Deception plays an important role in many military operations. But is hard to deceive an opponent (or anyone else) when evidence of that deception is visible in plain sight.
A new military term — “competing observable” — has been introduced to capture this problem.
In the context of military deception, an ordinary “observable” is defined as “an indicator within an adversary’s conduit [or information pathway] intended to cause action or inaction by the deception target.”
But a “competing observable” is “any observable that contradicts the deception story, casts doubt on, or diminishes the impact of one or more required or supporting observables.”
The term “competing observable” was incorporated in the latest edition of the official DoD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms this month. The Dictionary, a copy of which appeared in our conduit, provides standard definitions for thousands of words and phrases that constitute the lexicon of U.S. military thought.
Each new update removes some terms, and adds or modifies others in an ongoing adaptation to current military doctrine.
The latest edition, for example, eliminates “berm” (“The nearly horizontal portion of a beach or backshore…”) and “honey pot” (“A trap set to detect, deflect, or in some manner counteract attempts at unauthorized use of information systems…”). These and several other such terms were removed from the Dictionary this month since they are “not used.”
The term “ruse” was slightly modified and is now defined as “an action designed to deceive the adversary, usually involving the deliberate exposure of false information to the adversary’s intelligence collection system.”
The Federation of American Scientists supports H.R. 4420, the Cool Corridors Act of 2025, which would reauthorize the Healthy Streets program through 2030 and seeks to increase green and other shade infrastructure in high-heat areas.
The current lack of public trust in AI risks inhibiting innovation and adoption of AI systems, meaning new methods will not be discovered and new benefits won’t be felt. A failure to uphold high standards in the technology we deploy will also place our nation at a strategic disadvantage compared to our competitors.
Using the NIST as an example, the Radiation Physics Building (still without the funding to complete its renovation) is crucial to national security and the medical community. If it were to go down (or away), every medical device in the United States that uses radiation would be decertified within 6 months, creating a significant single point of failure that cannot be quickly mitigated.
The federal government can support more proactive, efficient, and cost-effective resiliency planning by certifying predictive models to validate and publicly indicate their quality.