2023-05-06 15:30:56
“All art of war is based on deception. » The principle enunciated by Sun Tzu in Ve century has not aged a bit. With battlefields increasingly exposed to means of observation, the ability to decoy the enemy has even regained its interest. And the war in Ukraine is the perfect embodiment of this.
Preserve real equipment
“Ukrainian decoys are mainly used to improve the “survivability” of certain very high value-added equipment such as Himars – these multiple rocket launchers delivered by the Americans, confirms Colonel Rémy Hémez (1), an officer in the French army and former researcher seconded to the French Institute for International Relations (Ifri). The idea is to improve the chances of survival of these decisive weapons by offering alternative targets to the Russians. »
Ces “deception operations” (set of tactics intended to deceive the enemy) allow “both to avoid the destruction of its own equipment and to encourage the adversary to waste its ammunition”. On the Russian side, the maskirovka (literally “camouflage”) is a long tradition of strategic cunning and dissimulation inherited from the middle of the Middle Ages. Today, in addition to its education in officer schools, the army even has a corps in the Moscow region specially dedicated to these questions: the 45th Independent Camouflage Regiment.
For lack of being able to conceal, it is necessary to simulate
Viktor Talanov, boss of the Czech company Inflatech, which manufactures inflatable military decoys, is formal: “It is no longer possible to camouflage large armored vehicles or hide from modern military intelligence. The only way to increase your survivability is to trick. » The intelligence and observation capabilities made possible by drones are such that the Ukrainian battlefield is a good reflection of the era of total visibility in which modern warfare takes place. If one cannot conceal, one must therefore simulate. Impossible then not to think of the inflatable and portable tanks of the vast diversionary operation Fortitudeand his fake landing in Pas-de-Calais in 1944.
But, as Colonel Rémy Hémez points out, tactical decoys have evolved in step with technological advances. “Until very recently, decoys were essentially visual and intended to deceive the ability to observe the battlefield. Now, they increasingly tend to be multispectral: they will no longer only deceive human vision, but also have a thermal signature (signs of human heat), electromagnetic (simulation of radio waves) or acoustic (imitation of noise engine, for example). »
Manual
You still need to know how to use it. “For it to be effective, the lure must be placed in a certain environment, insists the soldier and former researcher. If you put an inflatable tank in the middle of nowhere with no trace or sign of military activity around, any average military observer will know immediately that it is a decoy. On the other hand, if you put this same tank in a realistic combat position, that you tried to camouflage it with a net or other and that you created tracks of caterpillars nearby, there, you will more likely succeed in deceiving your opponent. »
Despite the proven effectiveness of this real-fake military equipment, decoys struggle to be fully integrated into the strategic thinking of armies. “General staff sometimes find it hard to convince themselves that it’s something fundamentally useful on the battlefield: this image of the inflatable tank tends to look like a fun game or a children’s toy, but it turns out to be today a real military asset. Ukraine, through very concrete examples of the use of decoys in combat zones, is re-interesting Western armies on this subject. explains Rémy Hémez.
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