The 33 Strategies of War (63 page)

The false front.
This is the oldest form of military deception. It originally involved making the enemy believe that one was weaker than in fact was the case. A leader would feign a retreat, say, baiting a trap for the enemy to rush into, luring it into an ambush. This was a favorite tactic of Sun-tzu's. The
appearance
of weakness often brings out people's aggressive side, making them drop strategy and prudence for an emotional and violent attack. When Napoleon found himself outnumbered and in a vulnerable strategic position before the Battle of Austerlitz, he deliberately showed signs of being panicked, indecisive, and scared. The enemy armies abandoned their strong position to attack him and rushed into a trap. It was his greatest victory.

And the Lord said to Joshua, "Do not fear or be dismayed; take all the fighting men with you, and arise, go up to Ai; see, I have given into your hand the king of Ai, and his people, his city, and his land; and you shall do to Ai and its king as you did to Jericho and its king; only its spoil and its cattle you shall take as booty for yourselves; lay an ambush against the city, behind it."...So Joshua arose, and all the fighting men, to go up to Ai; and Joshua chose thirty thousand mighty men of valor, and sent them forth by night. And he commanded them, "Behold, you shall lie in ambush against the city, behind it; do not go very far from the city, but hold yourselves all in readiness; and I, and all the people who are with me, will approach the city. And when they come out against us, as before, we shall flee before them; and they will come out after us, till we have drawn them away from the city; for they will say, 'They are fleeing from us, as before.' So we will flee from them; then you shall rise up from the ambush, and seize the city; for the Lord your God will give it into your hand. And when you have taken the city, you shall set the city on fire, doing as the Lord has bidden; see, I have commanded you."......And when the king of Ai saw this, he and all his people, the men of the city, made haste and went out early to the descent toward the Arabah to meet Israel in battle; but he did not know that there was an ambush against him behind the city. And Joshua and all Israel made a pretense of being beaten before them, and fled in the direction of the wilderness. So all the people who were in the city were called together to pursue them, and as they pursued Joshua they were drawn away from the city. There was not a man left in Ai or Bethel, who did not go out after Israel; they left the city open, and pursued Israel.... And the ambush rose quickly out of their place, and...they ran and entered the city and took it; and they made haste to set the city on fire. So when the men of Ai looked back, behold, the smoke of the city went up to heaven; and they had no power to flee this way or that, for the people that fled to the wilderness turned back upon the pursuers. And when Joshua and all Israel saw that the ambush had taken the city, and that the smoke of the city went up, then they turned back and smote the men of Ai.

J
OSHUA
8: 1-9, 14-23

Controlling the front you present to the world is the most critical deceptive skill. People respond most directly to what they see, to what is most visible to their eyes. If you seem clever--if you seem deceptive--their guard will be up and it will be impossible to mislead them. Instead you need to present a front that does the opposite--disarms suspicions. The best front here is weakness, which will make the other side feel superior to you, so that they either ignore you (and being ignored is very valuable at times) or are baited into an aggressive action at the wrong moment. Once it is too late, once they are committed, they can find out the hard way that you are not so weak after all.

In the battles of daily life, making people think they are better than you are--smarter, stronger, more competent--is often wise. It gives you breathing space to lay your plans, to manipulate. In a variation on this strategy, the front of virtue, honesty, and uprightness is often the perfect cover in a political world. These qualities may not seem weak but serve the same function: they disarm people's suspicions. In that situation, though, it is important not to get caught doing something underhanded. Appearing as a hypocrite will set you far back in the deception game.

In general, as strategists advocated in the days of ancient China, you should present a face to the world that promises the opposite of what you are actually planning. If you are getting ready to attack, seem unprepared for a fight or too comfortable and relaxed to be plotting war. Appear calm and friendly. Doing this will help you gain control over your appearance and sharpen your ability to keep your opponents in the dark.

