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January 1991.
Operation Desert Storm.
US Marines prepare for an amphibious assault,
which they think is only days away,
but which their commanders have planned will never take place.
May 1944.
Operation Overlord.
Two weeks before D-Day, America's best-known general, George Patton,
inspects units of an army which doesn't exist
in preparation for an invasion against Nazi-held Europe,
which will never take place.
Deception is a vital stage of any battleplan.
Confuse the enemy.
Make him think you're going to do something you're not going to do.
Or at a place or time you're not going to do it.
Get it right, and you can win the battle swiftly.
But get it wrong, when the stakes are high enough, and you risk losing the war.
The battleplan is Deception.
January 1991. Operation Desert Storm.
The target is the liberation of Kuwait.
Six months before, Saddam Hussein's lraq had invaded Kuwait,
and seized the country's oilfields.
Now a United Nations coalition, led by the United States,
assembles in Saudi Arabia.
lts mission is to expel Saddam from Kuwait.
ln charge is US General Norman Schwarzkopf.
His immediate problem is a classic military one -
an apparently strong enemy dug in along a strong defensive line.
Schwarzkopfs options are restricted
because the force he leads is a fragile coalition from a wide range of nations.
His Arab allies will not allow him to pursue an all-out assault on lraq.
lnstead, he must limit his attack to pushing the lraqi forces out of Kuwait.
On paper at least, he faces an army which is powerful,
well-equipped and highly experienced.
His attack must avoid Saddam's major troop and tank emplacements,
particularly the much-vaunted Republican Guard.
And he must win in a way which doesn't incur heavy losses on his own side.
So, how can he achieve this goal?
Nearly 50 years earlier, this man, British Lieutenant-General Frederick Morgan,
faces an even greater challenge.
1944.
Hitler's forces occupy Western Europe, from Norway to the border of Spain.
Allied troops are poised to cross the English Channel,
break through Hitler's Atlantic Wall, and push on to Berlin.
Everyone knows an invasion will come, but where and when?
Hitler's Atlantic Wall looks impregnable.
Beaches are defended by heavy gun emplacements, mines, barbed wire.
Below water they are defended by anti-landing obstructions.
lnland, Hitler's deadly Panzer Divisions wait to decimate the invading troops.
So how can General Morgan overcome this problem?
The solution, which both Morgan and Schwarzkopf come up with, is the same.
Deception.
Deception operations gives an army an opportunity to intellectualise war.
And just so long as people remain gullible, remain hungry for information,
there is always the opportunity to deceive them.
The battleplan for deception has certain key fundamentals.
Objective - what you want the enemy to think you're going to do,
and how you want him to react.
lf you can convince the enemy you're going to attack in a certain place,
and he moves his forces to cover this threat,
then you actually attack elsewhere.
The aim is to try and wrong-foot the enemy.
How it is done depends upon the exact situation, and what one wants to achieve.
Enemy assumptions - what military planners call ''EA''.
Work out what the enemy expects,
and make your deception fit what he would do in your shoes.
A successful deception leads the enemy to believe
what he already wants to believe.
The essential thing with deception is to help the enemy think
what he wants to think already.
You are feeding his prejudices.
Method selection - what US planners call ''Op Squared'',
operational options, the methods and techniques at your disposal.
Options range from physical tricks,
such as creating false units where they don't exist,
or hiding real units intended for an actual attack,
to intelligence deceptions, such as leaking, or planting, false information.
There are many ways to deceive the enemy.
You can make physical things for him to see.
You can plant documents, or false informers.
Or you can use electronic means.
You can create false radio signals to make him think
we're doing something that we're not.
Execution - how and when do you implement your deception methods?
ln deception, timing is everything.
Exploitation - what do you do afterwards?
How do you continue to benefit from your deception?
Like Morgan before him,
Schwarzkopf understands that two fundamentals
underpin all types of deception.
The first is psychology.
There are many ways in which a nation can try to use deception
to upset the balance of an opponent.
And one of the ways in which nations have done so over the centuries
is to play to the preconceived ideas that the opposition have,
to feed them information that makes them think
that what the enemy will do is what they expect them to do.
The second fundamental of deception is how to sell it.
An enemy is always working with an incomplete picture.
lf you have a complete picture, you will probably think something is going wrong.
Deception should be limited - just give the enemy enough,
like dropping a fishing line into the sea to see if the enemy will bite.
