The Utility of Military Deception and Information Operations in Modern Warfare

Introduction

Sun Tzu believed in the importance of the information environment and recognized that the quickest way to achieve military victory was to attack only when the adversary was confused, disoriented, and weakened. While the revolution in military affairs offered promises of a transparent battlefield, modern conflicts such as the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War and the ongoing Russo-Ukraine War prove that Sun Tzu’s work remains as relevant today as it was in ancient China. Advances in technology over the last twenty years have led to unforeseen changes in the modern battlespace. Urbanization trends and social media have changed the relationship between combatants and non-combatants. Modern electronic warfare, long-range missiles, and unmanned systems have been integrated into cohesive sensor-to-shooter systems known as kill webs. While practitioners have seen kill webs and drones leveraged in Nagorno-Karabakh and Ukraine, these modern conflicts also indicate an increased importance for information warfare. Modern technologies have made skills such as military deception, public affairs, civil-military engagement, and cyber activities necessary to outpace enemy decision-making cycles, protect friendly forces, and achieve political goals of conflict within a civil component.

Understanding the Information Environment

The information environment (IE) is a key component of the military’s operational environment (OE). An OE is best described as the aggregate of all conditions bearing on a military commander. The IE comprises all aspects of human attitudes, behaviors, and perceptions, and is a critical component of conflict. Successful operations in the information environment can neutralize an enemy’s will and capabilities to fight, provide offramps for conflict resolution, deceive enemy decision-makers to create surprise, and deny an enemy freedom of maneuver in cyberspace and across the electromagnetic spectrum (EMS)—the spectrum of radio activity encompassing radio, x-ray, and gamma wavelengths. The Russo-Ukrainian War and Second Nagorno-Karabakh War have provided key insights into how modern technologies and human behaviors have changed the IE’s relationship with war.

These two modern conflicts have varied in intensity, duration, and impact on civilian populations; however, both have leveraged military deception and non-traditional media to engage with civil populations, target enemy forces, and control narratives to varying degrees of success. One of the major takeaways from the Nagorno-Karabakh and Russo-Ukrainian Wars is that psychological warfare and information operations have become key to influencing foreign audiences and creating convergence windows for modern offensive weapons. In modern conflict, echelons above brigade are increasingly relying on creating windows of time to employ multiple systems across land, sea, air, space, and cyber domains to exploit enemy weaknesses. Many of these convergence capabilities rely on “deep fires,” which are long-range kinetic and non-kinetic effects delivered into an environment that can enable movement and maneuver. Both conflicts have also shown that operations in the information environment offer creative options enabling commanders to converge multidomain effects.

Military Deception and Psychological Warfare

Modern technologies have rendered military deception a vital characteristic of war. Long-range artillery, loitering munitions, and unmanned aerial systems have rendered large defensive positions more vulnerable than in previous eras of warfare. After the First Nagorno-Karabakh War, Armenia established defensive lines known as the Bagramyan and Ohanyan Lines. Armenian military officials felt confident in the lines’ protective characteristics and did not seek to camouflage or engage in deception to protect the defensive positions or capabilities around Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan identified Armenian overconfidence and spent years before the 2020 war crafting detailed plans to overcome a linear, well-fortified defense. These plans were informed by real-time intelligence due to the proliferation of modern unmanned vehicles and satellites. Azerbaijan, assisted by Turkish planners, recognized the need to create an unfair fight during pre-conflict military planning. Modern technologies, such as integrated air defense systems, render linear defenses like Armenia’s costly to assault. Long-range fires and drones make operations in depth more lethal than traditional linear maneuvers. During the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, Azerbaijan assessed that military deception provided the most feasible option to disrupt Armenia’s defense in depth. Azerbaijan remotely launched a fleet of WWII-era planes, loaded with explosives, at radar altitude into Armenian airspace. When Armenia mistook those aircraft for Azerbaijan warplanes, their air defense network engaged the decoys. The Azerbaijani military, now aware of Armenian air defense locations, destroyed Armenian integrated systems. This tactical victory, however, had operational-level effects. Due to destroyed Armenian air defense, Azerbaijan had a window of opportunity to employ modern, deep fires to target critical computer, signal, and communications systems. Azerbaijani armored infantry exploited defensive gaps while deep-fire munitions degraded Armenian command, control, and intelligence systems.

