deception

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Reality or simulation? Is there a difference?

The Endorian Sorceress Causes the Shade of Samuel by Dmitry Nikiforovich Martyanov, 1857. Shutterstock image.

About a month ago, German physicist Sabine Hossenfelder ran a YouTube video “Physicists Prove That Universe is not a Simulation.” As I understand the argument, they showed that if the universe were a simulation, it would have to obey the conclusions of Gödel’s Theorem, but that the real, observable universe doesn’t.

Dr. Hossenfelder wasn’t entirely convinced, and I’m certainly not qualified to judge, but check it out for yourself.

Then, just a few days ago, Mark McGrath and Ponch Rivera posted a No Way Out podcast, “Beyond the Linear OODA Loop: Jon Becker on Authentic Boyd Strategies,” where their guest maintains that we are living in a simulation. So what gives?

The difference is that Becker is not addressing the entire physical universe but is echoing John Boyd’s observation that:

To make these timely decisions implies that we must be able to form mental concepts of observed reality, as we perceive it, and be able to change these concepts as reality itself appears to change. The concepts can then be used as decision models for improving our capacity for independent action. “Destruction and Creation,” p. 2.

In other words, what we are living in is a simulated world generated by our mental models, and so our (simulated) world is indeed governed by Gödel’s Theorem. Becker, then, draws some interesting conclusions about how to live and operate in this environment.

Recognizing that we are living in a simulation, there are things we can do. We can not only mitigate the effects on ourselves by following Becker’s suggestions — e.g., recognize the effects of our egos, incorporate a range of perspectives (including those from the external environment), and always remember that orientation is a process and not a picture — but also exploit the fact that our impression of the unfolding situation is a simulation. We can do this in at least a couple of ways: internally to our organization as leadership and externally to it, as strategy. With John Boyd, everything is about mitigating and exploiting, with the latter providing the schwerpunkt.

Back in 2022, I did a presentation on the internal implications — that is, on leadership — of living in a simulation. After watching Jon’s podcast, I made a few updates to the notes accompanying that presentation. The fundamental conclusions, though, haven’t changed. For millennia, there have been people who recognized that what we regard as reality is actually a mental construct. Over the centuries, some of these folks evolved tools for manipulating this fact. So it stands to reason that leaders and strategists today could benefit from exploiting these tools. We refer to many of these as “magic.”

Think of them as the chi to the cheng you find in most management, leadership, and strategy tomes. Serious leadership gurus and strategists have dismissed them as tricks or “slight-of-hand.” Entertainment but good for little else. But the deeper question is, “Why do they work?” And why do they work even though you know the performer on stage is trying to fool you? It’s just like in a conflict: Your opponent knows you’re trying to deceive them. But you have to do it, anyway. If you look carefully, you’ll find that many of the most successful leaders down through history have found these techniques and made good use of them.

You can download the presentation here, and the notes, which I strongly recommend because I don’t think the presentation by itself will make a lot of sense, here. The Witch of Endor, by the way, makes her appearance on slide 53.

[The links in the paragraph above go to the versions that were current when this column was published in December 2025. Any more recent versions are posted on our Articles page.]

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A few thoughts on “Speed versus Quickness”

Credit: Oxford, Bodleian Library, LP 186

Larry Kummer*
August 25, 2025

Perhaps Chuck is over-conceptualizing the D-Day operations. The whole D-day deception – Operation Fortitude – is the stuff of legend. But there is little evidence that it affected German deployments in a meaningful way. A bigger advantage of the Allies was Hitler’s bizarre command structure for the defense.

As for D-Day, the accounts differ in their key details. Hitler was by then a meth-head, possibly sedated around 3 am by his personal physician, Dr. Theodor Morrell. When the call came at roughly 6 am about activity at Normandy, it is uncertain if he could have been awakened. Perhaps his aids didn’t try. He got the news at roughly noon, along with his generals’ request for permission to move the tanks. Sometime that afternoon Hitler ordered the tanks unleashed.

How long did Fortitude’s deception ops delay Hitler’s response? If the tanks had been released at noon – a few hours earlier, in full daylight, fully exposed to Allies’ air power – how would it have affected the outcome? We can only guess.

I said that perhaps Chuck “over-conceptualized” those events. He described them as a very high-level abstraction – and, like all such, of value to the extent it is useful. Here, I’ll offer another perspective that is simpler and, in my opinion, equally useful. As Boyd said, you have to slice the problem from many different directions.

Another example of conflating OODA loops with a simple action is Operation Mincemeat, intended to confuse the Germans about the invasion of Sicily. Like Fortitude, it was wildly complicated. But with a different twist in the ending, the story of which doesn’t require OODA loops.

Mincemeat had excellent results. A key part was “The Man Who Never Was,” a fake British officer whose corpse washed up on the Spanish coast with secret documents in his pocket. But the two key Germans in Spain who forwarded this hot info to Berlin saw through the trick. Desperate to justify their cushy jobs, however, they reported their actions as a valuable opportunity. If they had been more honest and loyal, this might have alerted the Germans to Sicily as our next target.

