Trolling as Military Doctrine

10 min read

From: The Fires of History

Operation Mincemeat. The Ghost Army. Operation Bodyguard. Governments have formal trolling programs with budgets, personnel, and operational security. Deception isn't a deviation from military doctrine. It IS doctrine.
Contents 7 sections

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Sun Tzu said “all warfare is based on deception” approximately 2,500 years ago. He was not offering advice. He was describing a structural feature of organized conflict that has not changed since the first army painted itself to look like a forest.

This is not a metaphor. I am not drawing a clever comparison between internet trolling and military strategy. I am pointing out that they are the same activity performed at different scales, and that governments formalized the practice, gave it budgets and personnel and operational security protocols, and did all of this decades before the internet existed. The internet did not invent trolling. It democratized it. The military had it first.

Operation Mincemeat (1943)

In the spring of 1943, British intelligence needed to convince the German High Command that the Allied invasion of southern Europe would target Greece and Sardinia, not Sicily. The actual target was Sicily. The problem was that Sicily was the obvious target – so obvious that the Germans expected it.

The solution was a dead body.

Lieutenant Commander Ewen Montagu and Flight Lieutenant Charles Cholmondeley of the Twenty Committee (the double-agent coordination unit, named with the British fondness for puns – “XX” as in “Double Cross”) obtained the corpse of Glyndwr Michael, a homeless Welshman who had died from ingesting rat poison. They dressed him as a Royal Marines officer, created an entire fictitious identity – Captain (Acting Major) William Martin – and planted fake documents on his body. The documents included personal letters, theater ticket stubs, a photograph of a fictional fiancee, and, critically, a letter from Lieutenant General Sir Archibald Nye to General Sir Harold Alexander discussing invasion plans targeting Greece and Sardinia.

They put the body in a canister, loaded it onto the submarine HMS Seraph, transported it to the coast of Huelva, Spain, and dropped it in the water.

Spanish fishermen found the body on April 30, 1943. Spain was nominally neutral but riddled with German intelligence assets. The documents reached the Abwehr within days. The Germans analyzed them, concluded they were authentic, and reinforced Greece and Sardinia. When the Allies invaded Sicily on July 9, German defenses were depleted.

Operation Mincemeat was, stripped of its wartime context, an elaborate shitpost. British intelligence created a fake person with a fake identity, gave him a fake backstory complete with props, planted him where the target audience would find him, and then sat back and watched the target audience take the bait. The medium was a corpse. The message was disinformation. The execution was flawless.

They trolled the Third Reich with a dead homeless man. And it worked.

The Ghost Army (1944-1945)

The 23rd Headquarters Special Troops was activated on January 20, 1944. Its authorized strength was 82 officers and 1,023 enlisted men. Its mission was to impersonate two full divisions – approximately 30,000 soldiers – using every form of deception available.

The unit was recruited from art schools, advertising agencies, architecture firms, and theater programs. Their ranks included Bill Blass, who would become one of America’s most famous fashion designers, and Ellsworth Kelly, who would become one of the most important abstract painters of the twentieth century. The Army looked at the problem of tactical deception and concluded, correctly, that what it needed was not more soldiers but better artists.

Their tools:

Inflatable tanks. The 603rd Camouflage Engineering Battalion manufactured 93-pound rubber tanks, trucks, artillery pieces, and aircraft that looked real from the air. They were blown up under cover of darkness, arranged in tactical formations, and positioned within range of German reconnaissance aircraft. From a thousand feet, they were indistinguishable from the real thing. From fifty feet, they were balloons.

Sound trucks. The 3132 Signal Service Company operated massive speakers mounted on half-tracks that could project pre-recorded sounds – tank engines, troop movements, bridge construction – up to fifteen miles. The recordings were made at Fort Knox using real equipment. The sounds were mixed and sequenced to simulate specific tactical scenarios. They were, essentially, producing live sound design for an audience of German listening posts.

Fake radio traffic. The Signal Company generated scripted radio transmissions mimicking the communication patterns of specific units. Each real unit had distinctive radio signatures – operators had recognizable habits, units had characteristic message frequencies and formats. The Ghost Army replicated these signatures to create the impression that real units were in locations where they were not.

Theatrical performance. Ghost Army soldiers wore the insignia and patches of the units they were impersonating. They drove around local towns. They frequented cafes. They talked loudly about their units. They were, in modern terms, maintaining a cover story through social engineering. Except they were doing it in person, in a war zone, wearing costumes.

The Ghost Army carried out more than twenty deception campaigns across France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and Germany between June 1944 and March 1945. They saved an estimated 15,000 to 30,000 American lives by drawing enemy fire and attention away from actual combat units.

Their story was classified for more than fifty years. It was not declassified until 1996. In February 2022, the surviving members received the Congressional Gold Medal.

One thousand one hundred men whose entire job was to put on a show. To build sets, design costumes, write scripts, and perform for an audience that would kill them if it figured out the act. That is not a metaphor for trolling. That is trolling with a budget, a chain of command, and a Congressional Gold Medal.

