Among Carl von Clausewitz’s many timeless observations, one in particular stands out as a perpetual impediment to commanders and strategists. “War is the realm of uncertainty,” the Prussian strategist wrote. “Three quarters of the factors on which action is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty.” Throughout military history, commanders have attempted to pierce this fog of war with snippets of information, leveraging human runners, pigeons, and cavalry, and later, telegraphs, radio, and full-motion video. However, for the last thirty years, US forces have employed advanced technology in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance platforms that have provided unprecedented visibility and awareness of battlefield developments. Now, with increasingly lower barriers to entry for use of commercial space-based capabilities and drones, this long-held asymmetric US advantage is eroding. Now that other militaries can use these technologies to approximate US sensing and strike capabilities, achieving operational and tactical surprise will be increasingly difficult.
However, all is not lost. The US military has dealt with symmetries in transparency before. Equally important, increased transparency does not always lead to improved understanding.
While sensor-rich environments make operational concealment harder, they also create opportunities to exploit adversaries’ cognitive biases. Commanders can combine advanced technology with human ingenuity to turn battlefield transparency into an advantage. Planners can do this by understanding adversaries’ information needs, shaping the data they rely on to inform those needs, and manipulating the enemy’s decision-making. This approach requires cross-domain planning and a deep understanding of how opponents process information.
Despite the historical importance of military deception and cognitive warfare, the two recent decades spent fighting irregular opponents have left the US joint force out of practice on how to integrate these elements into campaign design in large-scale combat operations. Yet, today, in the era of strategic competition and as new technologies like artificial intelligence increasingly influence the conduct of military operations, America’s rivals are poised to exploit transparency, making it vital for US planners to refamiliarize themselves with these skills for the looming conflicts in the twenty-first century.
Future operational planners must treat battlefield transparency as an opportunity rather than a limitation. History provides examples that yield clues on how to do so.
Cannae: Shaping Perception in the Fog of War
Making your enemy do what you want is no easy task and only a small number of history’s great captains could do it consistently. One of these was Hannibal of Carthage. The Battle of Cannae, which took place in 216 BCE, during Rome’s epic struggle with Carthage, is an excellent example of how a commander can manipulate an opponent’s perception and biases to achieve victory despite facing overwhelming odds.
Cannae was not the first time Hannibal had fought Roman legions. In the lead-up to Cannae, Hannibal’s army had bested a consular army at the Battle of the Trebia and annihilated a Roman force in one of the most devastating ambushes in military history at Lake Trasimene. Despite these victories, Rome sent yet another army, the largest it had ever dispatched, to deal with the problematic Carthaginian now operating with impunity on the Italian peninsula.
With this latest Roman force closing in on him, Hannibal had to devise a way to overcome his numerical inferiority. To do this, he weaponized knowledge he gained from past engagements with the Romans to bait them into a full-scale frontal attack and commit their tactical reserve, and then use their momentum to envelop them.
Knowing that the Roman commanders would be impatient to defeat him and win glory, Hannibal crafted a trap that seemed to offer an avenue for a quick and decisive victory over their hated foe. The Carthaginian commander placed his weaker forces, consisting of Gauls and Spaniards, in the center of his line. This created what appeared to be a vulnerable part of the Carthaginian line that might collapse if penetrated and result in the destruction of Hannibal’s army. However, this weakness was instead a carefully constructed illusion based on accurate, if misleading, information.
Hannibal wanted the Romans to focus on his center and advance with the bulk of their forces to significantly condense the spacing between Roman units and force the legions to abandon their tactical flexibility, reducing their ability to fight. While the legions advanced into the center, Hannibal’s stronger African infantry and cavalry would conduct a double envelopment of the Roman forces.
When the Romans arrived on the field and observed Hannibal’s deployment, they behaved exactly as Hannibal anticipated, advancing aggressively against his center. Hannibal then executed his planned double envelopment, compacting the Romans in so tightly that they could not fight back effectively, resulting in the destruction of nearly the entire Roman army.
Hannibal’s success at Cannae clearly demonstrated that although the Romans could see virtually all of his forces (a condition like transparency), it was not enough to avoid catastrophic defeat. The brilliance of Hannibal’s battle plan was not in hiding his forces but rather in successfully shaping how the Romans might interpret the intent and context of his activities. Hannibal created a believable deception narrative that led Rome’s military leaders to behave precisely as he wanted. Manipulating his opponent’s perception was the key to this victory, and it illustrated a critical lesson for modern warfare: complete visibility can be crafted into an advantage if you understand how enemy commanders are likely to interpret the information they can gather from the battlefield.
D-Day: Manipulating Adversary Biases
One of the most notable examples of manipulating transparency and enemy perceptions to gain an advantage occurred before the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944 (Operation Overlord). A major challenge for the invasion planners was preventing Germany from deploying reserves to overpower the initial landing forces. The Allies devised a clever solution called Operation Fortitude South, which combined battlefield transparency with the deliberate manipulation of enemy cognitive biases to paralyze enemy decision-making and to misdirect Nazi military power at a crucial moment in the campaign.
Given the nearly two million troops and several thousand ships gathering in southern England, the Allies couldn’t hide their preparations for a cross-channel invasion. The only major question was where exactly the Allies would land. German planners quickly zeroed in on Calais as the most likely landing site because its proximity to England allowed for maximum air coverage and it was along the most direct route into Germany.
Knowing that German planners believed that a landing near Calais was more likely, Allied planners encouraged them to interpret any evidence of a landing in Normandy as merely a diversion for a larger operation aimed at Pas-de-Calais. This manipulation of enemy perceptions was woven into the fabric of Operation Overlord from its earliest stages.
