Why a Think Tank Report on Deception Misses the Point—And Makes States More Vulnerable

I was excited to watch the presentation yesterday of a recent New America report on “The Future of Deception in War“. It seemed throughout the talk, however, that a certain perspective (the “operator”, the quiet professional) was missing. I even asked what the presenters thought about Soviet use of disinformation that was so excessive it hurt the Soviets.

They didn’t answer the question, but I asked because cultural corruption is a serious problem, like accounting for radiation when dealing with nuclear weapons. When deception is unregulated and institutionalized, it dangerously corrodes internal culture. Soviet officers learned that career advancement came through convincing lies rather than operational competence. This created military leadership that was excellent at bureaucratic maneuvering but terrible at actual warfare, as evidenced in Afghanistan and later Chechnya. Worse, their over-compartmentalization meant different parts of their centralized government couldn’t coordinate—creating the opposite of effective deception.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen academic approaches miss the operational realities of information warfare. As I wrote in 2019 about the CIA’s origins, effective information operations have always required understanding that “America cannot afford to resume its prewar indifference” to the dangerous handling of deception.

What’s invisible, cumulative, and potentially catastrophic if not carefully managed by experts with hands on experience? Deception.

Then I read the report and, with much disappointment, found that it exemplifies everything wrong with how military institutions approach deception. Like French generals building elaborate fortifications while German tanks rolled through the Ardennes, the analysis comes through as theoretical frameworks for warfare that no longer exists.

As much as Mr. Singer loves to pull historical references, even citing the Bible and Mossad in the same breath, he seems to have completely missed Toffler, let alone Heraclitus: the river he wants to paint us a picture of was already gone the moment he took out his brush.

The report’s fundamental flaw isn’t in its details—it’s in treating deception as a problem that can be solved through systematic analysis rather than understood through practice. This is dangerous because it creates the illusion of preparation while actually making us more vulnerable.

Academia is a Hallucination

The authors approach deception like engineers design bridges: detailed planning, formal integration processes, measurable outcomes, systematic rollout procedures. They propose “dedicated doctrine,” “standardized approaches,” and “strategic deception staffs.” This is waterfall methodology applied to a domain that requires agile thinking.

Real deception practitioners—poker players, con artists, intelligence officers who’ve operated in denied areas—know something the report authors don’t: deception dies the moment you systematize it.

Every successful military deception in history shared common characteristics the report ignores:

• They were improvisational responses to immediate opportunities
• They exploited enemy assumptions rather than following friendly doctrine
• They succeeded because they violated expectations, including their own side’s expectations
• They were abandoned the moment they stopped working

Consider four deceptions separated by nuance yet united by genius: the Haversack Ruse at Beersheba (1917), Ethiopia Mission 101 (1940), Operation Bertram (1942) and Operation Mincemeat (1943). Each succeeded through what I warned over a decade ago is Big Data vulnerability to “seed set theory” – an unshakeable core of truth, dropped by a relative influencer, spreading with improvised lies around it.

The haversack was covered in real (horse) blood with convincing photos, military maps and orders. Mission 101 took a proven WWI artillery fuse design and used 20,000 irregular African troops with a bottle of the finest whiskey to rout 300,000 heavily armed and armored fascists. Mincemeat was an actual corpse with meticulously authentic personal effects.

None of these could have emerged from systematic planning processes. Each required someone to intuitively grasp what truth would be most convincing to a particular enemy in a unique moment, then place the right seed with human creativity into the right soil, that no doctrine could capture.

It’s no coincidence that Orde Wingate, founder of Commando doctrine, considered Laurence of Arabia a flamboyant self-important bureaucrat. One of them delivered an operations guideline that we use to this day around the world and in every conflict, the other created Saudi Arabia.

The Wealthy Bureaucrat Trap

The report’s emphasis on “integrating deception planning into normal tactical planning processes” reveals profound misunderstanding. You cannot bureaucratize deception any more than you can bureaucratize jazz improvisation. The qualities that make effective military officers—following doctrine, systematic thinking, institutional loyalty—are precisely opposite to the qualities that make effective deceivers.

Consider the report’s proposed “principles for military deception”:

• “Ensure approaches are credible, verifiable, executable, and measurable”
• “Make security a priority” with “strictest need-to-know criteria”
• “Integrate planning and control”

This is exactly how NOT to do deception. Real deception is:

• Incredible until it suddenly makes perfect sense
• Unverifiable by design
• Unmeasurable in traditional metrics
• Shared widely enough to seem authentic
• Chaotic and loosely coordinated

Tech Silver Bullets are for Mythological Enemies

The report’s fascination with AI-powered deception systems reveals another blind spot. Complex technological solutions create single points of catastrophic failure. When your sophisticated deepfake system gets compromised, your entire deception capability dies. When your simple human lies get exposed, you adapt and try different simple human lies.

