Get Practiced at the Art of Deception

Observations and lessons from recent conflicts consistently demonstrate it is nearly impossible for military forces to maneuver undetected—even when employing sophisticated camouflage and concealment techniques.¹ As a result, surviving inside an adversary’s weapons engagement zone (WEZ) has become one of the most significant challenges the Marine Corps faces.

Instead of trying to hide from adversaries’ advanced command, control, communications, computing, cyber, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and targeting (C5ISRT) capabilities, Marines should exploit them. A Concept for Stand-In Forces argues for “operationally relevant capabilities that cannot be ignored, even as their low signature, high mobility, dispersion, and use of deception make them difficult for an enemy to find and target.”²

Use of deception is crucial. Decoys can draw adversary observation and fires away from friendly units, overwhelm adversary air defenses by saturating sensors, and deny adversary decision-makers the critical information they need to make timely and effective decisions. SIF can survive in the WEZ—if they are adept at employing a variety of decoys across multiple domains in an increasingly transparent battlespace. Although the latest Marine Corps operating concepts acknowledge the need for decoys, the service has not invested enough in them.³ This has left a significant capability gap that will limit the effectiveness of a Marine littoral regiment (MLR) and the SIF concept.

Decoys and Deception

Joint Publication 3-13.4: Military Deception says decoys are false representations of something real, “an imitation in any sense of a person, object, or phenomenon that is intended to deceive enemy surveillance devices or mislead enemy evaluation.” Decoys can range from simple wooden and inflatable radar systems to more sophisticated devices that duplicate electromagnetic signatures, to algorithms in cyberspace. Employed effectively, decoys shape adversary perceptions to create tactical and operational advantages in competition and conflict. Joint Army and Marine Corps doctrine adds that “decoying is deploying a false or simulated target(s) within a target’s scene or in a position where the enemy might conclude that it has found the correct target(s).”⁴ Decoying underpins a fundamental maxim of deception theory—that it is always easier to deceive an enemy by reinforcing what he already believes to be true.⁵ Put another way, it subjects the adversary to confirmation bias.

Once the adversary believes a decoy to be a real target, it is difficult for him to change that belief. His resistance to updating his mental model is the opportunity the Marine Corps should exploit. Adversary decision-makers and even the bias coded into the algorithms that support artificial intelligence and machine-learning models in modern battle networks could all be the objects of such exploitation.⁶

Benefits to the Stand-In Forces

As part of an integrated air-defense plan, decoys could enhance the survivability of SIF by degrading the effective accuracy of an adversary’s bombs and missiles. Especially during a first missile salvo, decreasing the probability of a hit would change the attacker’s decision calculus. Factors such as magazine depletion, resupply, and the likelihood the SIF has unmasked its position and exposed itself to countertargeting would in many cases force the attacker to increase salvo size, force protection, and survivability measures and dedicate more resources to find, fix, and finish its intended target. More resources allocated in one place mean less to dedicate elsewhere.⁷ Decoys gradually impose opportunity costs, too, as the adversary expends finite resources to manage the competing operational requirements that SIF generate. And, not to be overlooked, an effective decoy display increases the survivability of the friendly system and enhances that system’s lethality by exposing the enemy delivery systems to attack.

Integrating decoying into an overall information campaign would reinforce deception. Decoying creates advantages by denying the adversary information he needs to “understand the situation, make decisions, or act in a coordinated fashion.”⁸ If the object of the deception hits decoys instead of real targets, SIF planners could reinforce the deception by communicating that the adversary struck real targets. This could fortify an adversary’s self-confidence and compound his confirmation bias.

On the other hand, revealing to the adversary he struck a decoy would negate the decoy’s effectiveness by encouraging the adversary to search harder for real targets.⁹ Every decoying effort is an information campaign and, as such, needs special attention to maximize the potential informational benefits. For example, when the Royal Air Force (RAF) bombed German cities in World War II, it was common practice for Nazi propagandists to confirm the RAF’s reported statistics. Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels noted in his journal in 1941, “We cannot deny the pompous declarations of success by the RAF, because they mostly concern dummy installations.”¹⁰

While the goal of emission control and signature management procedures typically is to reduce signatures to decrease the probability of detection, decoys paradoxically could help safeguard SIF by increasing the noise in the battlespace.¹¹ Physical, multispectral, and electromagnetic signatures detectable by adversary ISR would confuse enemy target acquisition and countertargeting systems and demand additional energy and resources to sift through the noise to find authentic signals.

