Sometimes, even mannequins fight battles. In the early weeks of the war in Ukraine, a captivating video surfaced on social media, offering a glimpse into tactics defining the conflict. The footage shows a Ukrainian trench line south of Kharkiv, battered by artillery craters and under assault from Russian tanks. Amid the chaos, lifeless figures — mannequins used as decoys — stood rigidly in place, absorbing the Russian barrage as projectiles attacked their positions. While almost absurd at first glance, this moment highlights a critical element of Ukrainian strategy: using a decoy to outmaneuver and outwit a far larger and better-equipped Russian force.
Since those hectic first weeks of the war, both Russian and Ukrainian forces have employed drones to enhance their targeting processes and maintain persistent observation over the battlefield, characterizing the war as the first drone war. This has made it much harder to mass forces or deploy critical assets near the forward line of troops. Drones variants have expanded to include resupply, air defense, and casualty evacuation functions. The deployment of thousands of sensors across the battlefield has highlighted the evolving nature of warfare. The U.S. military, through carefully evaluated lessons, must adopt novel approaches to mitigate these capabilities and emerging technologies. As the Marine Corps transforms its force structure, it must fully integrate technological advancements and update tactics, techniques, and procedures, particularly in decoy employment. As highlighted in the 2024 Marine Corps tactical publication, Deception, decoy efforts will ensure force survivability and degrade adversary targeting capabilities in the modern battlespace. To succeed, the Marine Corps must disrupt enemy sensors, deny the adversary the ability to engage first, and remain agile in contested environments deep within the enemy’s weapons engagement zone, where our opponents possess significant targeting capabilities. Decoys can be introduced into the force to enhance survivability, create ambiguity in enemy targeting processes, and maintain operational advantage in future conflicts. However, as it stands now, the Marine Corps has not integrated decoy operations into doctrine, training programs, or standardized equipment across the force.
A Brief Buzz Through Decoy Employment
Decoys are probably as old as war itself, but the modern era has seen many famous uses of this form of deception. Four days after Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the Red Army’s military engineer administration issued its first directive on Soviet maskirovka on June 26, 1941. Initially, Soviet decoys were crude and poorly executed. From 1942 onward, successful Soviet operations included deception plans with decoys, false radio traffic, misinformation, artificial sound effects, and altered appearances of installations and vehicles. This was evident during the winter counter-offensive of 1941–42 near Moscow. Soviet forces used fake bridges, dummy tanks, and artillery to mislead German intelligence, effectively diverting strikes and reconnaissance efforts toward counterfeit targets. Post–World War II, the Soviet Union used six decoy SS-4 missiles during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the invasions of Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Ukraine in 2014 and 2022.
British troops misled Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps at the Second Battle of El Alamein with a fake armored corps consisting of 4,500 decoy vehicles, 8,000 tons of supplies, and damaged vehicles used as decoys. During the Battle of Britain, more than 400 decoy aircraft were used to protect infrastructure. The Royal Air Ministry’s decoys saved critical infrastructure and lives, establishing 237 decoy sites, known as “Starfish,” which protected 81 towns and redirected more than 730 bombing raids away from critical metropolitan centers such as Bristol, Sheffield, Birmingham, and Portsmouth. Lastly, during the Normandy landings, the First U.S. Army Group, commonly referred to as the Ghost Army, led by General George Patton, fixed German reserves in Pais De Calais after forming a fake army consisting of decoy tanks, jeeps, fuel depots, tents, hospitals, and ammo supply points in southeast England. Ultimately, these efforts saved thousands of civilian and military lives.
More recently, during the 1999 NATO air campaign in Kosovo, Serbian forces successfully diverted NATO air attacks from high-value targets by deploying fake military assets, complicating the coalition’s targeting efforts. Serbian forces also used destroyed tanks, with fires burning underneath to enhance their infrared signature for sensors. Chechen fighters likewise used decoy command posts and firing positions to draw Russian fire during the attack on Grozny in 1994. Houthi fighters also utilized decoys effectively to counter aerial surveillance, and Hizballah spent years building decoy bunkers to blunt significant and influential Israeli advantages.
Decoys in Ukraine and Russia
Russian and Ukrainian troops have both extensively utilized drones to maintain persistent surveillance over the front lines, which has made it exceedingly difficult to concentrate troops and equipment without exposing them to significant risk. Ukrainian and Russian forces’ attacks with platoon and company-level formations, therefore, are quickly located and engaged with artillery, mortars, anti-tank missiles, and first-person-view drones. This persistent threat has significantly altered how commanders plan and execute offensives, deploy forces, and manage logistics, including resupply and evacuation operations near the front lines.
