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?