Decoy or Genius? The return to 'inflatable tanks' and the art of deception in the British Army
The
Sunday Times reported this weekend that at the RUSI Land Warfare Conference, it
was proposed that British Army should try to mask the onset of defence cuts by instead
seeking to use a variety of deception devices, such as inflatable tanks in order
to deceive potential opponents about the strength and location of UK forces. (article is HERE)
Despite
protestations that the article was meant in a ‘light-hearted’ way, it was
supported by a fairly barbed editorial that suggested that this would only work
if the Russians or other potential foes didn’t read newspapers, and that this
was a poor way to conceal the impact of defence cuts.
In
reality the proposal about using deception techniques is an excellent one,
perhaps too quickly forgotten by the armed forces. Deception is a tool that is
as old as warfare itself, intended to try and convince an opponent of your potential
course of action, only to prove them dangerously wrong as you instead do
something very different. This is also something the Russians are old hands at
(e.g. read HERE
about Russian inflatable decoys).
Deception
techniques can be employed at the tactical, operational and strategic level to
try and alter the thinking on how to respond. At the tactical level, the timely
employment of vehicles with false barrels (such as UK armoured fighting
vehicles) can hide specific capabilities on the front line. As a very young
Officer Cadet Appleby found, during an exercise off the coast of Western Scotland,
deception can be as simple as putting a simple device on display to an ‘enemy’
ship with subtle modifications to let them guess its purpose (in this case a ‘henry hoover’ pretending to be something
of intelligence value).
At the operational
level, deception can help shape thinking about responses, ranging from the use
of ‘fake cities’ in the blitz in WW2, where remote moorland near cities like
Bristol was set ablaze to convince German bombers that the fires were a major city
and not a hill in order to protect a
local target. Strategically the classic example remains Allied operations in
1944 to convince German forces that the real invasion was coming via the Pas De
Calais and not Normandy, which included false HQ’s and the steady dropping of
chaff to simulate an invasion force sailing in the wrong direction.
Deception
in the modern environment is a less commonly used tactic and has perhaps
slipped in use in part because it is seen as underhand and not terribly ‘British’
in an era when the UK tries to fight wars with legitimate backing and under the
clearly laid down conventions. The idea then that the British Army should
resort to the use of inflatable tanks and other decoys is actually a superb thought
that should immediately raise questions about whether the art of deception is
as well taught as it should be in the UK.
For starters,
inflatable tanks allow you to deceive the enemy about your strength and
location – they can be used to suggest forces massing in one sector, only to instead
allow properly concealed forces to punch a hole through enemy lines in another
one. They permit you to influence enemy thinking, for instance using arms
control agreements to imply forces are held in in country (through aerial observation
like Open Skies), only for UK troops and assets to be deployed somewhere entirely
different.
Finally
they allow you to shape the battlefield, forcing indecision into your opponents
targeting process. If a foe is unsure about the location of your forces as a
result of recce missions, this induces paralysis in the decision making stage,
possibly leading to committing resources and manpower to counter a threat that
does not exist. Even determining
that a threat is actually not real takes
a lot of intelligence analysts to review imagery and other sources to work out
if the tank in the field exists, or if the bombed out aircraft near a runway is
real, or in fact a 30 year old piece of scrap held to deceive.
The UK
used to invest a lot of time into deception tactics – for instance using ex
airframes after they could no longer fly as ‘bomb damage’ aircraft to be
shunted into position to convince foes that more damage was sustained than had actually
happened. In turn this leads to altered intelligence assessments and a potentially
nasty surprise when a force hits you at full strength.
For the
UK being able to deceive is a key part of the puzzle – not making it easy for
our foes to guess where UK forces are, what their readiness is, or how much
damage was done on the last airstrike ties up resources that could otherwise be
used to cause mayhem elsewhere.
In an
era where accurate conventional munitions are scarily expensive, deception takes
on renewed importance. If your foe can only afford 100 nice and terribly
capable anti-armour missiles, and you have 400 inflatable tank decoys in the
field, then they need to be utterly certain that they’re not about to expend a
very capable rocket blowing up a large balloon.
This
may sound flippant, but in an era when almost all nations cannot afford lots of
highly accurate munitions in great numbers, if you can deceive the opponents
targeteers about where to send the missiles, you increase your chances of survival.
A lesson hard learned by the Serbs in the Kosovo Campaign of 1999 where they
emerged having seen a lot of NATO precision munitions expended taking out balsa
wood targets with radar reflectors.