Azerbaijan’s deception exploited Armenia’s trust in modern integrated air defense networks and the speed of battle. Integrated command, control, computing, communications, cyber, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and targeting (C5ISRT) systems—a defense concept for vertically integrated sensor-to-shooter systems—have increased situational awareness. Hypersonic weapons, UAV swarms, and deep fire munitions have increased the depth of the battlefield, as commanders now must observe and affect larger swaths of land in the same amount of time. These characteristics have rapidly increased battlefield tempo. Commanders rely on the data provided by modern C5ISRT to make quick decisions over increasingly large areas; this provides opportunities for deception operations. Deception planners can leverage tempo and data overload against adversary commanders, deceiving enemy staffs through ruses hidden in data. Azerbaijan’s ruse was effective because it exploited the fast-paced decision-making cycle required in modern conflict, forcing commanders to make decisions based on false information.

In 2022, Ukrainian forces engaged in an operational-level deception to retake the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. Ukrainian forces began to overtly mass combat power in southern Ukraine through July and August 2022, seeking to reinforce a Russian perception that Ukraine would pursue a spring attack in Kherson. Believability is a critical part of deception and information operations; Ukrainian military planners assessed that Russian Forces would likely believe the Ukrainian posturing for an offensive into the region due to Kherson’s value to both sides. Ukrainian President Zelensky aided this deception by engaging in targeted strategic communications. In August 2022, Zelensky issued statements regarding an upcoming southern offensive beginning in late August. Ukrainian leaders discussed attacks or activities in the Kherson area no fewer than eight times in the preceding weeks, which were combined with overt troop movements and missile attacks on infrastructure around Kherson. Ukraine recognized that Russian satellites and unmanned reconnaissance systems would easily identify these movements, reinforcing the deception objective in Russian decision-making processes. Russian leaders were saturated with data points regarding a Kherson offensive from consistent reconnaissance and open-source research, and in late August, relocated forces from the northern front to strengthen Kherson defenses. In September 2022, Ukraine launched the decisive offensive across the front, concentrating forces on Kharkiv. Ukrainian forces exploited light Russian defenses in Kharkiv to quickly capture the city, routing the Russian defenders. Additionally, Ukrainians successfully took advantage of Russian defensive chaos to capture Kherson. This deception operation boosted Ukrainian morale at a critical juncture in the conflict and resulted in significant territorial gains.

Both deception operations were successful at a tactical level due to three major components. First, the deceiving force exploited an adversary’s reliance on modern technology. Armenia revealed its integrated air defense network due to their trust in the radar systems’ conclusions. Ukraine executed routine troop movements and missile attacks during its ruse offensive, knowing that Russia would identify those activities through drone imagery, satellites, and electronic warfare activities. Azerbaijan and Ukraine recognized the utility and vulnerabilities of modern surveillance and cyber systems in deceiving an adversary. Ukraine and Azerbaijan leveraged enemy targeting and reconnaissance systems in their deceptions, as Russian and Armenian decision makers developed faulty conclusions from “data-driven” sources. Decoys and electronic deception will be highly successful in this environment; however, military planners must integrate deception planning early into operations cycles.

Second, modern media penetration remains a critical aspect of deception. Ukrainian leaders leveraged various media sources to reinforce the Russian belief in a Kherson offensive. Media changes have also aided deception planners. Social media provides opportunities for individual targeting and may be best used in conjunction with traditional televised media, which is generally viewed as a more trustworthy source of information. In Ukraine, press statements and articles were organized alongside real materiel movements, highlighting the clear relationship between public affairs, social media, and physical deception.

The third component is the relationship between deception and modern offensive technologies. The modern battlefield has more “depth” than ever before. Due to technologies such as cyber, UAVs, and long-range weapons, the battlefield has become non-linear. Commanders can synchronize missile launches with cyber operations to affect hundreds of kilometers of battlespace. Russians and Ukrainians have leveraged long-range fires to penetrate enemy territory, making rear and security areas seem more like the close combat zones of a corps fight. Azerbaijan and Ukraine both displayed that deception has value in creating convergence windows for the deep fires provided through modern warfighting technology.