Historical successful deceptions—from D-Day’s Operation Fortitude to Midway’s intelligence breakthrough—succeeded through human insight, not technological sophistication. They worked because someone understood their enemy’s psychology well enough to feed them convincing lies.

The Meta-Deception Problem

Perhaps worth noting also is how the authors seem unaware, or make no mention of the risk, that they might be targets of deception themselves. They cite Ukrainian and Russian examples without consideration and caveat that some of those “successful” deceptions might actually be deceptions aimed at Western analysts like them.

Publishing detailed sharp analysis of deception techniques demonstrates the authors don’t fully appreciate their messy and fuzzy subject. Real practitioners know that explaining your methods kills them. This report essentially advocates for the kind of capabilities that its own existence undermines. Think about that for a minute.

Alternative Agility

What would effective military deception actually look like? Take lessons from domains that really understand deception:

• Stay Always Hot: Maintain multiple small deception operations continuously rather than launching elaborate schemes. Like DevOps systems, deception should be running constantly, not activated for special occasions.
• Fail Fast: Better to have small lies exposed quickly than catastrophic ones discovered later. Build feedback loops that tell you immediately when deceptions stop working.
• Test in Production: You cannot really test deception except against actual adversaries. Wargames and simulations create false confidence.
• Embrace Uncertainty: The goal isn’t perfect deception—it’s maintaining operational effectiveness while operating in environments where truth and falsehood become indistinguishable.
• Microservices Over Monoliths: Distributed, loosely-coupled deception efforts are more resilient than grand unified schemes that fail catastrophically.

Tea Leaves from Ukraine

The report celebrates Ukraine’s “rapid adaptation cycles” in deception, but misses the deeper lesson. Ukrainian success comes not from sophisticated planning but from cultural comfort with improvisation and institutional tolerance for failure.

Some of the best jazz and rock clubs of the Cold War were in musty basements of Prague, fundamentally undermining faith in Soviet controls. West Berlin’s military occupation during the Cold War removed all curfews just to force the kinds of “bebop” freedom of thought believed to destroy Soviet narratives.

Ukrainian tank commanders don’t follow deception doctrine—they lie constantly, creatively, and without asking permission. When lies stop working, they try different lies. This isn’t systematizable because it depends on human judgment operating faster than institutional processes.

Important Strategic Warning

China and Russia aren’t beating us at deception because they have better doctrine or technology. They’re succeeding because their institutions are culturally comfortable with dishonesty and operationally comfortable with uncertainty.

Western military institutions trying to compete through systematic approaches to deception are like French generals in 1940—building elaborate defenses against the last war while their enemies drive around them.

Country Boy Cow Path Techniques

Instead of trying to bureaucratize deception, military institutions should focus on what actually matters:

• Cultural Adaptation: Create institutional tolerance for failure, improvisation, and calculated dishonesty. This requires changing personnel systems that punish risk-taking.
• Human Networks: Invest in education of people to curiously understand foreign cultures well enough to craft believable lies, not technologies that automate deception.
• Rapid Feedback Systems: Build capabilities that tell you immediately when your deceptions are working or failing, not elaborate planning systems.
• Operational Security Through Simplicity: Use simple, hard-to-detect deceptions rather than sophisticated, fragile technological solutions.
• Embrace the Unknown: Accept that effective deception cannot be measured, systematized, or fully controlled. This is a feature, not a bug.

A Newer America

The New America report represents the militarization of management consulting—sophisticated-sounding solutions that miss fundamental realities. By treating deception as an engineering problem rather than a human art, it creates dangerous overconfidence while actually making us more vulnerable.

Real military advantage comes not from better deception doctrine but from institutional agility that lets you operate effectively when everyone is lying to everyone else—including themselves.

The authors end with: “We should not deceive ourselves into thinking that change is not needed.” They’re right about change being needed. They’re wrong about what kind of change.

Instead of building a Maginot Line of deception doctrine (the report’s recommendations are dangerously counterproductive), we need the institutional equivalent of Orde Wingate’s Chindits: fast, flexible, and comfortable with uncertainty. Because in a world where everyone can deceive, the advantage goes to whoever can adapt fastest when their lies inevitably fail.

In 1969 “Strategem: Deception and Surprise in War” by Barton Whaley, at the Center for International Studies MIT, offered this historical insight on page 17:

Disinformation was originally a World War I term, having been first applied to the Disinformation Service of the German General Staff. The Russian Bolshevik Cheka adopted the term (as dezinformatsiya) and the technique in the early 1920’s, and it has been in use by the Soviet state security (OGPU, NKVD, KGB, etc.) and military intelligence (GRU) services ever since. Current Soviet Russian intelligence parlance uses this term in a sense so broad that U.S. Government translators sometimes translate it as “deception,” although the Russians are careful to distinguish it from physical camouflage (maskirovka). The term, as borrowed from the Russian, is now also common in U.S. intelligence parlance, but is used in a less comprehensive sense.

