Russia's High Tech Military Turns to Inflatable Weapons

abcnews.go.com ^ | 10/12/10 | Alexander Marquardt

[mrmeyer]

Seems like a modernized version of what the U.S. and British did in England to deceive German air recon prior Operation Overlord.

[thackney]

An enterprising entrepreneur would rent these out for Texas BBQs.

[phockthis]

we need a complete bank of them in DC

[Lazamataz]

The feared Inflatable Spetznaz:

[Moonman62]

I’m surprised they don’t inflate them with vodka.

[Army Air Corps]

Are they crewed by inflatable women?

[isthisnickcool]

** Insert picture of penis pump here **

Uh, better yet. Maybe don’t....

[Manly Warrior]

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....

[Malone LaVeigh]

We can't afford to fall behind in a balloon arms race ...

[spetznaz]

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.

[KarlInOhio]

I’m surprised they don’t inflate them with vodka.

They tried it but they were always deflated again by the next morning.

[Calvin Locke]

I read an article in the 1980s about the US efforts in tactical deception in tank warfare.

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.

[A.A. Cunningham]

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.

Except in Kosovo.

[Sax]

I've always enjoyed the pics of the entire roof of the Boeing Plant disguised as a residential neighborhood.

[OldCorps]

Gates needs to work on this asap. We don’t want to fall behind in the balloon gap.

[Sax]

Russian balloon missile lock-on

[mrmeyer]

That is an awesome picture. What year was this?

[Sax]

It was put up right at the beginning of WWII (so I'm guessing early '42?) at their Seattle plant. Here are a few more pics of the “neighborhood.”

[Manly Warrior]

The very reason for our TTPs today...

Lesson’s Learned.