Feels like something I’d read about in WWII.
Decoys are as old as war itself. Every army has used them and they will keep using them. Business as usual here.
Totally. Ukraine uses HIMARS decoys that have proven really effective.
Literally. My grandfather worked for De Haviland. They painted bomb damage of the roof of the factory so the Nazis would think they already bombed it and De Haviland could keep putting out aircraft meanwhile.
The US used fake tanks in the gulf war
There are also stories that the allies also spotted Germany building a decoy airfield at some point during the war. It included wooden aircraft, trucks, etc. When the construction was complete the allies supposedly sent a single bomber that dropped a wooden bomb on the site.
No idea if these stories are true though… Snopes calls it “unproven”…
Normandy, IIRC had one of the beaches, the tanks were mostly inflatable of the inflatable sort to try and pull resources from the main advance.
Also, iirc the early jet program used plywood props with fake spinners to conceal the planes on the runway.
Your comment about the jet program reminded me of something I read once about the US military trying to conceal a top secret jet (I think it was the SR-71) from spy satellites. The thing I read said that the planes heated up the runway where they sat, which would show up on thermal images of the runways. Iirc, they would go out and heat the runways further to make it seem like there were more planes or to change the shape of the heat signature.
This is based entirely off of memory, and I can’t find the right search terms to look for more info, so take it with a grain of salt.
There were fields of inflatable tanks and other vehicles in England during the build up to Normandy but these were not deployed across enemy held beaches for hopefully obvious reasons.
I have a captcha idea…
The sun: hol up I gotchu fam
They’re getting to the point where pictures of fighter jets is all they can afford anymore.
Prior to D-Day, The Allies had inflatable tanks and trucks to disguise where the real buildup was. Pretty classical tactic.
Those cast shadows. Look at this pic again. These idiots aren’t fooling anyone except NK blurry ass satellite.
Or perhaps a blurry ass camera in a drone at night. You might be surprised what can work at times. At least it will cause someone to waste a bit more time studying the photos to be sure of what they are.
i mean, with the amount of effort this took even a single quick glance resulting in a miss would be a pretty big win
its a silly idea but theres hardly any reason not to try it
not to mention that its probably still pretty effective in low visibility situations
We’ve quite literally done the same thing in area 51 and quite honestly most of our test facilities and skunk works. The sr71 pretty literally had a bunch of janky designs painted around Radar testing facilities to throw off the Russians.