Operation Bodyguard (1944)

If the Ghost Army was tactical trolling, Operation Bodyguard was strategic trolling – the entire D-Day deception plan, designed to convince the German High Command that the Allied invasion of France would come at the Pas-de-Calais, not Normandy, and that it would come later than June 1944.

The scale was staggering. Bodyguard was not one operation but a constellation of sub-operations spanning the entire European theater:

Operation Fortitude South created the First United States Army Group (FUSAG), a completely fictional army of nearly a million men supposedly preparing to invade at Calais. FUSAG was “commanded” by General George S. Patton – the American general the Germans feared most – who was at the time being punished for slapping soldiers in Sicily and had no actual command. The Allies turned his disgrace into an asset: Patton was famous, available, and the Germans believed any major invasion would be led by their most capable adversary. They gave him a fake army, fake headquarters, fake radio traffic, and inflatable tanks visible from German reconnaissance flights.

Operation Fortitude North threatened a fake invasion of Norway from Scotland, pinning down 27 German divisions in Scandinavia that might otherwise have reinforced France.

Double agents – the entire stable of turned German spies controlled by the Twenty Committee – fed false intelligence to the Abwehr confirming the Calais invasion. The most important was Juan Pujol Garcia, codenamed GARBO, a Spanish double agent who ran a network of twenty-seven sub-agents, every one of whom was fictional. GARBO was so trusted by the Germans that they awarded him the Iron Cross. He also received an MBE from the British. He was decorated by both sides for being the best liar in the war.

The result: on June 6, 1944, when 156,000 Allied troops landed at Normandy, the German Fifteenth Army – the strongest force in France, stationed at Calais – did not move. For seven weeks after D-Day, the Germans kept their reserves at Calais, waiting for Patton’s invasion that would never come. By the time they realized the deception, the Allies had established an unbreakable beachhead.

Operation Bodyguard may be the most successful troll in human history. An entire fictional army, commanded by a real general with no real command, using inflatable equipment and imaginary spies, convinced the most powerful military in Europe to defend against an attack that was never coming. The deception held for seven weeks. Tens of thousands of lives were saved. The war was shortened.

The Doctrine

The point is not that war involves trickery. Everyone knows that. The point is that deception is not an aberration in military doctrine. It is the foundation.

Sun Tzu’s Art of War, written circa 500 BC, devotes more space to deception than to combat. “When able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.” The entire text treats information manipulation as the primary instrument of warfare and physical violence as a secondary tool used when deception fails.

This is not ancient history. The U.S. Army’s own publications acknowledge that deception has been a “lost and found” art, periodically forgotten and rediscovered. Every major war of the twentieth century featured dedicated deception units. The British had the London Controlling Section. The Americans had Joint Security Control. The Soviets had maskirovka – military deception – as a formal doctrinal category from the 1920s onward.

These are not rogue operations. They are line items in defense budgets. They have training programs, doctrine manuals, after-action reviews, and promotion tracks. The United States military has, at various points, employed thousands of people whose full-time job was to lie convincingly to the enemy. The difference between a military deception officer and an internet troll is resources, authority, and consequences. The skill set is identical.

The Democratization

Here is the thesis of The Fires of History: the practices that the book documents – trolling, provocation, deliberate misinformation, identity manipulation, social engineering – are not products of the internet. They are products of human conflict. They existed in Athens. They existed in medieval Europe. They existed in every war ever fought.

What the internet did was democratize them. Before the internet, large-scale deception required institutional backing. You needed a government, or at least an organization, to run a Ghost Army. You needed classified budgets and security clearances to execute an Operation Mincemeat. The barrier to entry was enormous. Only nation-states could troll at scale.

The internet removed the barrier. Now a single person with a laptop can reach millions. A teenager in a basement can create a fake persona, build a following, and manipulate public discourse in ways that would have required a dedicated intelligence unit fifty years ago. The tools changed. The tactics did not.

The Ghost Army used inflatable tanks. The internet troll uses sockpuppet accounts. The Ghost Army used sound trucks to simulate troop movements. The internet troll uses bots to simulate grassroots support. The Ghost Army wore false insignia. The internet troll creates false identities. The underlying logic – make the enemy see what you want them to see, not what is actually there – is unchanged from Sun Tzu to 4chan.

The difference is that the Ghost Army received a Congressional Gold Medal, and the internet troll gets blamed for the collapse of civil discourse. The activity is the same. The only thing that changed is who is authorized to do it.

The Uncomfortable Conclusion

If deception is military doctrine, and military doctrine is the formalized practice of organized human conflict, then trolling is not a corruption of discourse. It is discourse. It is the adversarial component of every information system, present in every era, practiced by every institution, formalized by every military, and discovered independently by every generation.

The internet did not create the problem. The internet revealed it. The problem was always there. The generals knew it. Sun Tzu knew it. The 1,100 artists of the Ghost Army knew it.

Deception is not a bug in the system. It is the system. The only question is who gets to do it and whether they get a medal or a ban.

This essay draws from The Fires of History, coming fall 2026.

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