The UK
is not a stranger to the art of deception – in the Cold War from the 1960s
onwards, most of the UK’s Central Government strategy for survival post nuclear
strike was built around convincing the Soviets that the target that really
mattered was the ‘Site 3’ facility in Corsham, home to a large nuclear bunker
for 4000 people. It had at one point been exactly that, a site for Central
Government, but post Cuba it was realised that it was too vulnerable. Instead
plans within plans were laid to not send the UK Wartime Government to one or
two locations, but instead disperse them across the country to sites so
sensitive that they remain classified SECRET to this day (the PYTHON concept).
These plans essentially saw a tethered decoy exist in a plausible and credible
format in the hopes that the actual continuity of government plans (known to a
tiny handful of people) may work in the worst case scenario.
Today
the UK remains slightly uncomfortable with the concept of deception as a wartime
art. We like our wars to be highly regulated and conducted under tight legal guidelines
like the Hague Convention. The idea that we would lie or cheat to convince our
opponents that we would do something different seems increasingly remote in an
era when every decision is made under the microscope of intense scrutiny.
What is
needed is to look back at the classic WW2 deception operations like the ‘Man
Who Never Was’ and the D-Day landings, and understand that deception plays a
critical part of wartime work, but also that it something that cannot be treated
as a niche skill to be carried out by subsets of the Reserves or other strange
people.
There
is an opportunity emerging to use the increase focus on fixed operations in
Central and Eastern Europe to develop the concept of a ‘decoy Division’ using
assets like inflatable tanks, radio traffic, social media messaging and other
tools to convince an opponent that UK forces are deploying to locations nowhere
near where they actually are intended to go. Such a move requires a major
investment in the unconventional ‘dark arts’ of deception,. Propaganda, psy ops
and other niche skills to gently message an opponent about our intentions in
the hope that we can catch them unaware come the operation itself.
Some will
say that this doesn’t matter and that we should fight merely with what we have –
however we face a world where Russia seems determined to chart a course of activity
on the route to becoming considered our foe. They operate a totally different
rulebook to the UK and see no qualms in cheating, lying and exploiting the
system for their own ends. They simply do not recognise the Western system of ‘lawfare’
and playing by the rules, and instead operate to their own policy, strategy and
goals that pay little heed to the accepted norms of warfare.
The UK
faces a clear and very binary choice. It can ignore deception and pretend that
the idea of inflatable tanks, decoy radio traffic and other such messages is a silly
WW2 legacy idea intended to to convince the UK taxpayer that we have more equipment
than is actually the case and not take it further.
Or the
UK can recognise in deception operations a wonderful ability to utterly disrupt
our potential foes planning, cause problems in their targeting cycle and really
cause them to have to face difficult decisions. A properly executed deception plan
is not cheap or easy -in fact it is the very definition of ‘Joint’ drawing on
the assets from across the Services and other HMG Departments to shape how our potential
foes could react. Proper investment in planning and execution of deception
operations is something which for a low cost could cause chaos in opponents
targeting boards, and significantly reduce the threat to our own forces – if all
you have are grainy overhead images of a ‘tank’ how do you decide if its real
or inflatable? Its mere existence causes you to react in a manner that constrains
your operational abilities.
Deception
is an area that the UK can potentially cause real game changing effects in, and
help enhance NATO morale. If for example it was announced that the UK was establishing
multiple Brigade and Divisional HQ’s, but only (for example) 25% of these
commanded actual troops, with the rest being phantom divisions, how would the
Russians or others react. A properly executed deception plan could cause real chaos
and make policy making more difficult. There is a low cost, but complex opportunity
here to really deliver effect for little risk.
So, the
idea of inflatable tanks is neither new nor scary. It should not be seen as
something to gently mock, nor as a sign of defence cuts gone mad. Instead it
should be seen as an extremely sensible means of helping the Army cause disruption
and chaos to our potential foes at very little impact to ourselves – what’s not
to like about this idea?
Some 'experts', regardless if they're consultants for the MoD, acclaimed defence journalists, staffers, etc. simply don't do their homework.... Just a few minutes online, using proper keywords of course, and one can unearth some interesting monographs, studies, etc.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a112903.pdf
https://archive.org/details/LittleMasquerade
The comment about this not something we do anymore struck me as odd given in Gulf War 1 we took part in the softening up for an amphibious assault into Kuwait and had decoy units running around on land. Isn't deception part of every substantial war plan?
ReplyDeleteMultiple brigade and divisional HQs, only some of which actually command troops, sounds like the current British Army to me!
ReplyDelete"Today the UK remains slightly uncomfortable with the concept of deception as a wartime art" - I'm really not sure how true this is. I don't think there's any rules against deception in the Haugue Convention....
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