Information Operations and Strategic Communications

Humans, both combatants and noncombatants, have greater access to information than ever before. Cell phones, social media, and satellite-based internet services such as Starlink promise an endless supply of cameras, receivers, and microphones. Content creation and dissemination play a major role in shaping narratives and achieving the conflict’s political goals. The US learned this lesson during the Vietnam conflict, where combat reporting led to unfavorable domestic views of the conflict. Social media and media penetration have amplified this phenomenon in modern conflict. In Ukraine, citizens utilize social media to receive news, report battlefield movements, and provide real-time updates on combat activities, all to varying degrees of accuracy. The speed of social media has forced traditional media outlets to compete for viewership; the rush to break news has led some media outlets to publish stories with limited vetting. The interaction between social media and traditional media is proving to be a dangerous area for spreading disinformation. Russia is adept at disinformation campaigns on social media, which poses a risk to Ukrainian warfighting efforts as media forums compete for readership and interact with one another with varying degrees of trust. Additionally, this open society complicates the Ukrainian Government’s ability to control narratives, affecting everything from domestic confidence in government to the armed forces’ regeneration capacities.

In Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan organized units of drone pilots dedicated to filming the battlespace. Drones provided high-quality, real-time video for Azerbaijani media production teams. More importantly, Azerbaijani information operations teams developed strong and clear narratives designed to increase support for the war domestically, demoralize Armenian troops, and emphasize Azerbaijani victories to foreign actors. Drone footage was provided to news media outlets, layering modern technologies with more traditional information controls to increase the speed and permeation of information operations. Azerbaijan recognized the utility of modern media for psychological warfare and developed a force structure centered on that function.

In contrast, Armenia struggled to recognize modern media’s opportunities and vulnerabilities. During an Azerbaijani assault on the city of Shusha, Armenian officials denied Azerbaijani gains in Shusha despite clear evidence of increasing Azerbaijani control. These reports were easily refuted and demoralized Armenian defenders, who ultimately fled the city. The victory in Shusha became a strategically decisive point for Azerbaijan; shortly after the fall of Shusha, Armenia sued for peace, ceding Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan. Russia has also experienced this information failure in Ukraine. Before initiating the war in Ukraine in 2022, US officials released clear intelligence indicating that the Russian Army would engage in a deception operation to enter Ukraine. The clear publicization of Russia’s strategy in the media undercut Russian narrative control. Individuals all over the world came to conclusions about Russian intentions in Ukraine without significant government intervention due to modern media and information saturation. Global consensus on Russia’s aggression led to the country’s isolation from critical banking, trade, and political institutions. The media’s penetration of the human dimension provides opportunities for both deception and public affairs; the US’s experiences in Vietnam will only be magnified in intensity through citizen journalism and social media, creating potentially unforeseen strategic impacts on militaries.

Conclusion

Technology continues to change how humans interact, govern, organize, and fight. The Second Nagorno-Karabakh War and the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War have made clear that future battlefields will be layered with sensors, information systems, and computers. In operations centers, Commanders seeking rapid decision-making look to data for solutions. In this data-centric environment, information operations and military deception shoulder new importance in misdirecting, confusing, and altering adversarial behavior. Azerbaijan and Ukraine both demonstrated that traditional staff functions—preparation, strategic use of deception, and deliberate task organizations—remain key to achieving desired effects on the battlefield.  Modern military technologies will likely increasingly rely on information and deception operations to create convergence windows for modern offensive weapons. Nagorno-Karabakh and Ukraine show the conflict observer that psychological and information warfare provide a cost-effective method to leverage data against itself and create opportunities without expensive deep fire weapons.

There are several potential lessons that practitioners and policymakers can take from an analysis of these conflicts. The US Army’s information warfare capabilities, for example, will take on increasing importance in supporting division, corps, and theater commanders throughout the continuum of conflict. The US Army may consider expediting the creation of theater information warfare detachments and better integrating unmanned systems, public affairs, civil affairs, cyber, and psychological operations capabilities across Army formations. Military deception may not be an afterthought, but a necessary phase of decisive operations. The US Military may also benefit from creating a better standard for IO professionals. Between Air Force Information Operations (IO), US Marine Corps Influence Activities (IA), US Navy Information Warfare, and US Army Information Operations (IO) and Psychological Operations (PO), the US military’s information professionals are fragmented. Some, such as Active-Duty Army PO, are considered special operations forces. Others, including Army IO, reserve PO, and Air Force IO, are considered conventional forces or special operations enabling functions. Standardizing information-related military career fields may strengthen the Services’ ability to field capable forces and enhance interoperability for the joint force.

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