9:10PM - Pfff ... that's optimistic
"The intent was to win not only the physical fight but the fight of the mind: to ensure that the will of the adversary was compelled to accept the outcome, even before the first shots were fired. Maskirovka in application would change the calculus of combat in our favor against technically superior western forces. When the shots were fired, the intelligence that drove BLUFOR targeting was imprecise enough for our key systems to survive. This I would learn was the core of the concept of Maskirovka.
Maskirovka-applied meant the inclusion of deception measures, information operations/warfare, psychological operations, and outright propaganda to influence the outcome of our battles. This also meant radio broadcasts, leaflets, false news stories planted in the rotation’s mock newspapers, influencing local leaders, and maintaining physical deception measures. The collective intent for us, at least at the tactical level, was to place in doubt the true nature of our strengths, hide any weaknesses or vulnerabilities, take advantage of ‘non-traditional’ effects on the battlefield and influence the outcome by placing doubt in the minds of our ‘enemy’ leadership.
[We] were permitted to target the leadership, running false news about this battalion commander or that brigade commander, even before the tactical play had begun. News travels fast in the Soldier network when we plant stories that their command graduated at the bottom of their particular class at West Point; that they wrote their CGSC or War College papers on “Why We Need Better Army Soldiers” (every Soldier just loves to hear that their leadership doesn’t believe in them); or that the leaders had some minor fracas with the law in their past. Some of these stories were true; others were not, but that was not the point. We were able to produce radio segments that overstated our current capabilities (seeding doubt) while undercutting, with a great degree of accuracy of information, the operational readiness of units preparing to ‘fight’ us in the upcoming mock battles (degrading trust). Many of the scenarios for our upcoming battles called for the employment of Civilians on the Battlefield (COBSs). COBs planted stories or influenced our enemies as they began to engage with them - we would make great use of these partisan forces, for eventually, NATO units would invariably do something to turn the sentiment against them and for us, the bad guys.
We would station forces in one place, then move them in the morning to another assembly area and then do it again, making it very difficult to pin down where our center of mass truly was. We would stage maneuvers that to the onlooker were confusing demonstrations of capability, but not signaling any direct intent. We would mass artillery fires into open fields for no reason, then quickly displace, well away from but within observation of BLUFOR (the U.S./NATO forces) to test their counter fire response times. We would establish fake tanks and IFVs in easily detectable locations: fakes designed to draw attention away, by diverting our opponent’s intelligence assets, from the position of our real forces.
To continue to deceive our foes of our true intent, we would establish fake command and control facilities, with multiple antennae emitting perpetual fake RF energy, deceiving the intelligence of our opponents looking to template where we would command and control the fight. We would both listen into and jam enemy communications with rudimentary electronic warfare capabilities, degrading their ability to even use a radio. We would ‘drop’ lost CDs and portable media in the hopes that our adversaries would pick them up, install them, and immediately infect their command and control systems with malicious code (this part was notional, of course) designed to shut down units’ abilities to fight. Or, we would just ‘drop’ fake concept graphics of our intent in public places know to be used by U.S. Soldiers in the hopes that some unsuspecting GI would find them and alert his chain of command.
During reconnaissance missions of BLUFOR defenses, we would place actual NATO mine warning signs in places where there were no minefields so that our enemies would wake up thinking that their defenses got better overnight, making them complacent because of course, no one checked. While establishing defenses, we likewise established fake minefields to deceive reconnaissance elements and then “move” the minefields, since the fakes were usually just wooden dowels sticking out of the ground made to look like a buried anti-tank mine was beneath the surface (much too easy to just put the dowels in the ground under limited visibility conditions without actually putting in the anti-tank mines; but hey, it looks the same).
Lastly, for every rotational scenario we worked hard to keep COBs on our side, ensuring a compliant population--or at least a fearful one—did not support NATO forces, regardless of how legitimate their mission.
These and other examples set conditions for our forces to rapidly defeat NATO elements almost every time, though most NATO/U.S. units had a decisive technological edge over our formations. [..] We were able to influence the outcome by either denying our adversary the clear intelligence they needed to win or to simply break down the command and control of organizations [..]. Maskirovka provided me options while simultaneously degrading options in my opponents simply because we jammed up their decision cycles with constant doubt. [..] It remains a large “hole in our swing”, that U.S. and NATO tactical and operational units have great difficulty covering.( ... tālāk ... )
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