But for every battleplan for deception, there is one great danger.
The enemy might spot your deception, and run its own against you.
They could understand that your deception plan
is trying to deceive them, and then deceive you with their deception plan.
This is a fundamental again - to try and pursue a deception plan
that is flexible enough to respond to what the enemy might do to you.
So in 1944 and 1991,
how did Morgan and Schwarzkopf overcome this problem?
And how did they mount their battleplans for deception?
Desert Storm, 1990 to 1991.
General Norman Schwarzkopf and his planners consider their battleplan
for the liberation of Kuwait.
Operation Overlord, 1943 to 1944.
General Frederick Morgan, and his planners, consider their battleplan
for the liberation of Europe.
As young officers, both Schwarzkopf and Morgan
would have studied the great deceptions of military history.
Schwarzkopf, indeed, would have studied Morgan's in most minute detail.
Deception is as old as the history of warfare.
Armies have always tried to deceive their enemies,
so that the numbers of troops have an impact on the battlefield
out of all proportion to that which they might otherwise have.
And one case study, which Schwarzkopf and Morgan would have analysed
is one of the greatest deceptions of World War One -
the offensive by Russian General Alexei Brusilov, seen here on the left,
against Austro-Hungarian forces on the Eastern Front in summer 1916.
ln World War One, the conventional way of undertaking an offensive
involved massing huge numbers of reserves,
then mounting a lengthy artillery bombardment
before the troops left their trenches and crossed No Man's Land.
This gave the enemy plenty of warning, and ample time to prepare.
lt is a problem which both Morgan and Schwarzkopf also face.
lt is no secret to either of their enemies
that forces are being built up for a massive attack.
On the Eastern Front in World War One,
No Man's Land could also be up to several miles wide.
lt therefore took time to cross,
time that exposed attacking infantry to enemy fire.
Schwarzkopf won't have this problem.
His forces are right up against the lraqi defences on the Kuwaiti border.
But Morgan will - his men have to cross the English Channel.
Brusilov's deception was simple, but revolutionary.
His solution was to launch his attack,
without amassing the usual vast reserves.
He constructed large dug-outs
to conceal those reserves he did put in place.
He increased the speed of his assault by reducing the width of No Man's Land.
Carefully concealed trenches
were pushed forward from the Russian front line,
in some cases to within 50 yards of the enemy line.
lt was a massive operation along 200 miles of front.
Brusilov's men also dug under the wire separating the two forces.
When he launched his offensive,
it was with only a one-day bombardment of selected, not general, targets.
The enemy was caught off-guard,
without time to bring up his own reserves.
ln nine days, Brusilov's forces advanced up to 50 miles,
taking vast numbers of prisoners.
The success of his offensive helped to define future deception battleplans.
Desert Storm, 1991,
and D-Day, 1944.
Both Schwarzkopf and Morgan face the first requirement
in their own battleplans for deception.
There must be a clear objective -
what you want the enemy to do, and why you want him to do it.
For Schwarzkopf, there seem two alternatives
for the forces he is assembling in Saudi Arabia -
an amphibious landing at the head of the Gulf, near the Shatt al'Arab waterway,
led by the US Marines.
Or a direct thrust into south-east Kuwait,
heading northwards in the direction of Kuwait City.
But Schwarzkopf has a third, which is far more ambitious -
a wide left hook, out into the desert to the west,
actually across the lraqi border, then back into Kuwait from the north.
Schwarzkopf calls this his ''Hail Mary play''.
This was a direct reference to a play in American football...
...whereby the receivers run deeply into hostile territory,
and wait to have the ball passed to them by a very strong-armed quarterback.
Schwarzkopf, however, has a problem.
The target area for his Hail Mary
is where Saddam has positioned his strategic reserve,
primarily the crack divisions of his Republican Guard.
Nevertheless, Schwarzkopf and Washington decide to go for it.
And to use deception to make Saddam's forces play into their hands.
Their battleplan has two objectives.
First, to pull Saddam's key forces away from the west,
where the main attack will come, to the two points in the east,
the other potential spearheads of the attack.
Second, to disguise the build-up of the attack force in the Hail Mary play,
not just tanks, armaments, men and equipment,
but also the massive logistic support -
fuel, weapons, water, food - which will be required.
For Schwarzkopf, a successful deception is essential.
