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Hence when we are able to attack we must seem unable. The quote goes much deeper obviously, and I highly recommend getting a copy of The Art Of War. The point is well taken and is a tactic we see in our daily lives, with well designed bait and switch advertising campaigns to Click Bait *Breaking News* posts all over social media. Your mission, is to see through the static, while accurately deciphering the noise to reach a reasonable conclusion using critical thinking and logic.
Simple huh?
Not really, you see, gathering the intelligence necessary to form even an educated guess is more effort than most are willing to give, not to mention the manhours involved, this is a long game, make no mistake about that. What tactics are involved in gathering the evidence or the timing of events and the responses to them. For instance; You want to meet the new neighbor in your building, so you begin to gather intelligence on your target, what time is she in the lobby, walking her dog etc. You even log a lame attempt, by a competitor, to aquire your targets digits. So with all this data and your critical thinking skills firing on all cylinders time to make your move. You see your target in the lobby, you approach and to your surprise, you see a wedding ring on her finger!
Deception at its finest...
She put that wedding ring on, before she got out her car in the parking lot. Its her anti-stalker ring. She's no more married than your dog is(?) It keeps her from becoming a target. Had you been more diligent in your data acquisition you may have spotted that deception technique.
Do you see how this topic gets fuzzy and gray real fast? I hope so. Its murky waters ahead, and if you can think of it, its probably been tried, in an attempt to deny an adversary what they want, in some battle somewhere. I could write volumes on this subject that no one would ever read, not about the minute details of gathering the day to day data points, but just about what I would want the enemy to think; about what I am doing or not doing. How my actions affect their decision making process. How do they react to my decoy? Are they not reacting to my decoy because they know I put it there? The, I know, that they know, I know, gets pretty crazy from here.
That is OPDEC personified, it is designed to create pause, cause confusion, elicit responses. To see how these psychological traps play out on the grandest scale, you can explore historical battlefield ruses via Google Search to analyze the most famous cases in military history.
*Clicking on some of the buttons will take you to a Wikipedia page, for that I apologize, take information on this subject from them with a grain of bias.
Passive Recon Demonstration. 