Salami slicing tactics

Salami slicing tactics, also known as salami slicing, salami tactics, the salami-slice strategy, or salami attacks,^[1] is the practice of using a series of many small actions to produce a much larger action or result that would be difficult or unlawful to perform all at once.

Salami tactics are used extensively in geopolitics and war games as a method of achieving goals gradually without provoking significant escalation.^[2]

In finance, the term "salami attack" is used to describe schemes by which large sums are fraudulently accumulated by repeated transfers of imperceptibly small sums of money.^[3]

Computerized banking systems make it possible to repeatedly divert tiny amounts of money, typically due to rounding off, to a beneficiary's account. This general concept is used in popular automatic-savings apps.^[4] It has also been said to be behind fraudulent schemes, whereby bank transactions calculated to the nearest smallest unit of currency leave unaccounted-for fractions of a unit, for fraudsters to divert into other amounts.^[5] Snopes in 2001 dismissed a popular account of such an embezzlement scheme as a legend.^[6]

In Los Angeles, in October 1998, district attorneys charged four men with fraud for allegedly installing computer chips in gasoline pumps that cheated consumers by slightly overstating the amounts pumped. The fraud was noticed by consumers who found that they had been charged for volumes of gasoline greater than their cars' gas tank capacities.^[7]

In 2008, a man was arrested for fraudulently creating 58,000 accounts which he used to collect money through verification deposits from online brokerage firms, a few cents at a time.^[8]

In 1996, a fare box serviceman in Edmonton, Canada, was sentenced to four years' imprisonment for stealing coins from the city's transit agency fare boxes. Over 13 years, he stole 37 tonnes of coins, with a face value of nearly CA$2.4 million, using a magnet to lift the coins (made primarily of steel or nickel at the time) out of the fare boxes one at a time.^[9]

In Buffalo, New York, a fare box serviceman stole more than US$200,000 in quarters from the local transit agency over an eight-year period stretching from 2003 to 2011, and was sentenced to thirty months in prison.^[10]

The first use of salami slicing in politics - and the original Hungarian term (Hungarian: szalámitaktika) - is commonly attributed to Stalinist dictator Mátyás Rákosi, who described the actions of the Hungarian Communist Party in its drive for power in the Hungarian Soviet Republic.^[11][12]

The European Parliamentary Research Service has accused China of using the salami slice strategy to gradually increase its presence in the South China Sea.^[13]

Scientists are often evaluated by a number of papers published and similar criteria. In this context, salami slicing refers to "fragmenting single coherent bodies of research into as many publications as possible".^[14] If the fragment is too small it may be too hard to publish, so this includes forming minimal publishable items. It can be harder to collect, digest, understand and evaluate the research when scattered in a number of sources. It also leads to repetitive descriptions of context, bibliography lists and so on. Regarding that it is costly to scientific dissemination process, it is often considered a bad practice^[15] or even unethical.^[16] Some authors managed to divide research to extreme proportions.^[17] Salami slicing "can result in a distortion of the literature by leading unsuspecting readers to believe that data presented in each salami slice (i.e., journal article) is derived from a different subject sample".^[18]

Salami slicing is considered a type of scientific misconduct.^[19][20][21]

In the 2016 film Arrival, Agent Halpern mentions a Hungarian word meaning to eliminate your enemies one by one. It is thought that this alludes to szalámitaktika.^[22][23]

Salami slicing has played a key role in the plots of several films, including Hackers, Superman III, and Office Space.^[6]

In a 1972 episode of the TV series M*A*S*H, Radar attempts to ship an entire Jeep home from Korea one piece at a time. Hawkeye commented that his mailman "would have a retroactive hernia" if he found out.^[24]

Johnny Cash's "One Piece at a Time" has a similar plot to the aforementioned M*A*S*H episode, but with a Cadillac made up of parts spanning model years 1949 through 1973.^[25]

• Creeping normality
• Death by a thousand cuts
• Defeat in detail
• Gradualism
• Goodhart's law
• Slippery slope
• Structuring
• Deterrence theory