In this context, decoys have become indispensable to disrupting adversary surveillance and targeting networks, enhancing the force’s survivability in the battlespace. For example, Ukraine’s advanced Western-supplied weapon systems are high-value targets for Russian forces. When first introduced, these systems degraded Russian logistics, command and control nodes, air defense systems, and ammunition depots. Nevertheless, Russian forces, over time, developed an adaptation cycle, relocating assets out of range and deploying decoys to deceive Ukrainian forces into expending valuable Western munitions on false targets.
Russian tactics, supported by a constellation of drones, have significantly impacted their reconnaissance-strike complex and reconnaissance-fire complex, considerably reducing the time to strike targets close to the front line and at operational depth. However, early reporting during the war indicated that Russian forces, even with the ability to maintain persistent intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, had been incentivized to target Western equipment through bounties of high-mobility artillery rocket systems, Western tanks, and equipment. These incentives, which Ukraine has exploited by introducing high- and low-fidelity decoys, have led to trigger-happy operators and dishonest reporting of battlefield failures. Through visual evidence, Russian targeting of clear Ukrainian decoys has highlighted how a military with advanced intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities can still fall prey to deception measures and decoy deployments.
For example, in a video on social media, Ukrainian forces employed a decoy M-270 system — which was likely manufactured by the Czech company Inflatech — to divert attention from the genuine launcher as it relocated to a secondary firing position or resupply point. In the video, the M-270 launcher is tracked by a Russian reconnaissance drone, which eventually lost sight of the system and only rediscovered it after scanning along a tree line. Russian forces reacquired the target after seeing the front end of the M-270 along the tree line and engaged the target with a 9M723 Iskander M missile, which can cost upward of $3 million each. The target was a decoy.
These high-fidelity decoys, such as those provided by Inflatech, can imitate optical, radar, and infrared signatures, making them highly effective against Russian intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities. Metinvest and other Ukrainian companies and civilian organizations have also significantly contributed by manufacturing low-fidelity decoys in large quantities. Despite their rudimentary nature, these decoys have been equally effective in congesting the Russian targeting loop and diverting Russian targeting efforts, underscoring the significance of these tactics.
Decoys for the Marine Corps
In an April 2022 article entitled Stand-in Forces: Adapt or Perish, the 39th Commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Eric M. Smith, emphasized that Marines need to be prepared to survive in executing reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance missions while operating well inside enemy weapons engagement zones. Such concepts are not new. Perhaps senior Marine leaders emphasize these points in articles, speeches, and updated doctrinal publications because most currently and soon-to-be-fielded Marine Corps equipment is costly and complex to manufacture, and can strain logistics. High-fidelity decoys, such as the systems developed by Inflatech for Ukraine, are only a fraction of the cost of the assets they replicate, are lightweight, and take only days to produce. For example, the total cost of a Navy-Marine Corps ship interdiction system launcher is approximately $2.194 million, which does not include the additional equipment or the missile storage container, nor does it include ready-made decoys. An F-35B, as another example, costs well over $100 million and takes two years to build. This investment of over $100 million doesn’t include a single decoy.
The Marine Corps’ ongoing investments in fielding three Marine littoral regiments are significant. In addition to the Navy-Marine Corps ship interdiction system, the new regiments are being equipped with capabilities such as long-range unmanned surface vessels armed with loitering munitions, joint light tactical vehicles priced at $395,000 each, and other critical assets like tactical trucks. Similarly, the AN/TPS-80 ground/air task-oriented radar system is priced at approximately $35 million. With plans to establish three littoral regiments in the Indo-Pacific by 2030 and for a service that prides itself on being able to fight with less, the scale of this investment emphasizes the need for protection against advanced adversary surveillance and targeting capabilities to ensure the survivability of these assets in contested environments. However, as it stands now, the Marine Corps has not integrated decoy operations into doctrine, training programs, employment manuals, or standardized equipment across the force.
Even though these sophisticated missile systems, vehicles, loitering munitions, and radars significantly improve the capabilities of the Marine Corps stand-in forces, their relatively high cost and the limited industrial capacity to support large-scale combat operations far from manufacturing hubs can create significant logistical challenges, which would likely lead to the Marine littoral regiments becoming high-value targets for the People’s Liberation Army in any conflict in the Western Pacific. On the other hand, decoys for systems such as the Navy-Marine corps ship interdiction system and ground/air task-oriented radar can be manufactured at a significantly reduced cost, enhancing critical assets’ survivability in contested environments and alleviating the logistical burden in future combat operations.
Integrating decoys is essential to supporting distributed operations and improving survivability. As Gen. David Berger mentioned in the 2019 Commandant’s Planning Guidance, “Friendly forces must be able to disguise actions and intentions and deceive the enemy through decoys, signature management, and the signature reduction.” More specifically, in one of the Force Design 2030 Annual Updates, Berger writes, “How do we organize, train, and resource so that the ability to plan and implement deception becomes an integral part of each unit, training event, and materiel solution? Additionally, while there is no mention of decoys or deception in Gen. Eric Smith’s Commandant Planning Guidance release in 2024, the document does mention, as did his statements to the Senate Appropriations Committee in 2024 and his interview with War on The Rocks in October 2023, reconnaissance/counter-reconnaissance as critical in the changing character of warfare.
