ELEMENTOS DE UNA CENTRAL DE GENERACIÓN FOTOVOLTAICA

The most important treatise from Ancient Rome devoted to the topic of military deception is a work entitled Strategematon (stratagems), written by Sextus Julius Frontius

at the end of the 1st _{century A.D.}3 _{Frontinus’s stated purpose was to collect the most}

notable historical examples of military trickery and cunning and to catalogue them in a single volume.4 _{The text was influential not for its analysis or theory, but rather for the}

various instances of military deception it provided. These examples serve to highlight the some of the fundamental types of military deception common to war. To illustrate these varieties, this section will group them under the four basic deception techniques

presented in current U. S. military doctrine: the feint, demonstration, ruse, and display.5

The first two techniques, feints and demonstrations, attempt to deceive by arraying one’s own military forces in a way that provokes a favorable enemy reaction.

3 _{Barton Whaley, Stratagem: Deception and Surprise in War (Boston: Artech House, 2007), 47.} 4 _{Sextus Julius Frontinus, The Stratagems, trans. Charles Bennett(Cambridge: Harvard University}

Press,1925; London: William Heinemann, 1961), I, 3-7.

The difference between the two is that a feint involves a deliberate move to engage or come into contact with one’s enemy, whereas a demonstration does not. By definition, a feint is an attack conducted with the purpose of deceiving one’s enemy as to the actual location or time of the main attack.6 _{Frontius presents the following example of a feint}

used to ambush enemy troops in pursuit:

Sempronius Gracchus, when waging war against the Celtiberians… [sent] out light-armed troops to harass the enemy and retreat forthwith, [which] caused the enemy to come out; whereupon he attacked them before they could form, and crushed them so completely that he also captured their camp.7

In this case, Gracchus took advantage of the fact that his enemy would be eager to pursue a retreating foe, and he arrayed his forces in such a way as to cause the Celtiberians to believe that they were up against a weaker opponent. This example illustrates a feint because Gracchus’s troops initiated the deception by launching an attack. Had Gracchus not attacked first with his lightly-armed troops but had only baited his enemy by making his troops seem vulnerable, the action might have instead been a demonstration (if no contact with the enemy was intended).8

The third technique presented in current U.S. military doctrine is the ruse, broadly defined as a trick or stratagem used to gain a favorable advantage by deceiving one’s adversary and inciting him to act in a way that for the enemy is self-destructive.9 _The

cleverness of a ruse is often its distinguishing feature. Frontinus provides the following example:

6 _Ibid.

7 _{Frontinus, II v 3, 135.}

8 _{U.S. military doctrine defines a demonstration as a show of force (a presentation of military capability)}

that does not involve an attack but that deceives one’s adversary in order to gain a favorable advantage. Ibid.

27

Leptines, the Syracusan… when waging war against the Carthaginians, ordered his own lands to be laid waste and certain farm-houses and forts to be set on fire. The Carthaginians, thinking this was done by their own men, went out themselves also to help whereupon they were set upon by men lying in wait, and were put to rout.10

The Carthaginians never imagined that Leptines would burn his own forts and farmhouses, and because of this made an erroneous assumption, one that led to their demise. Unlike Gracchus’s feint, the success of Leptines’s ruse did not rely on the deceptive way in which he deployed his forces into battle but rather on the misleading picture he painted for his adversary. Leptines was successful because his enemies

mistakenly interpreted the reason the forts and farms were burning, whereby they fell into Leptines’s trap.

The last technique given in U.S. military doctrine is the display, which involves the use of simulations and disguises to cause an enemy to misinterpret the true disposition of one’s own forces.11 _{Displays can be accomplished in two ways: simulations and}

disguises. Simulations differ from disguises in that simulations give the impression that military capability exists when it does not, whereas disguises hide capability that is actually present. The following example from Frontinus involves a display by simulating strength:

Alexander of Macedon, when the enemy had fortified their camp on a lofty wooded eminence, withdrew a portion of his forces, and commanded those whom he left to kindle fires as usual, and thus to give the impression of the complete army. He himself, leading his forces around through untraveled regions, attacked the enemy and dislodged them from their commanding position.12

10 _{Frontinus II v 11, 139.} 11 _{JP 3-13.4, I-9.} 

By keeping his army’s campfires lit, Alexander simulated the appearance that his entire force remained in camp when it had actually moved. Alexander’s display thus masked both his intentions and his true capabilities from the enemy, allowing him to gain the advantage in the attack by taking his unprepared enemy by surprise.

Taken together, these four deception techniques have one element in common: the goal of hiding one’s true intentions from one’s adversary in order to gain a military advantage. Because belligerents, quite naturally, endeavor to watch each other closely in order to gain the upper hand and because they are continuously making judgments and assumptions based upon the way their enemy appears to them, the concealment of one’s purposes and capabilities has long been recognized as a vital element of successful warfare. In this way, fighting wars is very similar to football and other games involving trickery.13 _{In both cases, stratagem and deception aim to mask, distract, desensitize, and}

confuse one’s adversary in order to gain the upper hand and achieve victory.