Why the Army Needs Deception Groups

Next Army is a collaborative series by CSIS Futures Lab and the Modern War Institute launched in honor of the U.S. Army’s 250th birthday and the Army Transformation Initiative. The commentaries explore how emerging technologies, organizational reforms, and major shifts in the strategic environment will shape the force of 2040 and beyond.

 To survive on the modern battlefield, the U.S. Army needs to revive the use of “ghost armies”—deception units that support large-scale combined arms maneuver. The dual trends of low-cost persistent surveillance (i.e., the transparent battlefield) and precision mass mean that wherever the Army fights, ground units will be targeted by cheap drones and missile salvos. This combination of continuous fires and intelligence make it difficult both to deploy the force and conduct large-scale ground offensive campaigns. Yet, by integrating deception, the Army can disorient the enemy, sow doubt in their sensors, and reduce the efficacy of their fires.

In other words, deception is not a parlor trick; it is a critical campaign function that requires dedicated units, training, and resourcing to shape enemy decisionmaking. What follows argues for institutionalizing that function as a colonel-led Deception Group in the Army Reserve built to support Corps commanders tactically while interfacing with theater‑level entities such as Theater Information Advantage Detachments (TIADs), which can serve as a focal point for coordinating additional cyber effects and inform and influence activities. Building these units in the reserves will both reduce the costs and offer a vehicle for attracting the diverse set of skills required to create battlefield deception.

The Historical Case for Deception Groups

Military deception is a central feature of modern combat operations. In 1944, roughly 1,000 soldiers from the 23rd Headquarters Special Troop—the Ghost Army—arrived in the European theater. Over the next year, they executed more than 20 tactical deception operations in support of the Twelfth Army Group’s drive to Germany. Their tradecraft combined different mediums to sell the deception. Inflatable tanks and gun batteries tricked aerial reconnaissance. Flash simulators mimicked artillery. Spoofed radio nets sounded like division staffs. Recorded soundscapes of motors, bridging, and troop movements played from loudspeakers along the front line confused the enemy as to the location and intention of U.S. forces. In March 1945, during Operation VIERSEN, the 23rd helped mask the Ninth Army’s actual Rhine crossing by concealing the real concentration in XVI Corps while simulating two divisions in XIII Corps, complete with dummy guns, notional headquarters, stepped‑up radio traffic, and other displays to confuse the enemy.

In the Mediterranean theater, the U.S. Navy Beach Jumpers used similar ways and means to set conditions for major amphibious operations like Operations Husky and Avalanche. The unit would amplify limited naval raids to make the enemy think the United States was committing a large force. These diversions helped conceal the time and place of actual landings and kept the axis off balance.

In the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S. Marine Corps created Task Force Troy, a 400-strong composite group built around 1st Battalion, 12th Marines. The unit used mock radio traffic, small-unit maneuvers of tanks and artillery, psychological operations, and artillery raids to make the defending Iraqis think they were a much larger division.

Taken together, these historical examples illustrate three enduring aspects of deception. First, deception works best when it blends physical displays (i.e., inflatable armor parks, dummy artillery, conspicuous tracks), electromagnetic and sonic signatures (i.e., spoofed radio nets, flashes and sounds of firing, broadcast “movement”), and behavioral cues (role‑played headquarters) with limited contact like small raids, feints, and demonstrations. Second, these effects scale only when purpose‑built units are tied directly to the operational plan. The 23rd’s Rhine‑crossing cover (Operation Viersen) masked the Ninth Army’s real crossings. The Beach Jumper feints during Husky and Avalanche pulled coastal defenses the wrong way. Task Force Troy’s decoys and broadcasts fixed Iraqi attention on a frontage that would normally require a division. Finally, the cost‑exchange favors the deceiver: low‑end kits and small teams created delays, reserve misallocation, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) retasking that protected the main effort. Historically, the advantage did not come from exquisite technology. It came from dedicated organizations with the authorities, tradecraft, and kit to synchronize deception with corps‑ and theater‑level schemes of maneuver.

The Doctrinal Case for Deception Groups

Joint and Army doctrine already define what deception must do and how it is executed. What’s missing is a standing formation designed to do it at scale. Joint doctrine defines military deception (MILDEC) as actions to deliberately mislead adversary decisionmakers and codifies the four core techniques (i.e., feints, demonstrations, ruses, and displays) that planners synchronize with operations, intelligence, operations security (OPSEC), and assessments. Army doctrine translates that joint framework for Army commanders and staffs, directing them to plan, coordinate, execute, synchronize, and assess deception across all phases of an operation. In other words, doctrine makes deception a repeatable, commander‑driven process and places it alongside other information‑related capabilities that must be integrated to shape an adversary’s choices.

Those doctrinal requirements imply a need for tailored organizations to support deception. Executing displays (e.g., physical and electromagnetic portrayals of forces), staging demonstrations and feints, and running ruses in radio and communications patterns—while maintaining tight OPSEC and collecting evidence of adversary reactions—requires distinct capabilities and formations. Units need everything from decoy fabrication kits to false radio networks and a single owner to train, equip, and certify them. A group‑level (i.e., O6/Colonel-led) formation provides that owner. It can hold the Army’s deception tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) and signature libraries; field and sustain specialized kits; enforce need‑to‑know distribution; and generate multiple subordinate elements to support different Corps simultaneously.