To encourage this German belief, Operation Fortitude South focused on masking the true intent of Allied activities rather than hiding their capabilities or locations. Within the electromagnetic spectrum, the Allies utilized a mix of actual and fictitious units to create substantial and realistic radio traffic, gradually increasing in intensity to simulate the final surges of planning and coordination typical before a major operation. On the ground, planners oversaw the construction of fake headquarters, signal stations, and restricted zones, and staged fake equipment to deceive German air reconnaissance and intelligence networks into believing that a significant Allied buildup in southeastern England aimed at Calais was underway.
The judicious use of Allied double agents provided German intelligence with just enough detail to construct an entirely fictitious order of battle, along with information hinting at Allied objectives near Calais. Allied air planners further complicated German assessments of Allied intent. Allied airpower was employed for continued raids elsewhere in Europe, clouding the enemy’s efforts to discern the Allies’ main focus. Although Allied actions were frequently detected, the German high command maintained a flawed understanding of their true intent.
The most compelling element of Operation Fortitude South, however, was the appointment of General George S. Patton to command the ghost army preparing to lead the cross-channel invasion against Calais. Germany’s military leadership assumed that Patton would play a major role in the upcoming Allied main effort and never considered that the Allies might integrate his high-profile activities into a broadly conceived and well-developed deception narrative.
These misleading impressions, intentionally fostered by Allied planners manipulating the transparency surrounding their efforts, reinforced a German belief that the main Allied effort was a cross-channel invasion aimed at Pas-de-Calais. When the invasion commenced on the night of June 5, 1944, German leadership only committed local forces to counter the initial Allied landings. Despite having significant reserves capable of launching a counterattack—as had been seen at Anzio six months earlier—German commanders held their reserves near Calais, waiting for a cross-channel assault that never came. The Allies’ adept exploitation of transparency and manipulation of enemy expectations, both forms of cognitive warfare, ultimately provided the crucial time needed to ensure the invasion’s success. By incorporating Operation Fortitude into the planning for Operation Overlord almost from the beginning, the Allied invasion got off to an advantageous start.
Shaping Perception on the Future Battlefield: Deceiving Both Human and AI Decision-Makers
With the lessons of these two historical case studies in mind, we can turn our attention to the present: What should operational planners do differently to be successful in the future? Perhaps the most critical factor of future battlefield deception is that we must not only fool human commanders, but also the AI algorithms that inform commanders and staffs.
Commanders can no longer rely on traditional methods of deception like hiding troop movements or equipment. Instead, shaping perceptions in sensor-rich environments requires a shift in thinking—from concealing information to manipulating how the enemy, including AI systems and tools, interpret it. To do this effectively requires more than a superficial understanding of enemy commanders and their goals; it involves feeding adversaries accurate if misleading data that can manipulate their interpretation of information and misdirect their activity.
Another way to deal with AI-enabled commanders and staffs is to make their AI systems ineffective and break their trust in those systems and tools. Commanders can overwhelm AI systems with false signals and present them with unexpected or novel data; AI tools excel at pattern recognition, but struggle with understanding how new variables (outside of their training data) inform or change the context of a situation. Commanders might also organize their counterreconnaissance in such a way to deprive enemy algorithms of the data they need to make effective decisions by attacking enemy sensing as a whole. Using these methods may allow commanders to disrupt enemy decision-making and create exploitable opportunities.
AI will not eliminate war’s chaos, deception, and uncertainty—it will only reshape how those factors manifest. While intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems may provide episodic clarity, they will never offer a perfect, real-time understanding of intent. This means deception must focus on shaping what the adversary thinks is happening rather than avoiding detection altogether. By crafting a believable deception narrative—through signals, false headquarters, and logistical misdirection—commanders can lead enemy AI and human decision-makers to make ineffective decisions.
History provides valuable lessons in shaping enemy perceptions, from Hannibal’s use of bait at Cannae to the Allies’ masterful deception before D-Day. The fundamental principle is a timeless one: adversaries trust intelligence that aligns with their existing biases. If enemy commanders expect a particular action, it becomes easier to convince them it is happening. The challenge is not simply in masking reality but in constructing a version of reality that is compelling and actionable for the enemy.
The proliferation of advanced surveillance and AI-enabled, data-centric technologies demands that operational art must evolve well beyond traditional methods of concealment and surprise. Modern operational art must embrace methods to actively target and manipulate enemy perceptions of one’s visible force deployment. Modern commanders may no longer be able to hide their forces, so instead, they should focus on shaping how adversaries interpret what they see and attempt to influence their decision-making processes deliberately. This shift requires an intimate understanding of the information adversaries seek and the cognitive biases that shape their analysis. Modern battlefield commanders may exploit these biases by providing adversaries with misleading indicators or collected data, guiding the enemy toward wrong assumptions.
Just as Clausewitz recognized the “fog of greater or lesser uncertainty” that shrouds the battlefield, he also understood that war’s immutable nature remains fixed, even as its character changes. The conditions of the modern battlefield, with all its technology and transparency, may be unrecognizable to Hannibal or even to Allied commanders of World War II. But the essential principles that enabled their success in deceiving their enemies remain the same.
Mark Askew is an active duty Army officer and military historian. Askew has over nineteen years of military service as an armor officer, West Point history instructor, and Army strategist, with operational experience in Iraq. Askew recently defended his PhD in military history at Texas A&M University.
Antonio Salinas is an active duty Army officer and PhD student in the Department of History at Georgetown University. Following his coursework, he will teach at the National Intelligence University. Salinas has twenty-six years of military service in the Marine Corps and the US Army, where he led soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. He is the author of Siren’s Song: The Allure of War and Boot Camp: The Making of a United States Marine.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Lance Cpl. Hunter J. Kuester, US Marine Corps