Deception on the Transparent Battlefield

A Strategic Inflection: Modern Warfare and Deception

In June 2025, when President Donald Trump launched strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, the B-2s that flew Operation Midnight Hammer employed military deception to ensure Iran remained clueless as to where and when they would be hit. We can expect the future of warfare to continue to require more military deception, where we remain “predictably unpredictable” at the operational level of war. We stand at a strategic inflection point, where advances in cyber, space, artificial intelligence, and information systems foment a rapidly changing character of war. Adversaries will no longer fight with tanks, ships, and aircraft alone. Instead, we should expect them to blend these traditional capabilities with electromagnetic warfare and a sea of misinformation to erode U.S. tactical overmatch. In this evolving environment, the necessity of military deception has risen to an operational imperative. As modern battlefields become increasingly saturated with sensors and surveillance, commanders who master the art of deception will seize the initiative and protect their combat power.

Given the changing character of war, two RAND scholars asserted that “successful deception activities enhance force protection, preserve combat power, and add complexity for the adversary,” especially as near-peer competitors field ubiquitous sensing systems. Likewise, Major General Paul Stanton, commander of the Army Cyber Center of Excellence, leads efforts to field electromagnetic-spectrum decoys and obfuscators that “raise the noise floor” around friendly forces, making them visible only as ambiguous signatures rather than precise targets. However, some argue that ubiquitous overhead and drone sensors have created battlefield transparency, negating the effects of military deception. Nevertheless, these arguments overlook two fundamental aspects of the art of deception: the vulnerability of an adversary’s decision-making and the importance of operational security.

Figure 1: Ubiquitous drones make the battlefield increasingly transparent.

Battlefield Transparency – Reality or Myth

The concept of battlefield transparency gained prominence late in the Cold War, and proponents of an emerging “Revolution in Military Affairs” pointed to the 1991 Gulf War as an early example of its implications. More recently, the Russia-Ukraine war renewed the discussion of a transparent battlefield and its implications for future warfare. Most analysts and military leaders acknowledge that the proliferation of drones, sensors, social media, and commercial imagery is making the battle space increasingly transparent, requiring militaries to change how they fight. General Valery Zaluzhny, the former Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, emphasizes that “due to the absolute transparency, a 10-15 kilometer zone of absolute death” now exists along the front line. Some analysts have even gone so far as to say that operational maneuver is impossible in the face of battlefield transparency. The lack of operationally significant maneuver and transformation of the Russia-Ukraine war into a war of attrition would seem to lend some credence to this argument.

However, despite the ability to collect, process, and exploit ever-larger quantities of information, battlefield transparency is not comprehensive. In a study of deception in warfare today, Mick Ryan and Peter Singer acknowledge the reality of “enhanced tactical visibility” but are skeptical that there will ever be an “unblinking eye capable of detecting all human activities and intentions” (emphasis ours). Further, “visibility is not the same as understanding”, and thus, surprise remains possible. Others point to renewed emphasis on signature management and the advances that will enhance military forces to “hide in plain sight” by blending into the electromagnetic spectrum (EMS). Still, others go further, noting that militaries are engaged in a “hider-finder competition” requiring a mastery of denial and deception operations to disrupt and defeat adversary sensing capabilities. Additionally, just as technology enables increased visibility, technology will increasingly be capable of overwhelming adversary systems or manipulating information, creating distrust and uncertainty for your adversary.

Ultimately, debate about the scope of battlefield transparency and its implications for the character of warfare will continue. On one side, some will argue that sensor proliferation and the availability of information will make surprise harder to achieve, and thus make maneuvering more costly. Although true, we argue that war remains a human activity characterized by creativity and violence, even on an increasingly visible battlefield. While no commander can guarantee information superiority, commanders can still achieve the initiative by exploiting an adversary’s perceptions and proactively denying truthful information to the enemy.

Coping with Competing Observables

Military deception planners carefully consider which signatures to hide and which to reveal or amplify to prompt adversary decision-makers to take actions that support the friendly mission objective. Using the See-Think-Do methodology, deception planners can map conduits and anticipate potential competing observables. Some competing observables can be mitigated, but others cannot. While deception planners wish for the adversary to observe only a false reality, deceivers must contend with competing observables. Examining two military deception case studies —the 1990-1991 Gulf War in Operation Desert Storm and the 2024 Kursk Offensive during the ongoing Russia-Ukraine War —can help illustrate how deception can succeed despite an increasingly visible battlefield.

Deception Leverages Confirmation Bias: Desert Storm’s Left Hook

During Desert Storm, Coalition deception planners employed the See-Think-Do methodology to mislead the deception target, Saddam Hussein, during Operations Desert Shield and Storm. By understanding what the Iraqi regime saw, which shaped how Hussein thought and influenced what the Iraqi forces did, planners achieved strategic surprise and aided in a decisive 100-hour ground campaign. The deception planners began with the end in mind, thinking about how to enable and support General Norman Schwartzkopf’s two-corps campaign and worked backwards. The planners knew that for the “left hook” to succeed, Saddam must order his Republican Guard to stay fixed, pointed toward the coast of Kuwait. This was the “Do” phase of the plan.

