The Utility of Military Deception and Information Operations in Modern Warfare
by John Wirges
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06.26.2025 at 06:00am
The Utility of Military Deception and Information Operations in Modern Warfare Image
Antonov AN-2 by common, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Introduction
Sun Tzu believed in the importance of the information environment and recognized that the quickest way to achieve military victory was to attack only when the adversary was confused, disoriented, and weakened. While the revolution in military affairs offered promises of a transparent battlefield, modern conflicts such as the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War and the ongoing Russo-Ukraine War prove that Sun Tzu’s work remains as relevant today as it was in ancient China. Advances in technology over the last twenty years have led to unforeseen changes in the modern battlespace. Urbanization trends and social media have changed the relationship between combatants and non-combatants. Modern electronic warfare, long-range missiles, and unmanned systems have been integrated into cohesive sensor-to-shooter systems known as kill webs. While practitioners have seen kill webs and drones leveraged in Nagorno-Karabakh and Ukraine, these modern conflicts also indicate an increased importance for information warfare. Modern technologies have made skills such as military deception, public affairs, civil-military engagement, and cyber activities necessary to outpace enemy decision-making cycles, protect friendly forces, and achieve political goals of conflict within a civil component.
Understanding the Information Environment
The information environment (IE) is a key component of the military’s operational environment (OE). An OE is best described as the aggregate of all conditions bearing on a military commander. The IE comprises all aspects of human attitudes, behaviors, and perceptions, and is a critical component of conflict. Successful operations in the information environment can neutralize an enemy’s will and capabilities to fight, provide offramps for conflict resolution, deceive enemy decision-makers to create surprise, and deny an enemy freedom of maneuver in cyberspace and across the electromagnetic spectrum (EMS)—the spectrum of radio activity encompassing radio, x-ray, and gamma wavelengths. The Russo-Ukrainian War and Second Nagorno-Karabakh War have provided key insights into how modern technologies and human behaviors have changed the IE’s relationship with war.
These two modern conflicts have varied in intensity, duration, and impact on civilian populations; however, both have leveraged military deception and non-traditional media to engage with civil populations, target enemy forces, and control narratives to varying degrees of success. One of the major takeaways from the Nagorno-Karabakh and Russo-Ukrainian Wars is that psychological warfare and information operations have become key to influencing foreign audiences and creating convergence windows for modern offensive weapons. In modern conflict, echelons above brigade are increasingly relying on creating windows of time to employ multiple systems across land, sea, air, space, and cyber domains to exploit enemy weaknesses. Many of these convergence capabilities rely on “deep fires,” which are long-range kinetic and non-kinetic effects delivered into an environment that can enable movement and maneuver. Both conflicts have also shown that operations in the information environment offer creative options enabling commanders to converge multidomain effects.
Military Deception and Psychological Warfare
https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/06/26/the-utility-of-military-deception/
