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The false front. This is the oldest form of military deception. It originally involved making the enemy believe that one was weaker than in fact was the case.
Deception Tactics
The appearance of weakness often brings out people’s aggressive side, making them drop strategy and prudence for an emotional and violent attack.
Controlling the front you present to the world is the most critical deceptive skill. People respond most directly to what they see,
you need to present a front that does the opposite—disarms suspicions. The best front here is weakness, which will make the other side feel superior to you,
the front of virtue, honesty, and uprightness is often the perfect cover in a political world. These qualities may not seem weak but serve the same function: they disarm people’s suspicions.
Goal is to disarm suspicions
you should present a face to the world that promises the opposite of what you are actually planning.
Tactoc
Camouflage. The ability to blend into the environment is one of the most terrifying forms of military deception.
The camouflage strategy can be applied to daily life in two ways. First, it is always good to be able to blend into the social landscape, to avoid calling attention to yourself unless you choose to do so.
When you talk and act like everyone else, mimicking their belief systems, when you blend into the crowd, you make it impossible for people to read anything particular in your behavior.
Tactic for cross culture adption?
break the pattern, and take them by surprise.
Planted information. People are much more likely to believe something they see with their own eyes than something they are told.
Tactic
Your task as a strategist is to know your enemies well, then use your knowledge to contrive a strategy that goes outside their experience. What they might have read or heard about matters less than their personal experience, which dominates their emotional lives and determines their responses.
Unfold the extraordinary out of the ordinary. To Sun-tzu and the ancient Chinese, doing something extraordinary had little effect without a setup of something ordinary. You had to mix the two—to fix your opponents’ expectations
Tactic
something with no reference to ordinary life is not in fact unconventional, but merely strange.
Once anyone succeeds at something with a specific strategy or method, it is quickly adopted by others and becomes hardened into principle—often to everyone’s detriment when it is applied indiscriminately.
Strategy best practice
When striving to create the extraordinary, always remember: what is crucial is the mental process, not the image or maneuver itself.
What will truly shock and linger long in the mind are those works and ideas that grow out of the soil of the ordinary and banal, that are unexpected, that make us question and contest the very nature of the reality we see around us.
Understand: you cannot win wars without public and political support, but people will balk at joining your side or cause unless it seems righteous and just. And as Luther realized, presenting your cause as just takes strategy and showmanship.
First, it is wise to pick a fight with an enemy that you can portray as authoritarian, hypocritical, and power-hungry. Using all available media, you strike first with a moral offensive against the opponent’s points of vulnerability. You make your language strong and appealing to the masses, and craft it, if you can, to give people the opportunity to express a hostility they already feel.
It is a world not of angels but of angles, where men speak of moral principles but act on power principles; a world where we are always moral and our enemies always immoral. RULES FOR RADICALS, SAUL D. ALINSKY, 1909–1972
First, the moral attack often comes out of left field, having nothing to do with what you imagine the conflict is about.
Second, the attack is often ad hominem; rational argument is met with the emotional and personal. Your character, rather than the issue you are fighting over, becomes the ground of the debate. Your motives are questioned and given the darkest turn.
Tactic
Appearances and reputation rule in today’s world; letting the enemy frame these things to its liking is akin to letting it take the most favorable position on the battlefield. Once the fight for moral terrain has begun, you must fight to occupy the high ground in the same way you would in a shooting war.
If a fight with your enemies is inevitable, always work to make them start it. In 1861, President Abraham Lincoln maneuvered carefully to make the South shoot first at Fort Sumter, initiating the Civil War.
in a conflict that is potentially nasty, in which you are certain the enemy will resort to almost anything, it is best that you go on the offensive with your moral campaign and not wait for their attacks. Poking holes in the other side’s reputation is easier than defending your own.
Tactic
give them no target. Live up to your good name; practice what you preach, at least in public; ally yourself with the most just causes of the day.
Instead of frontal battles, deliver irritating but damaging side attacks and pinprick bites. Frustrated at their inability to use their strength against your vaporous campaign, your opponents will grow irrational and exhausted.
a guerrilla-style campaign is appropriate for the circumstances you are facing. It is especially effective, for instance, against an opponent who is aggressive yet clever—a man like Napoleon. These types cannot stand lack of contact with an enemy. They live to maneuver, outwit, and outhit.
Tactic
The organizational model is the cell—a relatively small group of men and women, tight-knit, dedicated, self-motivated, and spread out.
Bimodal worked as a guerilla campaign but must be replaced by agile processes for the bureacracy to adapt
With his cells in place, Boyd had constant intelligence as to what was going on in the Pentagon and could anticipate the timing and content of the attacks on him. He could also use these cells to spread his influence through word of mouth, infiltrating ever deeper into the bureaucracy. The main point is to avoid an organization’s formal channels and tendency for bigness and concentration.
Always try to ally your guerrilla campaign with a cause you can defend as just and worthy.
The best way to advance your cause with the minimum of effort and bloodshed is to create a constantly shifting network of alliances, getting others to compensate for your deficiencies, do your dirty work, fight your wars, spend energy pulling you forward. The art is in choosing those allies who fit the needs of the moment and fill the gaps in your power. Give them gifts, offer them friendship, help them in time of need—all
forms of reciprocity - for the whole book, create a scale or diagram of urgency versus threat matrix of tactics. Each tactic should cover a range. Use a build if necessary
Show dark side versus light side tactics. Show the gray side which is still in play if doe right
A common mistake is to think that the more allies we have, the better; but quality is more important than quantity. Having numerous allies increases the chances we will become entangled in other people’s wars.
Imortant consideration
we sometimes choose those who seem the friendliest, who we think will be loyal. Our emotions lead us astray.
Understand: the perfect allies are those who give you something you cannot get on your own. They have the resources you lack. They will do your dirty work for you or fight your battles. Like the Swiss, they are not always the most obvious or the most powerful.
Tactic about picking allies
You must think of them as temporary tools. When you no longer need such tools, there is no love lost in dumping them.
A false alliance is created out of an immediate emotional need. It requires that you give up something essential about yourself and makes it impossible for you to make your own decisions.
A true alliance is formed out of mutual self-interest, each side supplying what the other cannot get alone. It does not require you to fuse your own identity with that of a group or pay attention to everyone else’s emotional needs. It allows you autonomy.
And you will find that as the person who is simultaneously autonomous and part of the group, you will become a center of gravity and attention.
Goal
you must learn to make these necessary alliances strategic ones, aligning yourself with people who can give you something you cannot get on your own. This requires that you resist the temptation to let your decisions about alliances be governed by your emotions; your emotional needs are what your personal life
Key tactic
The alliances that will help you most are those involving mutual self-interest.
Tactic
Ideally they are left better for having had the entanglement
he made a point of befriending and allying himself with those at key positions—whether high or low—in the information chain. He was particularly good with older men who enjoyed the company of a lively young man and the role of the father figure giving advice.
Is part of stakeholder alliance to identify those that are particularly ripe for influence?
He would also seek quick victory in battle, even a small one, for no force is more easily discouraged by a defeat than an allied one.
always look at the tangible benefits you will gain from this alliance. If the benefits seem vague or hard to realize, think twice about joining forces.
wary of people who speak well, have apparently charming personalities, and talk about friendship, loyalty, and selflessness: they are most often con artists trying to prey on your emotions.
