Notes to Chapter 5

1. General Waldemar Erfurth, Surprise, S. T. Possony and Daniel Vilfroy, translators. Harrisburg: Military Service Publishing Co (Stackpole) 1943.

2. Double deception is best explained by the story of the two Jews who met on a train in Russia. Aaron asked Moses, "Where are you going?" Moses answered "To Pinsk." Aaron replied, "You say you are going to Pinsk so that I will believe you are actually going to Misnk, but I happen to know you really are going to Pinsk. So why do you lie?"

In military parlance, if A plans an operation he would not try to hide his plan, but would make sure that B assumes this particular plan is being advertised because it will not be implemented. The German deception plan of 1941 that preceded the attack on the Soviet Union was planned as a single deception but actually worked as a double deception.

3. The Six-Day War in the Middle East has made the concept better known.

4. One clear example of this kind of surprise was the Fall of France in 1940. Not only did the Germans attack in a place thought totally unsuitable for armor, but they used their armor in unexpected ways, driving deep into the French interior without waiting for the infantry to catch up.

The result was the the Germans operated inside the French decision cycle: by the time French headquarters had considered the situation and issued orders, their information about the front was obsolete.

5. As the Russians say, "If I attack you and you don't defend, there will be no war; if I attack you and you defend yourself, there will be war and you caused it."

6. It has always been exceedingly difficult to get arms control advocates to understand this elementary principle: if the retaliatory weapons don’t survive, there can be no retaliation; and if the aggressor knows there won’t be a retaliation, then deterrence is thin to non-existent. Strategic defenses are stabilizing, not destabilizing, because they are dangerous only to the aggressor.

Strategic defenses make strategic offense weapons obsolete. No one in his right mind believes that strategic defenses can form an ‘impenetrable shield’ against a modern technological power like the USSR; thus they are not an incentive to a first strike. This point has been made repeatedly in our advocacy of a policy of "Assured Survival" as opposed to the official US Policy of "Assured Destruction", and appears to be taking hold in some part of the armed services, but not in the State Department.