aim is to deceive the human mind, the machines that humans rely on, or both.¹⁵

Principles for the application of military deception have been derived from the study of military history. Among the scholars who have described principles of deception in the modern era are Barton Whaley in Toward a General Theory of Deception, Daniel and Herbig in Strategic Military Deception, Jon Latimer in Deception in War, Christopher Rein as the editor of Weaving the Tangled Web, and Michael Dewar in The Art of Deception in Warfare.¹⁶

Yet the doctrinal publications of many nations reflect Whaley’s proposition in his 1969 study on deception and surprise in war: “Deception has been so infrequently or, rather, intermittently and idiosyncratically practiced that it has never gained a firm hold on formal doctrine.”¹⁷

For instance, French doctrine lists the purposes of deception (conceal, divert, and confuse)¹⁸ without providing principles for its employment. The use of deception similarly features throughout the British Army’s Land Operations Doctrine, although it is not specifically called out for attention, nor are the principles associated with its application by British forces.¹⁹ Likewise, the British joint doctrine on multi-domain operations, issued in 2020, refers to the importance of deception without further expanding on its application in joint operations.²⁰

Fortunately, U.S. doctrine stands out for having clear principles for the conduct of military deception. The U.S. joint doctrine on deception²¹ and the U.S. Army doctrine²² list six common principles of military deception:

1. Focus. Military deception should target the thought process of the adversary decision maker to cause a desired action. The enemy’s intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) system is normally not the target; rather, it is a means by which deception can deliver information to the decision maker.
2. Objective. Deception plans focus actions and resources that motivate an enemy to decide to take (or not to take) specific desired actions. The plan cannot focus solely on motivating the target to believe certain things; it must lead to the target making a specific decision.
3. Centralized planning and control. A centralized approach is necessary to avoid confusion, ensuring that various elements portray the same story and do not conflict with other operational objectives or evolving conditions in an operational environment. Execution of the deception may, however, be decentralized if all participating organizations adhere to a single plan.
4. Security. Military deception operations require strict security. Successful planners apply strict need-to-know criteria to each aspect of the deception plan. Maintaining the security of the deception means limiting the number of informed planners and participants to those needed.
5. Timeliness. A critical aspect of deception planning and execution is appropriate synchronization with the commander’s intent and maintaining synchronization during execution. A key challenge is to get the deception target to act in accordance with the deception objective within the timelines required. Friendly deception activities must be completed in a way that accounts for the time consumed by the enemy’s intelligence collection and analysis process, the enemy’s decision-making process, and the enemy’s activity that is to be exploited by friendly forces.
6. Integration. Military deception must be integrated at all levels throughout the planning process. Integration also necessitates developing a concept for deception that supports the overall mission. The integration of deception activities begins with planning, continues through execution, and concludes with the termination of the deception.

Coming from an organization trying to bring together multiple national approaches, NATO doctrine on deception is conceptually similar to U.S. doctrine. But it lacks the coordination mechanism inherent in the U.S. military’s “centralized control” principle, and it is also more target-centric, dealing almost exclusively with the target and desired outcome. The NATO principles are:²³

• Create a behavioral response. Deception must focus on creating a desired behavior. This behavioral outcome must meet the commander’s intent.
• Reinforce existing beliefs. Understand what the adversary is predisposed to believe (including how they expect friendly forces to act) and what they are predisposed to disbelieve. It is easier to reinforce a belief than to change it.
• Target the decision maker. The targeted decision maker must be able to detect deceptive events, process them, and subsequently act upon them. The decision maker may be at the tactical, operational, or strategic level.
• Be credible, consistent, verifiable, and executable. Deception must be:
  • credible in their minds: Is it believable?
  • consistent with the narrative of the operation and the strategic communications framework: Does it make sense in context with what is happening?
  • verifiable by their collection assets in the time required: Can it be satisfactorily confirmed?
  • verifiable by friendly forces collection assets: Can friendly forces collect information to confirm that the enemy is deceived?
  • executable in terms of the actions required over the time period available to do so: Can we actually do this in a timely manner?
• Use multiple approaches. Creating effects through joint action will ensure an integrated approach. The greater the number of channels used, the greater the likelihood of the deception being perceived as credible.
• Conceal the real and reveal the false. Draw attention away from real dispositions and intentions, while simultaneously attracting attention to false intentions. Alternatives require the adversary to evaluate them.