Meanwhile… Merriam-Webster says this:

false information deliberately and often covertly spread (as by the planting of rumors) in order to influence public opinion or obscure the truth. […]

Etymology: dis- + information, after Russian dezinformácija

Note: Russian dezinformácija and the adjective derivative dezinformaciónnyj can be found in Soviet military science journals published during the 1930’s. The Malaja Sovetskaja Ènciklopedija (1930-38) defines the word as “information known to be false that is surreptitiously passed to an enemy” (“dezinformacija, t.e., zavedomo lživaja informacija podkidyvaemaja protivniku”; vol. 3, p. 585). The verb dezinformírovat’ “to knowingly misinform” is attested earlier, no later than 1925, and may have been the basis for the noun. In more recent decades claims have been made about the origin of the word that are dubious and cannot be substantiated. […] First Known Use: 1939, in the meaning defined above

And, as an example of why that matters, Cyber Defense Review (quoting Merriam-Webster) then says this:

The word disinformation did not appear in English dictionaries until the 1980s. Its origins, however, can be traced back as early as the 1920s when Russia began using the word in connection with a special disinformation office whose purpose was to disseminate “false information with the intention to deceive public opinion.”

“The word disinformation did not appear in English dictionaries until the 1980s…“?

Hold that thought. With this dubious claim in mind, given we know that WWI Germans methods were copied by the Soviets, a most interesting version of all comes from a LSE blog post by Manchester University scholars.

Contrary to claims that the term disinformation entered English via Russian, conceived deceptively to sound like a word derived from a West European language to camouflage its Soviet origin, it had been in use in English from the turn of the twentieth century. For example, US press outlets accused their rivals of disinformation back in the 1880s and a British MP accused local authorities of using disinformation to justify their improper implementation of a parliamentary bill in 1901.

While not inventing the term ‘disinformation’, the Soviet authorities did pioneer its rather unusual usage. In 1923, the Bolshevik Party Politburo approved the establishment of the Disinformation Bureau (Dezinformburo) within the Soviet security service. The initiative, including its title, was suggested by an officer with close ties to German-speaking European Marxist revolutionaries (and this connection probably explains the Russian transliteration of the term in Russian from the German, rather than the English, spelling.)

Russians copied the Germans who copied the… British and Americans.

Or not? Could the origins of disinformation be disinformation itself?! Let’s pull this thread a bit more and see if we can find the ugly sweater it came from.

It’s plausible there was a potential knowledge transfer from German WWI intelligence practices to early Soviet operations, even if there doesn’t seem to be any formal “Disinformation Service” within the German General Staff structure (as claimed by Whaley).

German military intelligence during WWI ran under the Abteilung IIIb (formerly Sektion IIIb, established 1889, achieving departmental status June 1915). Colonel Walter Nicolai led it from 1913-1918, which is crucial to tracing origins. His comprehensive intelligence service conducted foreign espionage, counterintelligence, media censorship, and propaganda coordination, which included disinformation. The German War Press Office (Kriegspresseamt) was established in October 1915 to coordinate civilian agencies like the Military Section of the Foreign Office (established July 1916), which clearly focused on disinformation.

In the case of Germany, the press maintained a triumphalist approach, suppressing stories about the military disasters of the summer of 1918 and running uninterrupted editorials that victory was near. Throughout the war, troops who had just suffered massive losses of men and territory were dismayed to read optimistic accounts of battles unrecognizable to those that had participated in them. As the saying went, in portraying wars in the press, truth was the first casualty.

For as much as that sounds like coordinated efforts ran under the federal state, multiple German agencies worked at cross-purposes, lacking effective centralization until late in the war. Distributed and legacy structural problems limited effectiveness of information operations compared to Allied efforts (especially President Wilson’s Office of Propaganda, driven by his America First platform rooted in the KKK well-honed methods of racist disinformation).

Notably Nicolai’s own wartime diaries and correspondence, recently published after being strategically hidden in Moscow’s archives since 1945, do not seem to have the exact word desinformation.

His post-war memoir “Nachrichtendienst, Presse und Volksstimmung im Weltkrieg” (1920) also doesn’t seem to use the word when describing the propaganda run by “Aufklärung” (intelligence) and “Nachrichtendienst” (intelligence services).

