The Future of Deception in War: Lessons from Ukraine

Deception—the act of deliberately misleading your foe so that they will take actions that contribute to your own goals—has a long history and enduring value in war. Yet new technologies and ongoing conflicts are reshaping how military deception is planned and conducted.

This report explores the opportunities for and contemporary challenges of conducting the planning, execution, and adaptation of military deception, which have become apparent during the war in Ukraine. As all wars are learning labs of a sort, these lessons matter not just for that conflict, but will have significant impacts on future conflicts as well.

Current U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) doctrine provides useful planning principles that inform military deception activities. However, new and disruptive technologies provide both challenges and opportunities for those who practice the art and science of military deception. This report finds that six key technologies exert such an influence:

• Uncrewed systems;
• Artificial intelligence;
• Additive manufacturing;
• New advanced materials;
• Quantum computing; and
• Commercial sensing and networks.

These technologies are combining with six trends in modern war to drive change in military deception:

• Democratized battlespace awareness and the signature battle;
• New era mass and mobilization;
• Cheaper and more precise deep strike capacity;
• Strategic influence and cognitive dominance activities;
• Ubiquitous air, sea, and land autonomy and human-machine integration; and
• Faster and better integrated adaptation battle.

The convergence of the new technologies and battlefield trends is seeing longer, conventional warfare. Both maneuver and attrition feature in this construct. Concurrently, the massed use of precision munitions—both cheap and exquisite—that are cued from military and commercial sensors has proliferated. This has compounded the challenge for military deception. The military organizations of democracies must act now to improve their planning, conduct, measurement, and adaptation of military deception in this evolved environment, and not to become future victims of it. These include updates and adjustments of command and leadership training, strategy, battlespace operations, personnel systems, military organizational structures, equipment and technology, and doctrine.

We should not deceive ourselves into thinking that we are ready for the deception campaigns of the future.