And for Morgan and his planners in 1944, the situation is even more critical.
Hitler's forces stretch from Norway in the north,
to the Mediterranean in the south.
The Allied assault on D-Day will be across the English Channel into France.
The men landing on the beaches need protection from the air,
so the beaches must be within fighter range,
which gives Allied planners just two options -
the Pas de Calais and Normandy.
The coast is already massively defended,
but there are two other problems.
The first is that German forces from elsewhere in Europe
will be sent to the Channel coast to support the defenders.
The attacking forces will therefore be vastly outnumbered.
The second is the Germans are holding
key Panzer reserves away from the coast
to launch them against the invading forces
as soon as the location of the landing becomes clear.
One critical themes of the deception operations prior to D-Day
was to keep the German Panzer formation
as far distant from the Normandy beaches as possible.
The very lightly armed and few Allied troops
that would land on the D-Day beaches
on the 6th of June could have been smashed
and pushed back into the English Channel
by fast-moving German Panzer reserves.
The Panzers must be kept away from the Allied beachhead
until it is firmly established.
This will also increase the Allies' chances of destroying them by air.
lt meant that once the invasion started,
the German Panzer Divisions would roll forward.
And as they rolled forward on these long roads of France,
they would become vulnerable to Allied air power,
to the...P47 s and Typhoons that were in the skies,
literally by the hundreds, at any given point of the day during that week.
So both Frederick Morgan and Norman Schwarzkopf
have met the first requirement
in the battleplan for deception - a clear objective.
But now they face the challenge of persuading the enemy
to do what they want.
ln both Operation Desert Storm in 1991, and Operation Overlord in 1944,
the battleplanners have to answer the question -
how are they going to fool the enemy?
The next step is assessing enemy assumptions -
what the enemy thinks, or would like to assume.
The key requirement for effective deception
is knowing what the enemy wants to think.
Once you know that, you can help him along the path...
...to thinking how he wants to think.
At the core of the deception for D-Day
is the fact that there are only two potential areas for invasion,
which are within the range of Allied fighters for air cover,
and which have the right type of beach -
the Pas de Calais, the shortest distance across the Channel and to Germany,
or the beaches of Normandy.
Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D Eisenhower and his planners
are brutally aware of their limited options.
The brilliance of the Allied deceivers
is that instead of approaching this as a weakness,
they turn it into the very core of their deception.
For the Germans, the Pas de Calais is the obvious choice.
So Morgan goes for Normandy, and launches the deception
that the invasion will be aimed at the Pas de Calais.
At the core of that decision is one simple psychological fact.
The Pas de Calais is where the Germans expect the Allies to land.
With their preference for short, sharp Blitzkrieg campaigns -
get to the heart of the enemy as rapidly and mercilessly as possible -
this is where they would attack if the roles were reversed.
Once the deception plan begins, German planners are predisposed to believe it.
One of the absolute fundamentals for a good deception plan
is to know your enemy inside out,
to understand what he's likely to take on board,
and what he's likely to discount as false information.
Nearly 50 years later, the same principle lies behind Schwarzkopfs decision
to use an amphibious assault from the east as a deception.
The most important of the many deceptions in Operation Desert Storm
was the Marine landing that never happened.
That was particularly effective
because it fed into the existing lraqi mindset,
which was that the Shatt al'Arab,
the central waterway that leads into the lraqi heartland,
was the most important thing to defend.
And that the great danger would always come from the east.
For eight years, the lraqis had fought a brutal war against lran,
and the bulk of the fighting had been to control that vital waterway.
So both Morgan in 1943-44, and Schwarzkopf in 1990-91
have met the second requirement - what they plan for their deception
is totally in line with what and how the enemy thinks.
So now they have more crucial and practical decisions to make.
Method selection -
what sort of technical and operational deception methods should they choose?
Execution - how will they put them into practice?
When Morgan and Schwarzkopf plan this part of their deceptions,
they will take into account a number of classic examples.
For Schwarzkopf they are part of military history.
For Morgan, however, they are part of the war he himself is fighting.
North Africa, 1940-41.
ltalian dictator Benito Mussolini wanted to push Britain out of North Africa,
seize her naval base at Alexandria, and capture the all-important Suez Canal.
At that time, the ltalian army in Libya numbered 250,000 men.
Against it was a British force of only 36,000.