During competition, decoy deployment might routinely “elicit surveillance, reconnaissance, force posturing responses” from adversaries and shape their beliefs about U.S. doctrine, capabilities, capacity, and decision-making.¹² As John Solomon suggests in a thought-provoking article on maritime deception, “Perception shaping is especially important because . . . the credibility of deception stories in combat increases if an adversary’s decision makers have been conditioned in peacetime to anticipate certain behaviors by the defender.”¹³ Decoying during competition is particularly important when training with foreign military partners. For example, employing mobile Naval Strike Missile decoys during bilateral training exercises with the Philippine armed forces could shape the adversary’s decision-making calculus about lethal capacity and have an added deterrent effect.

Organization and Doctrine

The Marine Corps should bring decoying and deception to the forefront of its force modernization efforts through three lines of effort—doctrine, organization, and materiel.¹⁴

The service should create a Marine Corps war-fighting publication about decoying that synthesizes various theoretical elements of deception and historical use cases of decoying into practical employment principles. This would be a handbook for practitioners and a point of departure for early matériel development efforts. The service also should codify decoying in its training standards by adding additional tasks in training and readiness manuals. Adding such training will ensure decoying is institutionalized in the lowest-level units while generating the requisite experience to provide meaningful feedback to the matériel development process.

Next, the Marine Corps should establish within each MLR a multidomain decoy company (MDDC) commanded by a major. Each would comprise a headquarters platoon and three line platoons—an electromagnetic decoys (EMD) platoon, a dummy platoon, and a test-and-evaluation (T&E) platoon. In addition, the company would possess a decoy coordination cell capable of planning, directing, and synchronizing decoy operations within the fires-and-effects coordination cell and the intelligence collection plan. A robust collection and assessment plan must accompany each decoying effort to determine if the deception target has identified the decoys or if friendly actions have compromised the plan’s integrity.

The company commander would be the principal adviser for deception operations to the regimental commander. The headquarters platoon would supervise the manning, training, and equipping of the MDDC.

The EMD platoon would employ decoys that simulate electromagnetic signatures ranging from division-level command-and-control nodes to rifle squads—a single Marine with a pocket-size emitter might accomplish the latter.¹⁵ The platoon should be trained and equipped for a variety of insertion methods, such as air delivery and covert emplacement. The EMD platoon also should be able to measure electromagnetic signatures.

The dummy platoon would employ physical decoys that replicate MLR capabilities. Camouflage and concealment practices alone may be insufficient to protect real systems, but they are an essential component of an overall decoying plan. Some platoon members would be experts in advanced multispectral paints and materials that could hide real MLR assets. These Marines are the artists of the MDDC. They need to be creative, imaginative, and cunning. Others must be able to replicate the physical signatures of high-value assets such as the Remotely Operated Ground Unit for Expeditionary (ROGUE) Fires system to present adversary sensors with a false picture of the genuine maritime strike platforms.

An MDDC cannot wait for new technologies to trickle down through the acquisition system. The T&E platoon would be the primary entry point for new decoying methods, materials, and operating concepts, as well as the primary interface with service and industry science and technology efforts. Because decoying must rapidly adapt to changing environments and adversary actions, the MDDC must be able to transition new technology and tactics, techniques, and procedures into action.

Matériel

To obtain the best decoys, the Marine Corps must articulate requirements in the matériel development and acquisition process. Each MLR should submit urgent universal needs statements (UNSs) for physical and EMS decoys. A UNS is the shortest path to get decoys into the hands of line and training units while the operational requirements are refined and formal acquisition programs initiated.

Quick action would energize commercial vendors to begin designing new or modifying existing decoys to fit the needs of the Marine Corps. The service should require that all relevant acquisition programs have decoys written into the capabilities development document with associated key performance parameters and minimum development standards. This would require the service to update acquisition policies to allocate a percentage of each program’s funding to decoy development.

Whether in competition or armed conflict, the Marine Corps will find it ever more difficult to hide high-value assets from adversary observation and precision-strike capabilities. Marines must therefore confound adversaries, enticing and inducing them to act in ways that create opportunities stand-in forces can exploit. The merits of decoying are clear—it confuses adversary targeting, dilutes missile salvos, and exposes adversary reconnaissance elements. These are all critical requirements for stand-in forces to fight and win inside the weapons engagement zone.