The best strategist is not the one who knows he must deceive the enemy but the one who knows how to do it. Polish author Stanislaw Lem (1921 – 2006)
All war, Sun Tzu once observed, is based upon deception. And in keeping with Lem’s pronouncement, he knew how to do it:
The task of a military operation is to accord deceptively with the intentions of the enemy. The Art of War, Chapter 11 (Cleary trans)
Like so much of Eastern philosophy, this bears deep thought, For one thing, what do we mean by “deception”? Is it primarily camouflage, disguising ourselves so that the opponent does not recognize us? Feinting in one direction while we attack in another? Publicly making misleading statements about our intentions? All of these are deceptive, of course, but they all focus on what we’re doing, what our intentions are. Sun Tzu, however, talks about the intentions of the enemy. John Boyd’s definition captures this distinction:
An impression of events as they are not. Patterns, 115
Deception: Merely a Prerequisite for Surprise?
As Boyd explained it, to deceive an opponent, you must create a view of the world in his mind — his orientation — that is logical, compelling, and validated by observation, but which is wrong. The enemy will intend to act on this impression, allowing you to, for example, trap or ambush him or attack in an unexpected, direction. The key is knowing what his impressions, and thus his intentions, are.
How do we know “the intentions of the enemy”? One way is through your knowledge of the opponent, your fingerspitzengefuhl of how they act in various situations.
If I was him, what would I most want me to do? Easy, I thought. So I did it. K. J. Parker, Savages, Kindle Ed, Loc 619.
A new approach
But there is another, more powerful and more reliable way of knowing opponents’ intentions: You be the one who put them there.
His primary target is the mind of the opposing commander … Sun Tzu realized that an indispensable preliminary to battle was to attack the mind of the enemy. Samuel B. Griffith, in his introduction to The Art of War.
In other words, the blokes and boffins on His Majesty’s Service had tailored their program of deception to the peculiar tastes of their famous adversary. Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson on (successful) British attempts to shape Rommel’s impressions in 1941.
The idea is more powerful than just setting up the opponent for surprise. You can use deception to control the intentions, and thus the actions, of your opponents:
You are the general. The enemy are soldiers under your command. Miyamoto Musashi, Book of 5 Rings (1645) trans Brown, et al., 1982.
Think Stork taking over the band in Animal House. Once you achieve this degree of mastery over the opponent, there is hardly any limit to the bad mental and moral conditions you can inflict, including ambiguity, hesitation, and destruction of the opponent’s cohesion.
Bottom Line
Most of my readers will be familiar with these effects on the mental capabilities of the opposing side. So, here’s my main point. When we talk about creating impressions in other peoples’ minds, we’re talking mind control, or as it is often called, mentalism. There are people who do this for a living.
It seems reasonable to see if we can borrow some concepts from them.
Watch the this short YouTube video:
Now, watch it again, and this time pay close attention to their explanation of why it works: “We’re going to give the audience a story they can tell themselves …” where part of that story is the intention: “You’re telling yourself that at no time will you allow your attention …” Once they get to this point,
Penn and Teller accord deceptively with that intention. It’s important to note that Penn and Teller make a distinction between the deceptive actions we carry out and true deception, which is in the mind of the target, “That doesn’t fool anyone …”
I’ve put a few more observations on their act in the Notes to my presentation The Lost Arts of Leadership, and you can download both from our Articles page. Please do.
Here’s a more complex example involving not only the target but creating a team to exploit the target’s intention. It is one of the amazing and informative videos on the YouTube channel of the modern British mentalist, Derren Brown. Pay close attention to the first half, “The Gallery.” It’s about an hour long, but in addition to being extremely entertaining, it illustrates the idea of what Penn and Teller call a “curating of attention,” that is, nurturing a story, an intention, in your subject’s mind, and then exploiting it.
If strategy is deception, and deception is mind control, then strategy is mind control.
According to the Wikipedia page on the principles of war, none of them include deception. It’s sometimes mentioned as an enabler for surprise, but as I’ve tried to show, it can be far more than that. When I establish my War College, developing fingerspitzengefuehl for deception would be the schwerpunkt. It would be taught by people who actually know how to do it.