Military doctrine on deception also recognizes the close relationship between information operations and deception operations. NATO doctrine on deception describes how “Info Ops is the staff function that coordinates information activities to create effects on will, understanding, and capability. To maintain credibility of the overall messaging, the information activities within OPSEC [operational security] and deception plans must be coordinated with Info Ops.”²⁴

The 2012 U.S. Joint Doctrine on deception also notes that “MILDEC [military deception] and other information operations (IO) capabilities must be planned and integrated to support the commander’s campaign and/or operation.”²⁵ The 2022 U.S. Marine Corps doctrinal publication Information describes how “deception is an information activity because we endeavor to deceive the human mind, the machine the human relies on, or both.”²⁶

While there is a doctrinal foundation upon which military institutions can base their deception activities, there is also a set of maxims that might inform the implementation of military deception doctrine. These maxims were included in the 2019 version of the U.S. Army’s doctrine on deception but originated from a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) research project in 1981, which was declassified in 2015.²⁷

These “maxims of deception” help to frame what successful deception operations might look like, and provide a starting point for countering adversary deception activities.²⁸ The 10 CIA maxims are:²⁹

Maxim 1: Magruder’s Principle—the Exploitation of Preconceptions

Named for Confederate general John B. Magruder’s trickery during the 1862 Peninsula Campaign, it is generally easier to induce an opponent to maintain a pre-existing belief than to present notional evidence to change that belief. Thus, it may be more fruitful to examine how an opponent’s existing beliefs can be turned to advantage than to attempt to alter these views.

Maxim 2: Limitations to Human Information Processing

There are several limitations to human information processing that are exploitable in the design of deception schemes—among these, the law of small numbers and susceptibility to conditioning.

Maxim 3: Multiple Forms of Surprise

Surprise can be achieved in many forms. In military engagements, these forms include location, strength, intention, style, and timing. Should it not prove attractive or feasible to achieve surprise in all dimensions, it may still be possible to achieve surprise in at least one of these.

Maxim 4: Jones’s Lemma

Named for Professor R.V. Jones, a key figure in Winston Churchill’s “boffins” during World War II, deception becomes more difficult as the number of channels of information available to the victim increases. However, within limits, the greater the number of controlled channels, the greater the likelihood of the deception being believed.

Maxim 5: A Choice Among Types of Deception

Where possible, the objective of the deception planner should be to reduce the ambiguity in the mind of the victim to force them to seize upon a notional worldview as being correct—not making him less certain of the truth, but more certain of a particular falsehood.

Maxim 6: Axelrod’s Contribution—the Husbanding of Assets

Named for the work of the political scientist Robert Axelrod, there are circumstances where deception assets should be husbanded despite the costs of maintenance and risk of waste, awaiting a more fruitful use. Such decisions are often susceptible to rational analysis.

Maxim 7: Sequencing Rule

Deception activities should be sequenced to maximize the persistence of the incorrect hypothesis(es) for as long as possible. In other words, “red-handed” activities should be deferred to the last possible instant.

Maxim 8: The Importance of Feedback

A scheme to ensure accurate feedback increases the chance of success in deception.

Maxim 9: “The Monkey Paw”

Named for the 1902 short horror story by W.W. Jacobs, deception efforts may play on desire and greed to produce subtle and unwanted side effects. Planners should be sensitive to such possibilities and, where prudent, take steps to minimize these counterproductive aspects.

Maxim 10: Care in the Design of Planned Placement of Deceptive Material

Great care must be exercised in the design of schemes to leak notional plans. Apparent windfalls are subject to close scrutiny and often disbelieved. Genuine leaks often occur under circumstances thought improbable.

There are multiple examples from the war in Ukraine where these maxims have been applied. For instance, Magruder’s principle (maxim 1) was employed by Ukraine in the lead-up to the 2024 Kursk offensive. Ukraine sought to reinforce in the minds of the Russians, and Ukraine’s allies, that Ukraine was not able to conduct offensive activities at scale. The second maxim, limitations on human processing, is used almost nightly by the Russians as they deploy dozens of decoy drones to overwhelm Ukraine’s air defense network and confuse decision makers about actual targets. Multiple forms of surprise, which is maxim 3, are employed in the planning and execution of Ukrainian long-range strikes inside Russia in order to improve the chances of penetrating Russia’s air defenses and hitting desired targets. The enduring utility of these maxims is being demonstrated in real time in modern war.

The deception principles and maxims represent the “state of the art” in thinking about planning, executing, and measuring the conduct of military deception activities. The relationship between military deception operations and information operations, described in the more recent doctrinal publications, is also an important consideration in developing a framework for future military deception. That said, reviewing the principles of military deception will be necessary given the impact of new technologies and changes in the character of war explored in the following chapters.

With the fundamental knowledge of deception operations now examined, it is time to turn to an examination of those factors that are driving the adaptation of military deception. First, new and disruptive technologies are impacting the art of deception. Second, a range of trends in wider military affairs will force military institutions to adapt beyond traditional approaches to deception.