The decoy attack.
This is another ruse dating back to ancient times, and it remains perhaps the military's most common deceptive ploy. It began as a solution to a problem: if the enemy knew you were going to attack point A, they would put all their defenses there and make your job too difficult. But to deceive them on that score was not easy: even if before battle you were able to disguise your intentions and fool them out of concentrating their forces at point A, the minute they actually saw your army headed there, they would rush to its defense. The only answer was to march your army toward point B or, better, to send part of your army in that direction while holding troops in reserve for your real objective. The enemy would now have to move some or all of its army to defend point B. Do the same with points C and D and the enemy would have to disperse all over the map.

The key to this tactic is that instead of relying on words or rumors or planted information, the army really moves. It makes a concrete action. The enemy forces cannot afford to guess whether a deception is in the works: if they guess wrong, the consequences are disastrous. They have to move to cover point B, no matter what. It is in any case almost impossible to doubt the reality of actual troop movements, with all the time and energy those involve. So the decoy attack keeps the enemy dispersed and ignorant of your intentions--the ultimate dream of any general.

The decoy attack is also a critical strategy in daily life, where you must retain the power to hide your intentions. To keep people from defending the points you want to attack, you must follow the military model and make real gestures toward a goal that does not interest you. You must seem to be investing time and energy to attack that point, as opposed to simply trying to signal the intention with words. Actions carry such weight and seem so real that people will naturally assume that is your real goal. Their attention is distracted from your actual objective; their defenses are dispersed and weakened.

The principle is also employed in less tortuous circumstances, but with the same purpose of getting an individual to act naturally in a role because, in fact, he does not know that he is playing a false one. For example, take the design of the "Man Who Never Was" operation during World War II--wherein a high-level courier carrying secret papers containing misdirections regarding the Mediterranean invasion was to be washed up on the coast of Spain. After the "Major" was dropped in Spanish waters, the British attache in Spain was "confidentially" told that papers of great importance had been lost, and that he should discreetly determine whether the courier's briefcase had been recovered. The attache was thus able to act out his part in the fake-out in a very convincing manner by virtue of the fact that for him it wasn't an act.

T
HE
S
ECRETS OF
D D
AY
,
G
ILLES
P
ERRAULT
, 1965

Camouflage.
The ability to blend into the environment is one of the most terrifying forms of military deception. In modern times Asian armies have proven particularly adept in this art: at the battles of Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima during World War II, American soldiers were astounded at the ability of their Japanese foes to blend into the various terrains of the Pacific theater. By sewing grass, leaves, twigs, and foliage to their uniforms and helmets, the Japanese would merge with the forest--but the forest would incrementally advance, undetected until it was too late. Nor could the Americans pinpoint the Japanese guns, for their barrels were concealed in natural rock crevices or were hidden under removable camouflage covers. The North Vietnamese were equally brilliant at camouflage, reinforcing their skills by the use of tunnels and underground chambers that allowed armed men to pop up seemingly anywhere. Worse, in a different kind of camouflage, they could blend into the civilian population. Preventing your enemies from seeing you until it is too late is a devastating way to control their perceptions.

The camouflage strategy can be applied to daily life in two ways. First, it is always good to be able to blend into the social landscape, to avoid calling attention to yourself unless you choose to do so. When you talk and act like everyone else, mimicking their belief systems, when you blend into the crowd, you make it impossible for people to read anything particular in your behavior. (Appearances are all that count here--dress and talk like a businessman and you must
be
a businessman.) That gives you great room to move and plot without being noticed. Like a grasshopper on a leaf, you cannot be picked from your context--an excellent defense in times of weakness. Second, if you are preparing an attack of some sort and begin by blending into the environment, showing no sign of activity, your attack will seem to come out of nowhere, doubling its power.

The hypnotic pattern:
According to Machiavelli, human beings naturally tend to think in terms of patterns. They like to see events conforming to their expectations by fitting into a pattern or scheme, for schemes, whatever their actual content, comfort us by suggesting that the chaos of life is predictable. This mental habit offers excellent ground for deception, using a strategy that Machiavelli calls "acclimatization"--deliberately creating some pattern to make your enemies believe that your next action will follow true to form. Having lulled them into complacency, you now have room to work against their expectations, break the pattern, and take them by surprise.

