Deception as a Pervasive and Elemental Force | Small Wars Journal

"A key effect of operating in the mass urban agglomeration challenges conventional thinking that opposing commanders will seek combat supremacy, by imposing deception and artificial realties into the opposing force’s OODA loops. However, these very operations are themselves immersed in the 24/7 info sphere generated by the mass urban agglomeration. Constant coverage from blogging and phones, where news, fake-news and conflicting facts risk drowning-out a coherent operational picture. Creating in the end the ‘new irrational sphere’." *

There are people in the Intelligence Community who live in ivory towers and this author sounds just like one. I would think he was more scholarly if he learned how to spell check and paid more attention to grammar and punctuation, instead of filling pages with bloviated bull$#!4 trying to sound all academic and scholarly.

As an infantry commander, I would much prefer to read this several page literary "masterpiece" in plain English and cut down to about two paragraphs.

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* As an aside, attention to detail is important when you are publishing your work and in addition to spell checking, you need to grammar check your work. In the above case, he misspelled a word but it was still in the dictionary and got through the filters. Grammarly would have caught the spelling error and punctuation errors in the above selection.

Normally I wouldn't pay as much to the author's spelling and grammar... If this was an impromptu brief, and especially if this was an email response or response on social media, these mistakes can and should be overlooked. However, when you publish, you have more burden to be thorough, paying particular attention to brevity and attention to detail...

After all the reading I do these days - I disregard spelling when it comes from authors using other than American English.. and this guy was an Aussie. I thought the article was a good read... but at same time it frustrated me when he did not apply the doctrine terms to what he was describing - tactical/operational/strategic. There is no universal... for in deception - you are effectively attempting to deceive a small number of key leaders -- and force them to see something that is not. That portion is missing... and I concur with your ivory tower remark on that portion.. since anyone trained in deception and a student of it knows your real focus in deception planning.. everything else is structured to effect that.