In short, the modern battlespace provides a critical advantage for those capable of disrupting adversary targeting processes and overwhelming enemy sensors and networks. Decoys generate operational ambiguity, which may result in adversary decision-makers questioning their intelligence analysts and delaying critical targeting information, which, in turn, diminishes the effectiveness of adversary precision strikes — and, in the case of the new Marine littoral regiments, could enable them from being detected or targeted over more extended periods.
Recommendations for Implementation
The Marine Corps should prioritize the research and development of next-generation decoys specifically designed for forward-deployed, expeditionary operations. This would foster collaboration between Marine Corps units and the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, which can facilitate experimentation under modern conditions. The Marine Corps should capitalize on military exercises, training events, and force-on-force conditions in various training locations to provide thorough, evidence-based reports to decision stakeholders. Furthermore, it is imperative to organize decoy capabilities within the force effectively. Marine Corps Combat Development and Integration should begin a standalone decoy program office that funds, synchronizes the acquisition process, fields, and sustains decoys throughout the life cycle. Training and Education Command should review its current list of training venues that teach tactical employment of decoys and prioritize implementing decoy events into training and readiness manuals. These commands should also review existing Marine Corps doctrine. Doctrine and training should run in parallel to development.
Commanders are likely to deprioritize the use of decoys if they are perceived as a supplementary capability rather than an operational necessity. To prevent this, decoys must be thoroughly integrated into the doctrine and instruction of all levels of command. Commanders must undergo training to completely comprehend deception’s operational and tactical significance in modern warfare. The U.S. Army’s wargaming studies on decoy use have shown that insufficient training in the appropriate use of decoys can result in unintended and potentially harmful consequences and can reduce combat capabilities.
In the past, decoy units have typically been held in engineer units, a model well suited to the current capabilities. The combat engineer battalion, an integral part of the Marine Division, is well equipped to maintain decoys. Additionally, the engineer support battalion, a component of a Marine logistics group, is well prepared to execute this mission due to its control of structure and construction materials that are closely aligned with decoy and survivability requirements. Lastly, the Marine wing support squadron can support the Marine aircraft group with decoy operations around airfields, defensive counterair operations, forward arming, and refueling points. The Marine Corps can improve force protection, operational flexibility, and survivability in complex, contested environments by incorporating decoy operations into the engineering units.
Finally, but most importantly, the Marine Corps must confront cultural attitudes regarding decoy employment. In time-constrained environments, non-lethal systems such as decoys are frequently perceived as secondary by tactical commanders, particularly those with experience from the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Decoy systems must be prioritized as critical enablers that improve the operational effectiveness and survivability of the force in future conflicts. With such a drastic review of current doctrine and education, the Marine Corps can avoid sending decoys into the halls of the unit supply warehouse, where they will only be opened during supply inspections.
Conclusion
The current war in Ukraine provides critical lessons on modern warfare. Unmanned aerial vehicles, robots, advanced weapons, and targeting assets are abundant, making rapid deployment of troops difficult and dangerous. Ukraine has demonstrated that large-scale combat operations are unforgiving, and success frequently depends on the capacity to adapt rapidly, maintain manpower, and maintain industrial capacity. Like in past wars, decoys have played a role in this conflict, often taxing adversaries with advanced intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities. Integrating decoys into Marine Corps doctrine involves adopting new tools and transforming the force’s approach to combat and thinking in a contested environment. To ensure success, the Marine Corps must prioritize using decoys, train its leaders to employ them effectively, and thoroughly integrate these systems into operational planning and execution.
Applying the appropriate lessons from Ukraine’s ongoing conflict to our force structure and doctrine is imperative for the Marine Corps. The complexity, cost, and logistical demands of sophisticated weapons systems present challenges that cannot be disregarded even though the fundamental nature of war remains consistent. The Corps cannot afford to rely exclusively on air defense assets, which are susceptible to being quickly overrun by enemy drones, cruise missiles, aircraft, and ballistic missiles. Investing in decoys to maintain the Marine Corps’ capabilities and guarantee its survival on the modern battlefield will be imperative. The moment to act is now. Without this essential investment, we risk being surpassed by adversaries who comprehend the importance of adaptability and deception.
Jorge Rivero is a retired Marine staff noncommissioned officer. He is a senior information operations planner and previously served as a Russian foreign area specialist. Jorge holds masters of arts degrees from the Bundeswehr University in Munich and from George Washington University. He is also an MIT Seminar XXI fellow. His work focuses on Russian information operations, the Russian military, and Russian strategic weapons.
Image: Vitaly V. Kuzmin via Wikimedia Commons.
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