The 33 Strategies of War (62 page)

Fooling Hitler into keeping his forces dispersed across Europe and France would give the Allies a slim margin of time in which to establish a beachhead. The key was to present him a picture, composed of many different kinds of evidence, that would tell him the Allies were doing just what he had thought they would. But this picture could not be made up of all kinds of flashing signs pointing to the Balkans and the Pas de Calais--that would reek of deception. Instead they had to create something that had the weight and feel of reality. It had to be subtle, a mix of banal truths with little falsehoods stitched in. If Hitler saw that in its outlines it supported his expectations, his overactive mind would fill in the rest. This is how the Allies wove such a picture.

At the end of the war, Allied Intelligence Officers discovered in captured files of the German Secret Service the text of two hundred and fifty messages received from agents and other sources before D-Day. Nearly all mentioned July and the Calais sector. One message alone gave the exact date and place of the invasion. It had come from a French colonel in Algiers. The Allies had discovered this officer was working for the Abwehr and he was arrested and subsequently turned round. He too was used to mislead Berlin--used and abused. The Germans were so often deceived by him that they ended by treating all his information as valueless. But they kept in contact, for it is always useful to know what the enemy wants you to believe. Allied Intelligence, with great boldness and truly remarkable perversity, had the colonel announce that the Invasion would take place on the coast of Normandy on the 5th, 6th or 7th June. For the Germans, his message was absolute proof that the invasion was to be on any day
except the 5th, 6th or 7th June,
and on any part of the coast except Normandy.

T
HE
S
ECRETS OF
D-D
AY
,
G
ILLES
P
ERRAULT
, 1965

By late 1943 the British had secretly identified all of the German agents active in England. The next step was to turn them into unwitting double agents by feeding them false information--about Allied plans for an attack on the Balkans and Norway, say, and the massing of a fictional army--commanded by Patton, the American general Hitler so feared--opposite the Pas de Calais. (This army, FUSAG, existed only in piles of phony paperwork and wireless transmissions that mimicked a normal army.) German agents were allowed to steal FUSAG documents and intercept transmissions--carefully misleading messages but at the same time banal and bureaucratic ones, too banal to be seen as fake. Working with film designers, the Allies built an elaborate set of rubber, plastic, and wood that from German reconnaissance planes would look like an enormous camp of tents, airplanes, and tanks. The German general who saw FUSAG with his own eyes was misled about the direction he was taking toward London: he had actually passed the real army to the west of FUSAG's supposed site, massing for the invasion of Normandy.

Now Ravana said to himself, "These are all petty weapons. I should really get down to proper business." And he invoked the one called "Maya"--a weapon which created illusions and confused the enemy. With proper incantations and worship, he sent off this weapon and it created an illusion of reviving all the armies and its leaders--Kumbakarna and Indrajit and the others--and bringing them back to the battlefield. Presently Rama found all those who, he thought, were no more, coming on with battle cries and surrounding him. Every man in the enemy's army was again up in arms. They seemed to fall on Rama with victorious cries. This was very confusing and Rama asked Matali, whom he had by now revived, "What is happening now? How are all these coming back? They were dead." Matali explained, "In your original identity you are the creator of illusions in this universe. Please know that Ravana has created phantoms to confuse you. If you make up your mind, you can dispel them immediately." Matali's explanation was a great help. Rama at once invoked a weapon called "Gnana"--which means "wisdom" or "perception." This was a very rare weapon, and he sent it forth. And all the terrifying armies who seemed to have come on in such a great mass suddenly evaporated into thin air.

T
HE
R
AMAYANA
,
V
ALMIKI
, I
NDIA, CIRCA
F
OURTH CENTURY B.C.

As the date of the invasion drew near, the Allies left clues combining fact and fiction still more intricately. The real time and place of the invasion were planted with an agent whom the Germans completely mistrusted, giving Hitler the feeling that he had seen through a deception when in fact he was staring at the truth. Now, if real information on the timing of the invasion somehow leaked out, Hitler would not know what to believe. The Allies knew that reports on the buying up of Pas de Calais maps in Switzerland would reach Hitler, and this would have its own realistic logic. As for the Montgomery sightings in Gibraltar, little did the German agents know they were seeing a look-alike, a man trained to act like the general. In the end the picture the Allies painted was so real to Hitler that well into July he believed in it, long after D-Day had actually happened. Through such subtle deceptions they had compelled him to keep his forces dispersed--perhaps the decisive factor in the success of the invasion.

In a competitive world, deception is a vital weapon that can give you a constant advantage. You can use it to distract your opponents, send them on goose chases, waste valuable time and resources in defending attacks that never come. But more than likely your concept of deception is wrong. It does not entail elaborate illusions or all sorts of showy distractions. People are too sophisticated to fall for such things. Deception should mirror reality. It can be elaborate, as the British deception around D-Day was, but the effect should be of reality only subtly, slightly altered, not completely transformed.

To mirror reality you must understand its nature. Above all, reality is subjective: we filter events through our emotions and preconceptions, seeing what we want to see. Your false mirror must conform to people's desires and expectations, lulling them to sleep. (If the Allies had wanted to attack the Pas de Calais, as Hitler suspected, and tried to convince Hitler the attack was coming to Normandy, that would have been a great deal harder than playing on his preexisting belief.) Your false mirror must incorporate things that are visibly true. It must seem somewhat banal, like life itself. It can have contradictory elements, as the D-Day deception did; reality is often contradictory. In the end, like an Escher painting, you must blend truth and illusion to the point where they become indistinguishable, and your false mirror is taken for reality.