I’ve written before about the “dumb as rocks” German agent networks that infiltrated America, especially San Francisco (preparedness day bombing, heavily laced by federal disinformation). The evidence is unmistakable that Wilson’s administration restarting the KKK and sympathetic to Germany in WWI, was fundamentally on the side of German espionage as a means of ruthlessly suppressing domestic American dissent. This undermines any and all claims that Wilson’s wartime propaganda and surveillance were security measures, as he established them primarily as tools of racist political control that established dangerous precedents for future administrations. Calculated use of fabricated external threats to justify real domestic repression has since become a mainstay of American government communications during conflicts.

The targeting was systematic and coordinated by groups operating clandestinely as domestic paramilitary terrorists under President Wilson’s hand. Federal prosecutors routinely argued that opposing the war equated to aiding Germany without requiring evidence of actual German connections, while Wilson himself was aligned with German objectives. The administration setup “hyphenated Americans” rhetoric to justify surveillance of non-whites and political leaders while actual German agents continued unimpeded operations through established diplomatic channels.

Wilson was using explicitly nativist rhetoric while simultaneously enabling foreign spy operations, linked to domestic terror paramilitary groups, crushing domestic opposition. His “America First” campaigns makes “hyphenated Americans” targeting (e.g. calling non-whites Asian American, Black American to emphasize being born non-white prevents America being First) even more sinister in context.

Wilson’s 1915 selective enforcement (like Trump and ICE today ignoring actual foreign spies while crushing American political opposition through paramilitary terror campaigns) provides crucial context for understanding how propaganda techniques were really developed and refined.

We can easily see how Wilson’s 1917 official government-run propaganda apparatus could directly influence the 1923 Soviet Dezinformburo through the German-speaking Marxist networks (the same ones Wilson used to terrorize America). This makes knowledge transfer much more plausible than Whaley’s phantom “Disinformation Service”, which lacks any evidence.

The entire WWI propaganda period is best understood not as developing intelligence for national defense but rather pioneering techniques for domestic political control.

• 1914-1917: German operations under Nicolai
• 1917: Wilson’s CPI established
• 1918-1923: Post-war period with German-Marxist networks
• 1923: Soviet Dezinformburo creation

The Mata Hari case is perhaps the best documented example of Nicolai’s methods, where agent H-21 was deliberately exposed to French authorities through radio messages transmitted in codes the Germans knew had been broken, a sophisticated termination operation designed to protect German intelligence methods. For what it’s worth, this is the kind of historical knowledge that gives crucial context for the 1980s CIA disinformation operation that blew up Soviet gas pipelines.

“In order to disrupt the Soviet gas supply, its hard currency earnings from the West, and the internal Russian economy, the pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines, and valves was programmed to go haywire, after a decent interval, to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to pipeline joints and welds,” [Thomas C. Reed, a former Air Force secretary who was serving in the National Security Council at the time] writes. “The result was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space,” he recalls, adding that U.S. satellites picked up the explosion. Reed said in an interview that the blast occurred in the summer of 1982. […] In January 1982, Weiss said he proposed to Casey a program to slip the Soviets technology that would work for a while, then fail. Reed said the CIA “would add ‘extra ingredients’ to the software and hardware on the KGB’s shopping list.”

The sophisticated deception operation of agent H-21 was to protect real capabilities while feeding the enemy (at home or elsewhere) information that serves strategic political purposes. From 1917 paper and radio deception to 1982 software sabotage the technology changed, and yet American operatives maintained the same fundamental principles.

Perhaps now we see the real reason English dictionaries in the 1980s would publish a claim that Soviets invented “disinformation”. This was likely yet another CIA disinformation operation itself.

During the height of the Cold War, when American intelligence agencies were perfecting the art of feeding false narratives into academic and media channels, what better way to obscure the true American origins of modern propaganda techniques than to credit them to the enemy?

The irony is sickly sweet: the CIA, having inherited and refined Wilson’s domestic control methods and Nicolai’s sophisticated deception techniques, then deployed those same methods to rewrite the historical record. By the 1980s, American intelligence had become so adept at manipulating information flows that they could plant false etymologies in authoritative reference works, ensuring that future researchers would trace “disinformation” back to Soviet Russia rather than to America’s own pioneering propaganda apparatus.

The fact that a false origin story has persisted unchallenged for decades demonstrates just how effective these techniques are—the ultimate disinformation campaign was convincing the world that America learned disinformation from the Soviets, when in reality the Soviets had learned it from techniques pioneered and perfected by German spies deployed to suppress political dissent under “America First”.

We’re not just talking about historical artifacts when we do crucial history, but at the foundations of techniques being actively deployed today. The progression from Wilson’s “America First” domestic terror campaigns through Cold War disinformation to current “America First” domestic terror campaigns shows the proper through-line that explains the true meaning of present-day disinformation.