Until reinforcements arrived, the only way to hold off an assault
was to convince the ltalians that Britain had a large reserve on the ground,
poised to counter-strike.
British deceivers created the illusion of a massive army -
hundreds of tanks, trucks and artillery pieces,
but made of inflated rubber and canvas stretched on frames.
Frederick Morgan will use the same deception in his D-Day battleplan.
Back in North Africa, the British also created false roads,
and vehicle tracks in the sand,
and used horses and camels to create huge clouds of dust,
as if a large army was on the move.
British intelligence transmitted coded radio messages
for the ltalians to break, signalling a growing British reinforcement.
Both Schwarzkopf and Morgan will use false radio traffic
in their deception plans.
When the ltalians attacked, the British fell back.
But the ltalians bought the deception.
They believed a major British offensive
was about to hit their right flank, and halted.
By the time they realised their mistake, it was too late.
The British had created an army where none existed.
Three years later, General Morgan will do the same.
Britain, 1944.
The build-up to D-Day continues.
The deception plan covers an amazing array of tricks.
The British had been preparing the deception for the invasion of Europe
for around three and a half years.
As a result, they could have the pick of various deception techniques,
various deception scenarios,
and then apply them to the situation that they found in 1944.
The deception plan for D-Day is code-named ''Operation Bodyguard''.
At its heart is what modern specialists call ''black intelligence''.
And underlying all this is what the same modern specialists call ''HUMlNT'' -
human intelligence.
For information about Allied preparations,
the Germans rely heavily on the spy network they have built in Britain.
From mid-1943, this network begins to paint a detailed picture
for its controllers back in Germany.
Hitler is so impressed with one such agent,
a Spanish journalist code-named Garbo, that he awards him the lron Cross.
But there is a problem.
Hitler's key agent in Britain is a double agent.
And so are all the others.
British counter-intelligence tracked down almost every German spy sent to Britain,
and offered them a deal -
become double agents, sending back false information,
or be executed.
Nearly all the captured German spies choose to co-operate.
The deceivers also set up fictitious networks of German spies,
reporting back to Berlin.
lntelligence from these non-existent networks is backed up
by false radio messages designed to be intercepted by the enemy.
Operation Bodyguard also includes
specific deceptions to keep Hitler's reserves,
particularly the Panzer Divisions, from being moved to Normandy.
Operation Zeppelin is aimed at Hitler's southern flank in the Mediterranean.
lt's a combination of fake radio messages,
and the presence of real, but under-strength divisions.
The deceivers also seek to convince the German High Command
that any invasion in France
may be a decoy for a real attack in the Balkans.
The Germans aren't fed a whole story, just enough to get them thinking.
While Zeppelin is tying down German forces in the Mediterranean,
another operation, Fortitude North, is directed at Norway.
The objective is to keep the large German garrison there pinned down,
even to suggest that a landing in France will not happen
until there has been one in Norway.
A British Fourth Army is created in Scotland.
Part of the D-Day plans is that it will later be sent south as reinforcement,
but many of the troops train in mountain warfare,
and believe they are actually preparing to invade Norway.
Fake radio messages request ski bindings and other winter supplies,
and enquire about tank engine performance
in sub-zero temperatures.
The Firth of Forth is packed with warships and transport craft,
later to be used in the real invasion.
The Stockholm stock market is rigged
to raise the price of Norwegian securities,
suggesting that Sweden expects the imminent liberation of its neighbour.
Unknown to the men involved in Fortitude North,
the codebreakers at Bletchley Park, the country house near London
where the German military Enigma code is being read,
are confirming to Morgan and his planners
that no major German units are being moved from Norway.
This part of the deception battleplan is working.
Almost 50 years later, the Coalition planners have a very different aim.
lnstead of keeping enemy forces in place,
they need to persuade Saddam Hussein to move a major part of his army.
Their task - to open up the lraqi western flank
to General Schwarzkopfs Hail Mary play.
So they too put a variety of deception plans into action.
US Marines practise seaborne assaults in the east.
This ties in with the lraqi planners' assumption
about the importance of the Shatt al'Arab waterway.
The first aspect of that was actually trying to give
the lraqis what they were expecting.
They expected the US Marines to actually launch an amphibious assault
off the coast of Kuwait.
That deception was powerful
because the Marines on those ships actually wanted to make those landings,
that key Marines in Washington wanted to make those landings,
that there was in fact a push within the Pentagon
to actually conduct these landings.