History is contingent: The German’s D-Day alert did not reach the Normandy zone; two corrupt Germans did not blow the whistle on Mincemeat. These are factors that move history.

In the present day, discussions of 4GW (and 5GW and 6GW) that center on OODA loops show the decay of the military arts in America: bizarrely abstract and very complex. Suitable for a nation that tied in Korea and lost every significant war in the following 70 years.

Oddly, the winners in those wars did so without such awesome PhD-level theories.

Part of our problem stems from a focus on the wrong aspects of Boyd’s theories, like Paleolithic hunters given a telescope – who then use it as a microscope. I recommend we broaden our approach to Boyd. For example, we should take to heart his description of grand strategy in Patterns of Conflict, slide 139:

  • Increase our solidarity, our internal cohesion.
  • Weaken our opponents’ resolve and internal cohesion.
  • Strengthen our allies’ relationships to us.
  • Attract uncommitted states to our cause. End conflicts on favorable terms, without sowing the seeds for future conflicts.

It’s worth pointing out that this section culminates in his “Theme for Vitality and Growth,” slide 144, whose purpose is nothing less than to “Improve fitness as an organic whole to shape and expand influence or power over the course of events in the world.” The acronym “OODA” doesn’t appear anywhere on that slide.

In fact, my candidate for Boyd’s greatest insight applies at all levels, from building a strong society, to grand strategy, to building a military, to tactics:

“People, Ideas, and Hardware. ‘In that order!’ the late Col John R. Boyd, USAF, would thunder at his audiences.”

Ideas spread best when in their simplest (or core) form. Christianity had its fastest rate of growth of converts before the Gospels were written, telling people little more than ‘Christ died for our sins and rose again.’ Another way to say this: The passages I quote are Boyd 101. Only when those are mastered should his disciples attempt to teach Boyd 201. That time might be many years in the future.

*Larry Kummer is the editor of the Fabius Maximus website, writing about these matters since 2003 (often presciently). [Editor’s note: His description. I am not prone to disagree, although one must contend with the blind hog syndrome.]

Here are some listings of posts on his site:

On OODA Loops (warning, Chuck and I are both featured, more prominently than we deserve):

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22ooda+loop%22+site%3Afabiusmaximus.com

On 4GW:

Military theory & practice

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All Warfare is Based Upon …

Utagawa Kuniyoshi, The Famous Samurai: Miyamoto Musashi (c. 1850)

The best strategist is not the one who knows he must deceive the enemy but the one who knows how to do it. Polish author Stanislaw Lem (1921 – 2006)

All war, Sun Tzu once observed, is based upon deception. And in keeping with Lem’s pronouncement, he knew how to do it:

The task of a military operation is to accord deceptively with the intentions of the enemy. The Art of War, Chapter 11 (Cleary trans)

Like so much of Eastern philosophy, this bears deep thought,  For one thing, what do we mean by “deception”?  Is it primarily camouflage, disguising ourselves so that the opponent does not recognize us? Feinting in one direction while we attack in another? Publicly making misleading statements about our intentions?  All of these are deceptive, of course, but they all focus on what we’re doing, what our intentions are.  Sun Tzu, however, talks about the intentions of the enemy.  John Boyd’s definition captures this distinction:

An impression of events as they are not. Patterns, 115

Deception: Merely a Prerequisite for Surprise?

As Boyd explained it, to deceive an opponent, you must create a view of the world in his mind — his orientation — that is logical, compelling, and validated by observation, but which is wrong.  The enemy will intend to act on this impression, allowing you to, for example, trap or ambush him or attack in an unexpected, direction.  The key is knowing what his impressions, and thus his intentions, are.

How do we know “the intentions of the enemy”? One way is through your knowledge of the opponent, your fingerspitzengefuhl of how they act in various situations.  

If I was him, what would I most want me to do? Easy, I thought. So I did it.  K. J. Parker, Savages, Kindle Ed, Loc 619.

A new approach

But there is another, more powerful and more reliable way of knowing opponents’ intentions: You be the one who put them there.

His primary target is the mind of the opposing commander … Sun Tzu realized that an indispensable preliminary to battle was to attack the mind of the enemy.  Samuel B. Griffith, in his introduction to The Art of War.

In other words, the blokes and boffins on His Majesty’s Service had tailored their program of deception to the peculiar tastes of their famous adversary.  Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson on (successful) British attempts to shape Rommel’s impressions in 1941.

The idea is more powerful than just setting up the opponent for surprise. You can use deception to control the intentions, and thus the actions, of your opponents:

You are the general. The enemy are soldiers under your command.  Miyamoto Musashi, Book of 5 Rings (1645) trans Brown, et al., 1982.

Think Stork taking over the band in Animal House. Once you achieve this degree of mastery over the opponent, there is hardly any limit to the bad mental and moral conditions you can inflict, including ambiguity, hesitation, and destruction of the opponent’s cohesion. 

Bottom Line

Most of my readers will be familiar with these effects on the mental capabilities of the opposing side. So, here’s my main point. When we talk about creating impressions in other peoples’ minds, we’re talking mind control, or as it is often called, mentalism. There are people who do this for a living.

It seems reasonable to see if we can borrow some concepts from them.

