Chapter 6: Surprise

Overview

Always mystify, mislead, and surprise the enemy, if possible.

”Lieutenant General Thomas J. Stonewall Jackson ^[1]

To achieve surprise, the practitioner of maneuver warfare must proactively take steps to degrade the quality of information available to the adversary. This multifaceted endeavor shapes the conditions that govern competitive encounters and creates an inequality in situational awareness, the ability to determine the relevance of unfolding events. ^[2] Once the adversary s decision-making process and ability to deploy resources are impaired sufficiently, striking him in an unexpected manner can ensure that his response comes too late to be effective.

Surprise can be achieved using one of three approaches: stealth, ambiguity, or deception. Stealth denies the enemy any knowledge of impending action. ^[3] Denying such critical information to the enemy minimizes or even eliminates the threat of retaliation by keeping rivals in a state of unawareness until sudden, unexpected action is taken. Ambiguity , acting in such a way that the enemy does not know what to expect, ^[4] involves sending an overt signal that confuses rivals and requires them to commit resources in a dispersed fashion to counter a number of potential combat scenarios. Attempting to prepare for every possible contingency spreads those resources so thin that the enemy becomes vulnerable on any number of fronts and the attacker can target the most attractive opportunity. Deception , convincing the enemy that we are going to do something other than what we are actually going to do, ^[5] is designed to cause a rival to deploy resources inappropriately, in defense of a target removed from the actual point of attack. Such a signal can take the form of a deliberate release of misinformation or the more subtle form of distorted information left on display, with the anticipation that the opposition will observe it.

In this chapter we offer six historical examples of the three means to achieving surprise as well as present-day lessons from the Marines. To illustrate stealth, we offer Sam Houston s attack on Mexican general Santa Anna during the Texas War for Independence in 1836 and PepsiCo s launch of Mountain Dew Code Red in 2001. To illustrate ambiguity, we describe the Coalition s attack in Operation Desert Storm in 1991 and Microsoft s strategy of offering across-the-board upgrades for new releases of its products. To illustrate deception, we recount Allied diversionary efforts during the Normandy invasion in World War II and Merrill Lynch s successful efforts to delay competitors responses when it introduced its cash management account in the late 1970s.

The Marine Corps s recent articulation of and commitment to the concept of information operations can serve you as a useful guide to managing information to achieve surprise in the business environment. To this end our intent in this chapter is to use their experiences and some of the lessons learned from our historical examples to suggest ways in which you can safeguard critical company information, use the media and other available channels as means to influence the perceptions and behavior of competitors, and create teams within your organization that are directly responsible for information-centric activities.

^[1] Imboden, John D., B Gen, CSA, Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah.

^[2] United States Marine Corps, Information Operations , MCWP 3 “40, 49.

^[3] Warfighting , 44.

^[4] Ibid.

^[5] Ibid, 39.