will's blog

8th Mar 2010


Victory by other means

In the second century BC the legendary Chinese military thinker Sun Tzu predicated that the greatest victory was one won without actually having to fight. The enemy was to be outmanoeuvred and placed in a position where the only option was surrender.

In varying ways this concept has held good over the centuries where by using some well tested wiles of war a victory may be achieved when the enemy is demoralised and confused or simply forced to divert men and resources. There are four broad ways in which this may be achieved.

Propaganda

Propaganda comes in two forms - black and white. Black propaganda is untruths, often concealed in truth, designed to demoralise. White is the truth often in the form of news reports about the situation at home or in the front line. Propaganda may be delivered over the air or in leaflets. The Internet has become the modern mouthpiece for many groups. Names like Axis Sally, Tokyo Rose, Lord Haw Haw are familiar from World War II but propaganda is alive and well today and existed long before Dr Goebbels and the Nazis. The name actually comes from the Jesuits and their Society to Propagate Christian Knowledge.

Psychological warfare

Psychological warfare is closely allied to propaganda but is more subtle and insidious. It may sew doubt in the minds of enemy soldiers about the competence of their leaders or the justice of the conflict. Nationalism and political agitation by minority groups was used by the Germans in World War I to destabilise Imperial Russian and British ruled Ireland. In World War II at Stalingrad the Soviet forces broadcast a metronome clicking at three second intervals followed by the words “Every three seconds a German soldier dies in Stalingrad”. Psychological Operations or Psy Ops have characterised low intensity operations, sometimes as in Malaya in the 1950s with frightening effectiveness as former Communist guerrillas led the security forces back to hidden camps and watched as former comrades died in a hail of gunfire.

Camouflage and concealment

Though camouflage was often seen as a product of World War I with exotic ideas like dazzle camouflage for ships, it has an older history with the adoption of khaki or dust coloured clothing by British forces in India in the 19th Century. Along with camouflage came field craft as expounded by Lord Baden Powell in his military manual on scouting. Camouflage could be for the individual soldier or whole factories. In the latter years of World War II the Germans faced by overwhelming Allied air superiority became very skilled at camouflage.

Deception

Deception can be as simple as towing a bunch of brush to produce dust that looks like a group of vehicles on the move through to complex electronic and thermal signals. One of the most famous deception campaigns was operation Double Cross by the XX Committee an Allied intelligence team that in World War II used a variety of ploys to convince the Germans that the Allied D-Day landings in 1944 would be at the Pas de Calais not Normandy. Nearly fifty years later I was innocently involved in a deception operation in Operation Granby the first Gulf War of 1990-91. Some naval charts were deliberately left at the Coalition media centre in Riyadh in the hopes that they would be seen and this would filter through to the Iraqis and convince them to concentrate forces in Kuwait in anticipation of an amphibious. Ironically I was not “in” on the plan so as a responsible officer when I saw the roll of charts I quickly packed them away. However the plan worked and operation Desert Sabre cut through the Iraqi land defences and rolled them up against the coast.

Though war fighting is a significant part of the current ISAF counter-insurgency campaign in Afghanistan, in the end victory will be achieved by more subtle means and some of these will include some of the tactics listed above.