And so it was a deception that was real
to almost all of the participants.
US amphibious forces are prominent.
Minesweepers sweep the sea lanes
up which the anticipated seaborne assault will sail.
Key installations and onshore buildings are bombarded by naval forces,
especially American.
Central to this is an aspect of deception only available
because of modern technology - manipulation of the media.
TV crews are given access to what seem to be key events.
Armchair generals and military pundits
support the notion of assault from the east.
ln the 21st Century, with more and more houses gaining access to radios,
and also to television sets,
unlike in the 20th Century during the Second World War
when the psychological impact of deception
was focused on the troops on the ground,
now we find that the media can be brought into deception operations.
Reconnaissance units begin to report
that the Republican Guard is being moved east,
so it can cover the waterway, and the main oilfields, more directly.
Schwarzkopf also has a plan to disguise the build-up of forces
in their assembly positions for the Hail Mary play.
Units in the west maintain strict radio silence.
ln the east, recordings of radio traffic litter the airwaves.
Black intelligence - false information - is fed to lraq.
But deception also extends to the incredible logistics of supply.
lt's one thing trying to disguise where your troops are,
but if you then show a trail, a logistic train leading up to something
that supposedly isn't there, it gives the game away.
So we find deception not just on the front line,
but for hundreds of miles behind the front line as well.
ln the east, trucks are driven to where the lraqis expect troop build-ups.
ln the west, the logistic columns move at night.
During the daytime, they stop and are camouflaged, their tracks covered.
Coalition air superiority removes the danger
of this being spotted by lraqi air reconnaissance.
ln preparation for D-Day,
Frederick Morgan also has a plan for hiding his forces,
as he implements the next stage of his battleplan for deception.
Operation Fortitude North had been aimed at keeping
the large German garrison in Norway pinned down.
But it is Operation Fortitude South which is the most important, and the most risky.
Spring 1944. Two million American, Canadian, British and Allied troops
wait in the south of England for D-Day.
Their locations, and that of their equipment
is a give-away as to where they will land.
Operation Fortitude South must disguise their presence,
or focus German attention elsewhere.
The deceivers create a false army, the First US Army Group, FUSAG,
and locate it in Kent
where an invasion force for the Pas de Calais would assemble.
lt includes some genuine reserve units, but is largely fictitious.
Double agents fill their reports with intelligence on this false army.
A fictitious timetable is drawn up for the Pas de Calais landings.
False radio traffic fills the airwaves,
just as it does almost 50 years later in Operation Desert Storm.
A US signals battalion moves through the English countryside
following fictitious routes of non-existent army units.
Dummy landing craft, moored with real landing boats,
create the illusion of a massive armada.
lnflatable rubber tanks suggest a large army ready for invasion.
Dummy aircraft fool enemy air reconnaissance.
German prisoners of war released through the Swedish Red Cross
are apparently accidentally shown indications of the fake build-up
of troops in Kent, and report them back to Berlin.
But the deception has one extra element, which makes it even more credible.
FUSAG's commander is US General George Patton.
His reputation as an attacking commander
makes him an obvious choice to lead the Allied assault.
Patton's later absence from Normandy confirms German belief
that D-Day is a diversion.
All this does two things.
lt takes German attention away from the real army and the real target.
And it confirms what the German planners want to think,
that the invasion target is the Pas de Calais.
After the war, evidence is found
that shows how well the FUSAG deception worked.
German intelligence had drawn up an ORBAT,
an Order of Battle for an Allied Army,
complete with unit insignia and call signs -
all of them mythical.
Even at the time, Allied reconnaissance aircraft
see no indication that the Germans are moving
their main Panzer reserves south towards Normandy.
The D-Day planners could be confident that Fortitude South was working.
To back this up, Allied bombing patterns are carefully planned
to suggest the Pas de Calais as the target for invasion.
They deceive the Germans by hitting targets which they themselves would hit
if they were invading through the Pas de Calais.
But the Allies are also destroying the vital road links and bridges
to the real invasion point in Normandy, further south,
thereby cutting off, or at least slowing down,
the lethal counter-strike of the Panzers held in reserve to the north.
ln the weeks leading up to D-Day, more than twice as many bombs
are dropped north of the Seine, than to its south.
To achieve this, one other factor is crucial.