For Hussein—who had absolute control over the Iraqi forces—to keep his most prestigious troops in place, he needed to believe that the Coalition Forces would launch a direct assault on Kuwait. During the “Think” phase, planners crafted a deception story that capitalized on Magruder’s Principle. This deception principle relates to confirmation bias, reminding deceivers that getting the deception target to maintain a preexisting belief is easier than changing their minds. Leveraging Saddam’s pre-existing biases, the planners could plant their deception means to shape what Iraqi intelligence would “See.”

In January 1991, Coalition forces staged a massive feint toward Kuwait’s southeast coast. They broadcast fake radio traffic, massed inflatable decoys, and rehearsed amphibious landings, deliberately leaking selected signal intelligence indicators through friendly-force channels. Commanding General Norman Schwarzkopf further amplified this narrative by crafting messages to the media, boasting to news reporters about the Marines’ amphibious capabilities. This approach fed Saddam’s fear of the mighty USMC coming ashore to take Kuwait and convinced the Iraqi dictator that all four of the Iraqi Republican Guard divisions needed to remain fixed on the coast to repel an amphibious assault that never came.

Figure 2: Leaflets distributed to Iraqi soldiers on the coast to keep them fixed for an impending USMC attack from the sea. Source: USMC Museum Blog.

Under the cover of this ruse and an unprecedented hiding of the massive Coalition logistics, VII Corps and XVIII Airborne Corps pivoted and rushed westward, crossing hundreds of miles of open desert in full view of Iraqi surveillance. At dawn on February 24, 1991, the famed “Left Hook” maneuver struck through lightly defended western flank sectors, bypassed main defenses, and shattered the Republican Guard’s cohesion, collapsing Iraqi resistance within just four days. It is essential to note that Iraqi collectors identified competing observables, including increased fuel tanker convoys and bridging equipment moving north through Wadi al Batin, as well as new tent complexes west of Kuwait’s border. Yet, Iraqi decision-makers discounted these indicators as routine rotations or exercises, because they fit the entrenched expectation of a frontal southern attack. By inserting just enough false information into the Iraqi decision-maker’s mind, Coalition deception planners induced hesitation, misallocation of forces, and ultimately, operational surprise.

Deception through Obfuscation: Ukraine’s Invasion of Russia (Battle of Kursk II)

Ukraine’s invasion of Kursk in August 2024 demonstrates another example of operational surprise, in part enabled by military deception. In the summer of 2024, Russia was slowly grinding away at Ukrainian forces in the Donbas region, with some commentators assessing that the war would have to end along the existing conflict lines. Ukrainian armed forces were under pressure and suffering from low ammunition, while many Ukrainians were increasingly open to ceding territory for peace. Then, on August 6, Ukraine launched a surprise incursion against weak Russian forces into Kursk that caught the Russians completely by surprise. Ukraine wanted Russia to “do” nothing – Ukrainian forces would achieve an operational advantage if Russia did not reinforce Kursk. To maintain the status quo, Ukraine sought to convince the Russians to “think” of Ukraine as incapable of launching an offensive in 2024. So, Ukraine obfuscated what Russian forces could “see” with an electronic blitzkrieg.

Operational security, deception, and camouflage were critical to Ukraine’s ability to achieve operational surprise. Ukrainian forces concealed their intentions by limiting planning to a handful of senior officers, engaging in an active disinformation campaign that emphasized the Ukrainians’ inability to conduct offensive operations before 2025. This narrative fed into Putin’s hubris. Meanwhile, Ukraine practiced strict signature management, moving units to the operational area under the pretense of training or equipment exchanges. Notably, the Ukrainians had conducted several limited raids in the area previously, and Russian forces had long been rumored to consider this an area for their own potential offensive operations, providing additional justification for the movement of troops into the area. Finally, the Ukrainians denied Russian forces a clear understanding of what was occurring by using air defense and electronic warfare capabilities to disrupt and degrade Russian command and control and intelligence systems.

Mastering Deception for the Next Inflection

The cases of Desert Storm and Kursk illustrate the enduring power of military deception.  As information and electromagnetic domains merge with land, sea, and air, deception means must advance beyond dummy tanks and radio traffic to multi-domain illusions that target an adversary’s sensors across the battlespace. Nevertheless, by crafting deception stories that exploit an enemy’s cognitive biases while simultaneously obscuring truthful friendly intentions, warfighters can still employ military deception. However, this art form cannot be mastered in battle. Instead, the Joint Force must educate future leaders when they attend professional military institutions, while training our forces to employ deception across all domains. To thrive at this strategic inflection point, the U.S. military must treat deception not as an afterthought, but as a core warfighting capability—deliberate, psychological, and relentlessly innovative. Western militaries risk a “deception gap” unless they integrate MILDEC into doctrine, experimentation, and force design now.

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