Finally, deception today lives inside broader operations in the information environment. That means a Corps‑supporting Deception Group must also plug into theater entities that plan and deliver information effects at scale—most notably TIADs and Marine Corps Information Groups. TIADs exist to sense, understand, and deliver information effects for theater and transregional problems. Pairing them with a Deception Group ensures MILDEC stories are synchronized with cyber, electronic warfare (EW), and influence lines; deconflicted across echelons; and instrumented to support operational assessments and adjustments. This Corps–theater bridge is not a luxury; it is how doctrine’s “integrate and assess” mandate becomes a campaign function instead of a one‑off stunt.

How to Build and Field Deception Groups in the Next Three Years

First, the Army should stand up a colonel-led Deception Group in the Army Reserve and build it around the right mix of combat support capabilities. The Reserve keeps fixed costs down and draws on the exact civilian skills this mission needs: signals teams that understand how to generate and protect signatures; engineers who can move, hide, and fabricate at speed; and intelligence detachments that know how to analyze the enemy and measure reactions. The formation can even add psychological operations (PSYOP) and military information support operations (MISO) elements to push the story into the human domain. Subordinate deception squadrons would be habitually aligned to Corps headquarters, with planners embedded in G‑2 and G‑3 shops. A small theater synchronization cell inside the group would connect to TIADS and other information formations so cyber, electronic warfare, and influence activities do not work at cross‑purposes. Even in its initial form, the group should field a minimum kit that includes modular decoys for vehicles, logistics sites, and command posts; portable signature generations (e.g., radio frequency, infrared, electro‑optical, and acoustic) alongside mixed fleets of attritable uncrewed systems to put them into position; and an expeditionary fabrication lab that helps units learn by doing rather than by briefing.

Second, the Army should integrate the new Deception Group into major exercises as a transformation‑in‑contact event that hones the right mix of people, equipment, and tactics. Deception concepts that look elegant on a whiteboard have to survive the friction of Combat Training Center rotations and joint exercises. That means rehearsing field‑expedient decoys, from inflatables to improvised antenna farms, and fake radio traffic that mirrors the cadence of actual division headquarters. It means reviving Ghost Army techniques like flash simulators, recorded movement and bridging, and visible tracks in mud and snow, and then updating them for today’s sensors. Crucially, each event should be instrumented. Commanders need data on how long it takes to emplace a deception package, how often opposing forces retask intelligence assets based on the ruse, how reserves move in response, and how long it takes analysts to realize they were chasing ghosts. Those metrics drive deliberate changes to billet structure, payload mixes, and the size of the fabrication cell, while helping refine a common deception annex template and signature library that any Corps can pull off the shelf.

Third, building Deception Groups is a way to tie the Army Transformation Initiative directly to multipurpose small uncrewed systems. Just as the Beach Jumpers used small boats and limited raids to sell the fiction of a major amphibious landing, the group can turn small drones into the physical “touch” that makes a deception story real. The goal is a family of payload‑agnostic air and ground systems that can carry modules that replicate ground convoys for enemy sensors, repeat or spoof headquarters traffic, and even lure enemy munitions into striking low-cost decoys. Similar to Task Force Troy, a well‑designed deception package might open with uncrewed systems projecting movement sounds and spoofed communications, followed by decoy motor pools “warming up” in the infrared spectrum, and ending with a handful of small strikes that look like the leading edge of a larger attack. When those sequences are paired with physical decoys, PSYOP cues, and TIAD‑synchronized information effects, the result is not a one‑off trick. It becomes a repeatable Corps‑level capability that turns cheap robots and clever tradecraft into time, space, and confusion the Army can use in support of large-scale combat operations.

Conclusion: Fielding the First Ghosts by 2027

The Army does not have the luxury of treating deception as an interesting historical vignette or a doctrinal sidebar. Transparent battlefields and precision mass are already here. Adversaries are wiring drones, commercial space, and long‑range fires into kill webs designed to find and finish U.S. forces before they can build combat power. The only way to consistently win time and space in that environment is to change what the enemy sees and, more importantly, what the enemy thinks is happening. That requires more than clever staff work. It requires organizations built from the ground up to live in the gaps between sensors and decisions.

A Deception Group in the Army Reserve is a concrete way to start. It translates the Ghost Army, the Beach Jumpers, and Task Force Troy into a modern formation that aligns with existing doctrine, plugs into Corps and theater structures, and uses tools the Army is already buying. The concept is not exotic. It is a colonel‑led headquarters with a handful of squadrons, a modest fabrication and signature‑generation kit, and a mandate to show up at major exercises to refine the art of confusing the enemy and injecting friction into the plans. The payoff is disproportionately large. The enemy risks misallocating its reserves, wasting intelligence collection assets, and diverting fires, thus providing windows of opportunity for combined arms maneuver.

Benjamin Jensen is director of the Futures Lab and a senior fellow for the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.