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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.
IIRC, it's even in the bible: soldiers moving at night carried one torch per ten guys, spaced-out, instead of one torch per hundred guys.
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”…
Another thing they did in WWII was to "move a town" by turning off all the lights in the town, then building matching lights a few km away. From the air, all you could really see were the lights, and if they matched the pattern for the town you were looking to bomb, that's where you dropped your bombs.
All that stuff is obsolete now to due to GPS, better maps, etc.
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.
Would've been a hoot, though, if the winds were right that day.