Control of the air.
ln 1991, General Norman Schwarzkopf enjoys this advantage.
By 1944, the Allies' control of the air reduces the chances
of German air reconnaissance spotting their deception.
ln 1944 and 1991, Morgan and Schwarzkopfs teams of deceivers
have met the initial requirements of the battleplan for deception.
But will they be able to keep their deceptions totally secure?
D-Day, 1944.
Operation Desert Storm, 1991.
Both battleplans for deception are on course.
But the next stage is crucial.
ln any deception plan there is the danger of counter-deception.
One of the dangers in trying to deceive the enemy
is that they can recognise that they are being deceived,
and they can put into place a deception operation of their own.
That can deceive you and totally wrong-foot the deceivers.
This has happened often in history, and right through the Second World War.
Bluff and counter-bluff are an integral part of deception operations.
ln North Africa, less than two years before D-Day,
British forces had come up against German General Erwin Rommel,
as his Afrika Korps attacked the British position at El Alamein.
lf successful, Egypt and the Suez Canal would have been captured within days.
German reconnaissance said that British defences
were thin in the southern sector,
so Rommel sent elite units to attack in the south.
To deceive the Allies, Rommel left dummy vehicles and artillery behind.
He maintained radio silence with his ground units,
and his own radio messages to his Luftwaffe commander were encoded.
What he didn't know was that the British had broken the code,
and uncovered the deception.
They then prepared a battleplan for counter-deception.
The British moved tanks and artillery to the southern sector,
but kept them well camouflaged,
so Rommel continued to think the area was thinly defended.
Radio traffic kept up the illusion that the units were still in the north.
Then the British mounted a more deadly intelligence deception.
They had in their possession German maps,
which did not show the treacherous shifting sands
around the Ragil Depression in the south -
a potential death-trap for Rommel's tanks.
So they prepared a fake map
on which these shifting sands were shown as hard ground,
and left it in a blown-up jeep in a minefield for the Germans to find.
On August the 30th, Rommel attacked through the Ragil Depression.
As his forces began to sink, British aircraft pounced and destroyed them.
When deception works, therefore, it works well.
When it goes wrong, however, it can end in disaster.
ln Desert Storm, the greatest risk
for Schwarzkopfs deception plans comes early on.
lf the lraqis launch a pre-emptive attack into Saudi Arabia
before most Coalition troops arrive, the results could be disastrous.
To cover this and pin down lraqi forces,
a rumour is spread that a sudden Blitzkrieg assault is being planned.
During this time, many things could have gone wrong -
perhaps the lraqis launching a counter-attack,
pushing down into Saudi Arabia
while the Coalition is being built and deploying at the front.
So these were days when so many things could have gone wrong.
But Saddam does not seize this opportunity.
By contrast, in Operation Overlord, the moment comes late.
And it comes with the classic fear -
that the enemy has recognised your deception,
and is running a counter-deception against you.
There are moments when Generals Morgan and Eisenhower
think their deception has been exposed.
So many different aspects of the intelligence
that the British and Americans fed to the Germans came back in a different form.
So it perhaps frightened them that the Germans knew where they would land,
because the Germans had their own deception operations.
There were many times when General Eisenhower thought
that the plans had been rumbled.
Only six weeks before D-Day,
a newspaper crossword contains several key invasion code-words,
including Overlord, the code for the landing itself.
lt's a coincidence, but frightening.
Shortly after this, a British staff officer
leaves the entire communications plan for the invasion,
marked ''Top Secret'', in the back of a cab.
The driver returns it.
Then, almost unbelievably, an American sergeant,
sending the Overlord plans to the Pentagon,
mixes the package with a clothes parcel
to a lady friend in a German area of Chicago.
The package is intercepted just in time.
With barely a month to go, American landing craft on night-time rehearsal
are intercepted by German E-boats.
7 49 men lose their lives.
Ten of these are officers with special knowledge of the Overlord plans.
They are feared captured.
A frantic search is made until every body is accounted for.
The night of June 5th, 1944.
The D-Day armada is on its way.
But have Frederick Morgan's deceptions worked?
Operation Desert Storm, 1991.
Have Norman Schwarzkopfs deceptions worked?
As D-Day dawns, the German High Command is still holding 200,000 troops
in Scandinavia, fearing an assault there.
Only one division is sent from the Mediterranean,
to the coast of the English Channel.