In the Six-Day War of 1967, the Israelis submitted their Arab enemies to a devastating and lightning-fast defeat. In doing so they confirmed all their preexisting military beliefs: the Arabs were undisciplined, their weaponry was outdated, and their strategies were stale. Six years later the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat exploited these prejudices in signaling that his army was in disarray and still humbled by its defeat in 1967, and that he was squabbling with his Soviet patrons. When Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on Yom Kippur in 1973, the Israelis were caught almost totally by surprise. Sadat had tricked them into letting down their guard.

Betrayer's masterpiece.
--To express to a fellow conspirator the grievous suspicion that one is going to be betrayed by him, and to do so at precisely the moment one is oneself engaged in betrayal, is a masterpiece of malice, because it keeps the other occupied with himself and compels him for a time to behave very openly and unsuspiciously, thus giving the actual betrayer full freedom of action.

H
UMAN
, A
LL
T
OO
H
UMAN
,
F
RIEDRICH
N
IETZSCHE
, 1878

This tactic can be extended indefinitely. Once people feel you have deceived them, they will expect you to mislead them again, but they usually think you'll try something different next time. No one, they will tell themselves, is so stupid as to repeat the exact same trick on the same person. That, of course, is just when to repeat it, following the principle of always working against your enemy's expectations. Remember the example of Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Purloined Letter": hide something in the most obvious place, because that is where no one will look.

Planted information.
People are much more likely to believe something they see with their own eyes than something they are told. They are more likely to believe something they discover than something pushed at them. If you plant the false information you desire them to have--with third parties, in neutral territory--when they pick up the clues, they have the impression
they
are the ones discovering the truth. The more you can make them dig for their information, the more deeply they will delude themselves.

During World War I, in addition to the infamous standoff on the Western Front, the Germans and the British fought a lesser-known battle for control of East Africa, where both sides had colonies. The man in charge of English intelligence in the area was Colonel Richard Meinhertzhagen, and his main rival on the German side was an educated Arab. Meinhertzhagen's job included feeding the Germans misinformation, and he tried hard to deceive this Arab, but nothing seemed to work--the two men were equals at the game. Finally Meinhertzhagen sent his opponent a letter. He thanked the Arab for his services as a double agent and for the valuable information he had supplied to the British. He enclosed a large sum of money and entrusted the letter's delivery to his most incompetent agent. Sure enough, the Germans captured this agent en route and found the letter. The agent, under torture, assured them that his mission was genuine--because he believed it was; Meinhertzhagen had kept him out of the loop. The agent was not acting, so he was more than believable. The Germans quietly had the Arab shot.

Agamemnon had sent Odysseus on a foraging expedition to Thrace, and when he came back empty-handed, Palamedes son of Nauplius upbraided him for his sloth and cowardice. "It was not my fault," cried Odysseus, "that no corn could be found. If Agamemnon had sent you in my stead, you would have had no greater success." Thus challenged, Palamedes set sail at once and presently reappeared with a ship-load of grain.... After days of tortuous thought, Odysseus at last hit upon a plan by which he might be revenged on Palamedes; for his honour was wounded. He sent word to Agamemnon: "The gods have warned me in a dream that treachery is afoot: the camp must be moved for a day and a night." When Agamemnon gave immediate orders to have this done, Odysseus secretly buried a sackfull of gold at the place where Palamedes's tent had been pitched. He then forced a Phrygian prisoner to write a letter, as if from Priam to Palamedes, which read: "The gold that I have sent is the price you asked for betraying the Greek camp." Having then ordered the prisoner to hand Palamedes this letter, Odysseus had him killed just outside the camp, before he could deliver it. Next day, when the army returned to the old site, someone found the prisoner's corpse and took the letter to Agamemnon. Palamedes was court-martialled and, when he hotly denied having received gold from Priam or anyone else, Odysseus suggested that his tent should be searched. The gold was discovered, and the whole army stoned Palamedes to death as a traitor.

T
HE
G
REEK
M
YTHS
,
VOL
. 2, R
OBERT
G
RAVES
, 1955