Posted on 10/12/2010 7:22:04 AM PDT by mrmeyer
Every May, Russia proudly marches its biggest, fiercest-looking military hardware across Red Square in a show of force one might expect from one of the biggest militaries in the world. Tanks, missile launchers and rockets worth billions of dollars thunder across the cobblestones.
But in a small field outside Moscow, two men wheel out a small package that could save the Russian military millions and prevent it from needing to deploy that fearsome arsenal. The men fire up an air pump and within minutes there stands a towering S-300 anti-aircraft missile launcher.
Russia's Defense Ministry is in talks with a private company called Rusbal to develop a range of inflatable decoy armaments they could place in battlefields to deceive the enemy about positions and lure it into attacking cheap replicas with their million-dollar rockets.
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
Seems like a modernized version of what the U.S. and British did in England to deceive German air recon prior Operation Overlord.
An enterprising entrepreneur would rent these out for Texas BBQs.
we need a complete bank of them in DC
I’m surprised they don’t inflate them with vodka.
** Insert picture of penis pump here **
Uh, better yet. Maybe don’t....
Too bad for the Russkies that we seldom use unaided visual means to detect, target and destroy targets-especially high pay-off/high priority targets like AA/AG missiles.
An inflatable dummy does not look like a real missile in the thermal/IR/SWIR, RF and TV modes of sensing.... RF emitters, signal noise and “stuff” that real ones produce are what we target, not just a shape. By the time they replicate all that “stuff”, they’d have been better off just making real ones.
We’ll leave the dummies and seek out the real ones quite nicely if it ever came to that....
At least they’d have plenty of rubber duckies to put in museums....
You should look at what happened in the Kosovo conflict, when NATO was reporting over 90 tanks and a 100+ APCs destroyed, a couple hundred artillery, many bridges bombed, and a lot of radar installations taken out. At the end of the war it turned out to be less than 20 real tanks (but a lot of plastic sheets covering wooden poles), less than 50 pieces of arty,and less than 20 APCs. For the radar installations, they turned the real radar on and off (and moved a lot) while they had a lot of normal microwaves acting as E-band decoys. Decoys do work, particularly in a messy cluttered environment where the enemy has some level of intellect.
They tried it but they were always deflated again by the next morning.
Wire 2-D frames with heat and light powered by generators were able to fool the "enemy" in combat training.
Then there are the declassified satellite photos of an inflatable sub at a dock. A storm folded it in half.
Except in Kosovo.
Gates needs to work on this asap. We don’t want to fall behind in the balloon gap.
That is an awesome picture. What year was this?
The very reason for our TTPs today...
Lesson’s Learned.
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