Comparison: Ghost Armies
The Art of War, Chapter 7.3.10-14 Divide your troops to plunder the villages.
This post continues our project explaining each stanza of Sun Tzu’s work. The English and Chinese are from my award-winning translation, The Art of War and The Ancient Chinese Revealed. Start here for the book’s opening lines.
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The stanza discussed here ends Section Three of Chapter 7 of The Art of War. The general topic of this chapter is Armed Conflict. In the beginning of this section, Sun Tzu defines the key to success in competition as “deception,” but his idea was closer to “controlling perceptions.” This was introduced in the first chapter of the book, but it is discussed here as an alternative to destructive conflict. All deceptive positions are, in a sense, a “ghost army,” one that can be attacked without damage and reappear anywhere.
In this lesson, we can learn from the use of a real “ghost army.” In World War II, the American 23rd Headquarters Troops was a great example. This ghost army was such of such great value that information about its existence was only declassified almost fifty years after the war. Its consisted of the 406th Combat Engineers for building roads and bridges, the 603rd Camouflage Engineers for building and installing the fake army itself, and the 3132 Signal Service Company Special, whose job was creating the auditory and radio sounds of an army.
This Ghost Army was inspire by the British’s ‘Middle East Command Camouflage Directorate’ and their work at El Alamein misleading Rommel. Both the British and American unit were telling examples of “winning without conflict,” even though they contributed to winning in a very real conflict. Both are testimonies to Sun Tzu’s vision of “controlling perceptions.”
The Soldiers of Perception
Recruiting for the Ghost Army focused on a very different kind of person than those recruited by the regular fighting forces. Its soldiers were drawn from very different walks of life.
<Plunder> <hometown> <divide> <crowd>
When on open ground, dividing is an advantage.
We must steal these people from the creative arts. Many came from the motion picture industry: artists, illustrators, sound technicians, prop makers, and so on. The ghost army also hired architects, engineers, and psychology experts. At its largest, it was said to have over a thousand members, including eighty-two officers. Their job was to mimic an army of more than 30,000 troops. Of course, wise businesses today, do something similar in creating their marketing departments. Those with marketing degrees from school are LESS valuable than those with proven creative abilities.
Looking at the image above of four men lifting a tank, we might think the mission was fooling the Nazis into thinking America had create “Captain America”-type super soldiers. Instead, what we are seeing is one of the army’s inflatable rubber tanks. These tanks could be repainted to the markings of any military division that was desired. The army also had inflatable howitzers, troop trucks, troop tents, and plenty of helmets to lay in rows on the ground to simulate troops dug into trenches to aerial reconnaissance
<Boundless> <ground> <divide> <advantage>
Don’t worry about organization; just move.
The world has an endless bounty of competitive ground to explore, and a ghost army can take any form. The Ghost Army could to move to anywhere the Allies wanted a “pop-up” army. One advantage in deception is that movements of a thousand men with props can be accomplished much more quickly than movements of a real army of 30,000 men. Moving the Ghost Army was the equivalent of striking a theatrical set in one theater, moving to another town, and setting up the set in a new place. Military encampments, tank placements, dummy airfields, fuel depots, and even a complete harbor were assembled in a matter of hours wherever they were needed.
All competitive battlegrounds are much larger than all the forces occupying them. When moving an army, generals must constantly decide between alternative paths. When two alternatives have different advantages, the ghost army could use one. When both paths appear to be used, the enemy must split their forces to prepare for both. But a ghost army can also occupy an outrageous areas, one that seems impossible. This can completely confuse others about what we are doing.
<Suspend> <authority> <and> <yet> <act>
Divide your troops to plunder the villages.
Ghost Armies do not have to obey established methods, but we must make our illusions believable from all angles. The job of the Ghost Army wasn’t just to fool airplane reconnaissance and casual spectators but to convince professional intelligence officers and spies. The Ghost Army assumed spies were watching, especially from nearby villages. The army had real guards, the same guards used to keep spies away from regular military placements. For their troop movements, they Ghost Army would have the same small convoy of trucks and real equipment, looping over and over again past village observers to emulated a much larger force.
What people hear is as important as what we show them. The 3132 Signal Company was especially important in this work. Military movements can be heard much, much further away than they can be seen. The goal was to create the sound of a moving army and a military camp up to fifteen miles away. This was done using the biggest speakers available at the time. They recorded the noises of real military movements and camps and played them in loops for as long as required. They also had an active telegraph and radio division that imitated the sounds and telegraph styles of real armies.
<First> <know> <detour> <direct> <of> <plan. <is> <victory>
Be the first to find a new route that leads directly to a winning plan.
As always, the issue is never what we do strategically, but how others react. The goal of these deceptions is to get others to react to the deceptive movements as if real. In the war, this made it easier for the real troops to winning real battles facing reduced forces.
<Here> <army> <conflict> <of> <method> <also>
This is how you are successful at armed conflict.
Whenever an opponent attacks a false position that we set up, we succeed in avoiding conflict. This is a common tactic in negotiations, where the first demands that we make are always deceptive, the most we can justify, often what we don’t even want, and never what we really want. We can always surrender these demands because they are ghost armies. Nothing real is invested in them.