Shock and awe: the effects of disinformation in military confrontation

Abstract

This paper analyzes the effects of disinformation in a military conflict. If one army distorts its opponents' perception of its ability, this will create a greater propensity for soldiers on the opposing side to surrender. The sender of disinformation will thus have a greater probability of victory. However, disinformation may also lengthen the battle and increase the total number of casualties. This depends not only on the degree of disinformation but also on whether and to what extent the sender of disinformation is superior to the receiver.

Keywords:

• asymmetric information
• belief
• updating
• disinformation
• warfare

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank two anonymous referees for helpful comments.

Notes on contributor

Matthew Clements is an Associate Professor of Economics at St. Edward's University. He blogs at http://www.phlegmaticblog.com/.

Notes

1. The general aim of shock and awe, according to Ullman and Wade (2003), is ‘to affect the will, perception, and understanding of the adversary to fight’ (xxiv). There are a number of potential facets of such a strategy, any subset of which might be employed. To what extent the American military strategy in Iraq depended on disinformation is debatable. The purpose of this paper is to consider the effects of disinformation in whatever context it might be used, not to provide a comprehensive or definitive analysis of the conflict in Iraq.

2. The results hold as long as there is not too much mass in the tails of the valor distribution.

3. It is possible for any given soldier's valor to equal 1, and this can be taken to mean that the soldier will fight even in the face of certain death. In terms of the model, the soldier would technically be indifferent between fighting and surrendering, but the resolution of this indifference does not affect the results.

4. There need only be one source of heterogeneity in the model to allow this; heterogeneity of a_i complicates the model substantially but does not add any insight. Similar complications arise if the two sides have entirely different distributions of valor, but again without significant gain in insight.

5. In the proofs of the results, I will assume that the probability of one side's winning includes the probability of a draw (where both sides' masses fall below ε during the same period). In most cases, the probability of a draw is arbitrarily small.

6. This is the simplest possible informational structure: all soldiers are unaware of the extent of disinformation and update beliefs in a limited way. If soldiers' beliefs were more complex – e.g., if they were able to draw inferences about disinformation, or about their own propensity to die in future periods – the qualitative changes in the results below would generally be predictable. In particular, disinformation would be less effective in the presence of more sophisticated beliefs.