Ukraine achieved battlefield surprise in its Kharkov counteroffensive despite fighting Russia with its satellites, aircraft, data mining, and spies. Seeing is not necessarily believing.
In ancient China, the general Sun Tzu counseled that “all warfare is based on deception.” Could that still be the case millennia later—after an industrial and then a digital revolution have left contemporary battlefields awash with intelligence sensors and digital technology that can offer commanders unprecedented levels of situational awareness? Advancement in thermal imaging can highlight targets concealed to the naked eye, while near constant real-time observation from constellations of satellites and seemingly ubiquitous unmanned vehicles can inhibit maneuver, deliver precision strikes, and provide timely indications and warning. Voluminous twitter threads and uploads of data, metadata, and even curated datasets provide a surprisingly granular understanding of the battlespace, and internet platforms like Google Maps can indicate traffic congestion along main motorways caused by an invasion. This may lead some to consider the fog of war practically dispelled, and, as a consequence, military deception a tool of a bygone, less transparent, and less sensor-laden era. But analyzing recent Ukrainian victories would correct this erroneous point of view. In early September the Ukrainian military accomplished the most major feat of arms in the Russo-Ukrainian war (thus far) with deception at its foundation. Some principles are timeless.
Do read it all.
As I've often written, including nearly a year ago in regard to Russia's massing of troops, surprise is not about hiding what you are doing but about helping your enemy accept a benign explanation for what they see you doing:
Russian military maneuvers near Ukraine are seasonal and routine. Okay. But if Russia wants to invade Ukraine (even more than it has) it could time the attack with these "seasonal" and "routine" maneuvers and movements in order to keep Ukraine and the West lulled into complacency to achieve tactical surprise. Remember, surprise attacks have warnings. But the surprised target somewhere in the chain of command had explanations other than imminent attack to explain the warnings.
Russia spent many months massing troops while denying this was anything to be worried about. This reflects my view of Russia's so-called "hybrid warfare" that I deny is anything new:
Over-analyzing Russia's deception causes the West to miss the point that "hybrid warfare" is very simple: Russia invades a country; Russia denies it has invaded a country; and the West goes along with Russian denials.
That's it. The West could have reacted very differently by simply refusing to go along with the Russian denials and acting on what we knew was going on--Russia had invaded a free (if corrupt) country.
Instead we act is if we need CSI: Donbas to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Russians are fighting inside Ukraine on the orders of Putin.
This simple Russian practice of denial of even the bleeding obvious is frustrating. But it aids the West in talking itself into positions favorable to Russia. If Russia denies any bad intent or even action despite what we can see, many in the West will eagerly argue that Russia has no bad intent or that it isn't doing anything at all, despite what working eyeballs connected to brains should indicate.
Not that I predicted the war. It made no sense to me. But Putin had a different opinion of the correlation of forces.
Nor did I predict Ukraine's Kharkov front offensive over what I still think is the more important--and visible--Kherson front. Not that I could see anything on the Kharkov front. Unless I did and discounted it.
But if I had been privy to such information I bet I would have run it through my bias in favor of the Kherson front's primacy. Perhaps I would have argued Ukrainian units "massing" are phantom formations. Or maybe they are a reserve to resist a Russian offensive on the Donbas front in reaction to the Kherson front. Or maybe I'd think they were recovering and regrouping from combat on the Donbas front. Or I could have believed they were a second-stage Kherson front force to drive on Melitopol.
But Ukraine either decided Kharkov was more important than Kherson or that it was more important to inflict a defeat on the Russians somewhere sooner. And Russian reinforcement of Kherson at the expense of Kharkov made Kharkov the more important front with that criteria.
Deception may be physically harder because of technology. But the minds that use the technology are the same old gullible meat sacks that Sun Tzu counted on.
NOTE: War updates continue here.