Watch the this short YouTube video:  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo5BRAKvJoA

Now, watch it again, and this time pay close attention to their explanation of why it works:  “We’re going to give the audience a story they can tell themselves …”  where part of that story is the intention: “You’re telling yourself that at no time will you allow your attention …”  Once they get to this point,

Penn and Teller accord deceptively with that intention. It’s important to note that Penn and Teller make a distinction between the deceptive actions we carry out and true deception, which is in the mind of the target, “That doesn’t fool anyone …”

I’ve put a few more observations on their act in the Notes to my presentation The Lost Arts of Leadership, and you can download both from our Articles page.  Please do.

Here’s a more complex example involving not only the target but creating a team to exploit the target’s intention. It is one of the amazing and informative videos on the YouTube channel of the modern British mentalist, Derren Brown. Pay close attention to the first half, “The Gallery.”  It’s about an hour long, but in addition to being extremely entertaining, it illustrates the idea of what Penn and Teller call a “curating of attention,” that is, nurturing a story, an intention, in your subject’s mind, and then exploiting it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWiKVAQRT4g

If strategy is deception, and deception is mind control, then strategy is mind control.

According to the Wikipedia page on the principles of war, none of them include deception.  It’s sometimes mentioned as an enabler for surprise, but as I’ve tried to show, it can be far more than that. When I establish my War College, developing fingerspitzengefuehl for deception would be the schwerpunkt. It would be taught by people who actually know how to do it.

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Creating mission-oriented leaders

Don’t you want your organization to run better? Of course you do: Get rid of the office politics, cliques, backstabbing, passive aggression — morale goes up, blood pressure goes down, objectives are routinely exceeded, competitors / opponents get trounced. Hence, the size of modern CEO offices, which need to be that big to hold all the books on how to actually do it.

Among the many approaches, “agility” proposes to use time to shape the competitive environment, and, if necessary, react to changes before they become fatal. Nestled within the agile approaches, there is a school that insists the best way to do this is to fire up creativity and initiative throughout the organization and harmonize them to accomplish the objectives of the organization. Note that “throughout” includes everybody from new hires to the aforementioned CEO.

Boyd’s philosophy is obviously in this category. He proposed an organizational climate, often known by the acronym EBFAS,* whose purpose was to produce organizations that could shape, reorient to, and exploit rapidly changing situations.  Boyd regarded conflict as characterized by deception, surprise, ambiguity, stress and threat, which can lead to fear, mistrust, and a breakdown of cohesion. “Reorient to” is a way of saying that you understand such situations better than your opponents. “Rapidly” implies that given time, your opponents will figure these things out; don’t give them the time.

The “E” in EBFAS stands for Einheit, for which Boyd adopted the English “mutual trust.” It is fundamental, so organizational cultures that focus on building mutual trust are sometimes called “trust based.”  Of the other letters, perhaps the best known is “A” for another German word, Auftragstaktik, often translated as “mission command.”  It has become something of a sub-genre in management literature.**

Last month, I featured an article by Don Vandergriff on Auftragstaktik, where he described the origins of the concept and why high performing organizations use it.

Don has now followed up with a well-documented piece on how to train people for Auftragstaktik .  He describes an emerging methodology within the Army, Adaptive Leader Soldier Training and Education (ALSTE), and an implementation, the Army Reconnaissance Course, that have proven to develop leaders who can excel under the philosophy of mission command. These programs reflect initiatives Don has been working on for years and documented as far back as Raising the Bar (2006).

*I’ve done several posts on EBFAS — please use the search feature in the right column if you’re interested.

**For an in-depth look at Auftragstaktik, I can recommend Stephen Bungay’s The Art of Action and Don’s recent book on Mission Command.

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Coherent, Credible, and Wrong

The best strategist is not the one who knows he must deceive the enemy,
but the one who knows how to do it.

Polish SciFi master Stanislaw Lem (1921 – 2006)

We often think of Soviet doctrine as tanks lined up tread to tread, rolling forward until either they conquer or fall. Mass makes might. While there is a lot of truth to the Soviet, and so presumably Russian, respect for mass, it may surprise you to learn that the Soviets had, and so presumably the Russians have, a well thought-out doctrine of deception called maskirovka. The BBC ran a nice piece on the subject a few days back, “How Russia outfoxes its enemies,” by Lucy Ash.

Boyd had great respect for deception, “an impression of events as they are not,” as he wrote on Patterns chart 115, “Essence of Maneuver Conflict.” A person who is being deceived is not confused. He knows what the situation is. His orientation is coherent; his mental model of the world fits all the facts. It’s just wrong. Boyd’s primary vehicle for using deception was the cheng / chi maneuver, which he borrowed from Sun Tzu and reformulated in more modern terms as the Nebenpunkte / Schwerpunkt concept (see charts 78, 114, and many others). Basically, the deceiver shapes the orientation of the victim to expect (cheng) certain actions to take place. Think all of the stuff the allies did to shape Hitler into expecting the D-Day attack across the Pas de Calais. The deceiver then springs something entirely unexpected, the chi, and tries to exploit the resulting shock and confusion. Continue reading →