Leadership Lessons and Highlights
► How are classic deception efforts Operations Fortitude and Bodyguard in World War II relevant today? Every single one of their principles still holds true today, from disguising your actions and intentions to reinforcing an enemy’s wrongful assumptions. Think of the then classified, but now famous “Ghost Army,” which made the Nazis think we were going to invade at the wrong location, but where they worried most. It was all so masterful and detailed, all the way down to little items like having an actor who looked like General Montgomery deliberately get photographed on a trip thousands of miles away, in the days before the invasion. Yet there is also a warning in them. Our research found that we now face a “deception gap.” The deception operations that our forces executed brilliantly on D-Day involved years of planning and thousands of moving parts. Now, the teaching of military deception gets short shrift in our training manuals, and counter-deception even less. This was insufficient for training how to fight the Taliban, unconscionable for when facing a great power. ► You recently released a detailed report on deception for New America with Mick Ryan. What have we learned about the evolution of deception from the Ukraine war? The so-called “transparent battlefield” is actually still filled with the fog of war, now heightened by new technologies like drones, AI, and 3D printing. Russia and Ukraine have managed to deceive each other again and again in spite of the mass presence of drones and satellites. So, deception has not gone out of style, it is even more important than ever. ► What trends in deception do you anticipate over the next decade? One is the growing vulnerabilities to systems with a “lower barrier to entry” like small drones. Another is that AI both enables new approaches to deception but also has certain vulnerabilities that can be exploited. AI can be tricked, and, even more so, future deception campaigns will target the relationship between human and machine. We are also seeing the growing role and importance of the space domain in deception campaigns. Finally, nations like Russia, North Korea, Iran and China have a learning complex, so we should expect to see our foes share lessons and technologies.
Peering into the Future with Peter Singer
By Steve Leonard
N early 20 years ago, I was meeting with Peter Singer for coffee at The Brookings Institution, where he led the 21st Century Defense Initiative for the Washington, DC, think tank. Each year, he would work with a remarkable group of fellows from the Army War College and refocus their thinking from the present to the future. Not surprisingly, our conversation that morning inevitably drifted from what the fellows were doing for Brookings to what Singer himself could do to help us prepare for that future. For some people, the future can be a little unnerving. What waits around the bend of the next international crisis? Which direction will the fortunes of global power dynamics turn? What threats lurk over the horizon? Those questions and a litany of others have become a driving passion for Singer, a best-selling author and renowned futurist whose research and writing on 21st-century national security issues continue to fuel the imagination of leaders. In the years since that first meeting, Peter Singer and I have written books together, explored the concept of FICINT – fictional intelligence – through the Useful Fiction initiative, and maintained a close dialog. But it was Singer’s latest effort at New America with another of my co-authors, Mick Ryan, that convinced me that another conversation was necessary.
► It’s 2030 and still nothing is happening between China and Taiwan. Why or why not? We did a project related to this question for SOCOM via our Useful Fiction project. We were asked to envision “What would winning look like?” Our answer was a future scenario not in which we defeated an invasion of Taiwan, but rather one in which China never invaded Taiwan. That is what winning would actually look like. The key lesson was that deterrence, however, turns on not just what you do, but what the other side perceives and decides.
So, I sat down with Peter to discuss his projects, his sense of what’s to come, and what keeps him awake at night. ► What inspired your interest in deception in war? The story of how militaries trick each other is one of the most essential—and fascinating—aspects of war. It goes from the Trojan Horse to the deception operations before D-Day to how Ukraine and Israel have more recently pulled it off. It is also something that new technologies like drones and AI are reshaping. Finally, it is an area that potential foes like China care about deeply and could pull off against us. ► How would you explain deception to someone without a background in the field? It has two key parts. First, deliberately misleading your foe. And second, so that they will take some action that contributes to your own goals.
So, the story we created was of a PLA general in that future, looking back on why it was never the right day to invade Taiwan, lamenting that they could never figure out how to win. He blames 20 dastardly things that the Taiwanese, Americans, and their allies put into place, possible real-world actions that made PLA military planners’ lives more complicated and our defenses more resilient. What is great is that the story was used not just at SOCOM, but in testimony to Congress. Hopefully, many of the scenario’s action items are being enacted, to make that fiction come true.
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