What we wish, we readily believe, and what we ourselves think, we imagine others think also.

--Julius Caesar (100-44
B.C.
)

KEYS TO WARFARE

In the early history of warfare, military leaders were faced with the following predicament: The success of any war effort depended on the ability to know as much about the other side--its intentions, its strengths and weaknesses--as possible. But the enemy would never willingly disclose this information. In addition, the enemy often came from an alien culture, with its peculiar ways of thinking and behaving. A general could not really know what was going on in the mind of the opposing general. From the outside the enemy represented something of an impenetrable mystery. And yet, lacking some understanding of the other side, a general would be operating in the dark.

The only solution was to scrutinize the enemy for outward signs of what was going on within. A strategist might count the cooking fires in the enemy camp, for example, and the changes in that number over time; that would show the army's size and whether it was increasing as reserves arrived or decreasing as it was split, or perhaps as soldiers deserted. To see where the army was heading, or whether it was readying for battle, he would look for signs of movement or changes in its formation. He would try to get agents and spies to report on its activities from within. A leader who picked up enough of these signs and deciphered them correctly could piece together a reasonably clear picture.

The leader also knew that just as he was watching the other side, the other side was doing the same with him. In pondering this back-and-forth game of reading appearances, certain enlightened strategists in cultures around the world had a similar epiphany: Why not deliberately distort the signs the enemy was looking at? Why not mislead by playing with appearances? If the enemy is counting our cooking fires, just as we are counting theirs, why not light more fires, or fewer, to create a false impression of our strength? If they are following our army's every move, why not move it in deceptive patterns or send part of it in a direction as a decoy? If the enemy has sent spies and agents into our ranks, why not feed them false information? An enemy that thinks it knows our size and intentions, and is unaware that it has been misled, will act on its false knowledge and commit all kinds of mistakes. It will move its men to fight an enemy that is not there. It will fight with shadows.

Thinking in this way, these ancient strategists created the art of organized deception, an art that would eventually filter beyond warfare into politics and society at large. In essence, military deception is about subtly manipulating and distorting signs of our identity and purpose to control the enemy's vision of reality and get them to act on their misperceptions. It is the art of managing appearances, and it can create a decisive advantage for whichever side uses it better.

The real impact of such a strategy is the dissipation of resources, the creation of both self-fulfilling and suicidal prophecies, and the destruction of truth and trust. It maximizes confusion and disorder and destroys the organization's resilience, adaptability, core values, and ability to respond. The key to such a strategy, says
[
Colonel John
]
Boyd, is less deception (the creation of a false order) and more ambiguity (confusion about reality itself). You want to combine fact and fiction to create ambiguity for an adversary, for the combination creates more problems, requires longer to sort out, and calls more into question than merely inserting false information. As an example, he recalled the story of a group of Germans after the Normandy invasion who had stolen some American uniforms and jeeps. They went around the French countryside changing all the road signs to confuse the allies as they advanced through the area. Soon, the Americans figured out that the directions had been reversed and simply did the opposite of whatever the signs indicated. How much more effective it would have been if the Germans had changed only a portion of the signs, a third to a half, and created even more problems for the Americans. Creating ambiguity about the signs' accuracy and prolonging the time it would take to discover the problem would have been far more effective than changing all the signs in a consistent fashion.

T
HE
M
IND OF
W
AR
,
G
RANT
T. H
AMMOND
, 2001

In war, where the stakes are so high, there is no moral taint in using deception. It is simply an added weapon to create an advantage, much as some animals use camouflage and other tricks to help them survive. To refuse this weapon is a form of unilateral disarmament, giving the other side a clearer view of the field--an advantage that can translate into victory. And there is no morality or goodness in losing a war.

We face a similar dynamic in our daily battles in life. We are social creatures, and our happiness, even our survival, depends on our ability to understand what other people are intending and thinking. But because we cannot get inside their heads, we are forced to read the signs in their outward behavior. We ponder their past actions as indications of what they might do in the future. We examine their words, their looks, the tone in their voice, certain actions that seem laden with significance. Everything a person does in the social realm is a sign of some sort. At the same time, we are aware that a thousand pairs of eyes are in turn watching us, reading us, and trying to sense our intentions.

It is a never-ending battle over appearance and perception. If other people can read what we are up to, predict what we are going to do, while we have no clue about them, they have a constant advantage over us that they cannot help but exploit. That is why, in the social realm, we learn from an early age to use deception--we tell others what they want to hear, concealing our real thoughts, hedging with the truth, misleading to make a better impression. Many of these deceptions are entirely unconscious.

Since appearances are critical and deception is inevitable, what you want is to elevate your game--to make your deceptions more conscious and skillful. You need the power to cloak your maneuvers, to keep people off balance by controlling the perceptions they have of you and the signs you give out. In this sense there is a lot you can learn from the military arts of deception, which are based on timeless laws of psychology and are infinitely applicable to the battles of daily life.

To master this art, you must embrace its necessity and find creative pleasure in manipulating appearances--as if you were directing a film. The following are the six main forms of military deception, each with its own advantage.