Here is a column I wrote, under the pen-name of Desiderius Erasmus an old Dutch philosopher, for a monthly Illinois newsletter on the Second Amendment. Old Desiderius’ motto was In the Land of the Blind, the One-eyed Man is King, which meant that you didn’t have to be perfect in your skillset, just better than your opponent. In Latin, the phrase is “in regione caecorum rex est luscus.”
I think it is an important read because when you see or her Russian comments on how the war in the Ukraine is going, or really any other topic, the Russians are BIG into shading the truth and hiding what is actually happening.
In regione caecorum rex est luscus
In the Land of the Blind, the One-eyed Man is King
By “Desiderius Erasmus,” a GSL member
Maskirovka
For centuries, the Russian empire, especially her military, have brought deception to a fine art. The Russian word maskirovka, translating to “masking something”, is designed to manipulate the enemy’s decision-making process so it does, or doesn’t, take actions, which therefore enhance the likelihood of Russian success. These actions might be reinforcing a certain sector of the front, thinking the Russians will attack there, when the Russians all along were going to attack somewhere else – and where the Russians really do attack, now has few enemy troops.
It is not enough to just fool the enemy; there must be actual actions that the enemy takes in response to that deception. At Stalingrad in 1942, the Russians portrayed the situation in the Soviet city as on the edge of falling for several months, by only bringing in relatively small reinforcements across the Volga River from Soviet positions east.
The Germans, in turn, pulled additional German units in from the flanks north and south of Stalingrad for a final push, and let Romanian, Hungarian, and Italian units take over those flank defensive sectors. Then in mid-November 1942 – wham, the Russians attacked those flanks, surrounding Stalingrad, where the German Sixth Army died on the vine over the next 75 days, a major turning point in the war.
The first precept is “give the enemy the smell that he likes,” an Israeli army colonel once told me. Every enemy has a preconceived notion of how the battle is probably going to unfold; identify that and use that as the deception story – the false scenario and how it will play out. Then do something different. The enemy wants to believe that they guessed right, so all deception measures should reinforce those enemy’s biases.
In World War II, the Germans believed the Western Allies would invade France from England at the Pas-de-Calais area of France. First, because the English Channel is at its narrowest at this point, but more importantly, because it was from Pas-de-Calais that Germany intended to invade England in 1940. Therefore, all Allied deception measures were designed to “sell” a Pas-de-Calais invasion, hiding the real invasion at Normandy, where the distance across the Channel was five times that of Pas-de-Calais.
Conceal the real; portray the unreal is the second guide. Not only does good maskirovka portray false operations, but includes tight operational security to hide what is really going on, because if the enemy obtains evidence of your legitimate plan, they may not fall for the deception to hide it. Disseminating battle plans on a strict “need to know” reduces the possibility that those plans get “leaked.” Anything that is leaked, should only be the false battle plans – and then only in a manner that is believable.
That is sometimes done by double agents – an enemy agent that has been apprehended, threatened with death, and “turned”, so the agent, in addition to feeding inconsequential true intelligence to keep credibility, is fed elements of the deception story.
It isn’t just human intelligence (spies) that is necessary to execute maskirovka effectively; you have to “fool” all the information sensors of the enemy. This includes radar and other electronic detection devices, and aerial photography – and in World War II there were no satellites to fool; now there may be 8,000 in orbit.
Audio sensors listen for certain sounds; sensors on the Internet monitor everything from what kind of mouthwash you buy online, to actions that indicate you are probably a firearms’ owner. Motion sensors can measure the movements of deer, or movements of military tanks.
If you attempt to shoot down every enemy drone in an area, he may believe correctly that you are up to something in that area. But if you do not shoot down any drones over an area, because you want them to pick up indicators of your activity, the enemy might ask themselves why you are not attacking them in that location.
Deception plans of maskirovka are some of the most sensitive, tightest “need to know” restrictions of all. Even knowing that some type of deception is going on is tightly controlled to the point that often high-level decision-makers are in the dark.
While it was not U.S. maskirovka, Vice President Harry Truman was not told about the Manhattan Project – the development of the atomic bomb – until hours after he became President after FDR’s death.
Today, the Russians are still at it with respect to maskirovka, whether that is in the Ukraine, or whether that is interfering with U.S. elections by injecting false stories into the American news cycle, or even up to potentially manipulating U.S. election results.
If you think the Russian aren’t good at maskirovka, ask the roughly 250,000 Germans at Stalingrad that never came home.