As the invasion fleet heads into the darkness,
British and American bombers fly decoy missions above them.
Using chaff, small metal strips code-named ''Window'',
to confuse enemy radar,
one group creates the impression of a bombing raid over Amiens,
far away from the Normandy beaches.
Another, flying intricate patterns over the Channel,
also uses Window to create the effect on radar
of hundreds of ships sailing towards the Pas de Calais.
But the key question remains.
Will the deception keep the counter-strike Panzers
off the assault forces long enough?
ln Operation Desert Storm,
it is time for Schwarzkopfs forces to cross the start line.
The Marines' deception has worked.
lt has moved Saddam's Republican Guard east,
to block the threatened landing there.
The false landing at Kuwait,
the landing that never happens, has the double effect
of focusing Saddam Hussein's attention away from the west,
where the real attack will happen.
But also causing him to put some of his best troops,
some of the best divisions of the Republican Guard,
in a place where they will be unable to react to the main attack.
As a result, Schwarzkopfs Hail Mary play is spectacularly successful.
ln barely 100 hours, US and British armoured forces
slice more than 100 miles through the desert,
utterly destroying the lraqi army, and liberating Kuwait.
Dawn, Normandy, June 6th.
The first troops land.
lnland, dummy parachutists are being dropped to confuse the defenders.
Then thousands of real paratroopers land to seize strategic targets,
adding to the confusion.
The landings are hard-fought, but by midnight the same day,
the Allies have 130,000 men ashore and have established a beachhead.
And the Allied deception plan is still working.
The German High Command is holding back its main counter-strike Panzer units.
Whether the Allies landed at Normandy or the Pas de Calais didn't really matter.
What did matter was that there was an element of doubt in the German mind,
which reinforced their tendency,
their existing tendency to keep their armoured divisions back,
scores of miles behind the line,
which made those armoured divisions vulnerable to Allied air power.
But there is one more factor in the deception formula -
exploitation, follow-through.
ln the case of D-Day, it's immediate.
As it happened, the deception plan worked
even better than one could have hoped for.
That even after the German High Command gets reports
of Allied troops landing in Normandy,
they are still convinced that the Normandy landing is a deception.
So the real deception made them think the reality was a deception.
One key part of the deception plan
was to keep it going a number of days after D-Day.
Due to the success of that deception operation continuing,
the German Panzer reserves were pinned to the north of the Seine.
And the Allies, at a very vulnerable point in their invasion,
could break out of their beachheads, reorganise, get some heavier weapons,
and continue to exploit, eventually towards Paris.
With Desert Storm, the exploitation is longer term.
2003, and Operation lraqi Freedom,
the campaign to finally oust Saddam Hussein.
Most observers expect General Tommy Franks
to adopt the same pattern
as Norman Schwarzkopf -
a long air campaign, plus the build-up of overwhelming force.
Franks, however, makes a different call - Blitzkrieg tactics, sharp and fast,
and uses Desert Storm as the base for a deception of his own.
Just like D-Day, the actual attack has become part of the deception.
So how did Frederick Morgan in 1944 and Norman Schwarzkopf in 1991
match up to the requirements for the battleplan for deception?
Objective - both men had clear objectives, and achieved them.
The Germans held back their main
counter-attack force from Normandy for several days,
while the lraqis moved their most formidable troops to the east.
Enemy assumptions - in both cases the deception plans worked
because they were in line with what the enemy wanted to believe.
The Germans remained sure
that a landing must come in the Pas de Calais,
while the lraqis waited in vain for an amphibious assault.
Method selection and execution -
both Schwarzkopf and Morgan met these requirements.
Morgan, in particular, employed a massive range of deception techniques,
and executed them brilliantly.
Exploitation - Morgan is so successful at following up his deception
that the German High Command even believes that it is D-Day itself
which is the deception.
But what about the future for the deception battleplan?
Deception operations are with us now,
and they will be with us for as long as there is warfare.
But the deceivers themselves can also be deceived.
So what we get with deception operations
is this tangled web of information and counter-information
that can lead to all sorts of unexpected things to happen on a battlefield.
lt is the point at which one can unravel that deception
that one can master the art of war.
That is very unlikely, and so deception is likely to stay with us.
Ways of fighting the deception battleplan
will undoubtedly become ever more complex.
But, in the end, the main aim remains unchanged -
to win the battle with the smallest number of casualties possible.