Enjoy more audio and podcasts oniOSorAndroid.
Letters are welcome via e-mail to [email protected]
The usefulness of subterfuge
Military deception is indeed a lost art in democracies, and more’s the pity (“Bodyguard of lies”, December 19th). Yes, it exists at a tactical level (“I’ll make the enemy think that I’m attacking from the right but actually my main force will be on the left”), but this is entirely predictable in its repetitiveness. At the more strategic level, military deception has withered. D-Day succeeded because of the trickery you mentioned: reinforcing Hitler’s conviction that Pas-de-Calais, 300km from Normandy, was the target for the Allied landing. Such deception would be impossible now. Modern armed forces are not nearly large enough to have the flexibility for such a duplicitous task. Conversely, headquarters’ staffs are too bloated, making it more probable that deception strategies would leak out.