Michael Posey, Chase Metcalf
In June 2025, when President Donald Trump launched strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, the B-2s that flew Operation Midnight Hammer employed military deception to ensure Iran remained clueless as to where and when they would be hit. We can expect the future of warfare to continue to require more military deception, where we remain “predictably unpredictable” at the operational level of war. We stand at a strategic inflection point, where advances in cyber, space, artificial intelligence, and information systems foment a rapidly changing character of war. Adversaries will no longer fight with tanks, ships, and aircraft alone. Instead, we should expect them to blend these traditional capabilities with electromagnetic warfare and a sea of misinformation to erode U.S. tactical overmatch. In this evolving environment, the necessity of military deception has risen to an operational imperative. As modern battlefields become increasingly saturated with sensors and surveillance, commanders who master the art of deception will seize the initiative and protect their combat power.
Given the changing character of war, two RAND scholars asserted that “successful deception activities enhance force protection, preserve combat power, and add complexity for the adversary,” especially as near-peer competitors field ubiquitous sensing systems. Likewise, Major General Paul Stanton, commander of the Army Cyber Center of Excellence, leads efforts to field electromagnetic-spectrum decoys and obfuscators that “raise the noise floor” around friendly forces, making them visible only as ambiguous signatures rather than precise targets. However, some argue that ubiquitous overhead and drone sensors have created battlefield transparency, negating the effects of military deception. Nevertheless, these arguments overlook two fundamental aspects of the art of deception: the vulnerability of an adversary’s decision-making and the importance of operational security.
Figure 1: Ubiquitous drones make the battlefield increasingly transparent.
Battlefield Transparency – Reality or Myth
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