Russian Army Upgrades Its Inflatable Weapons

jamax writes "According to the BBC: 'The Russian military has come up with an inventive way to deceive the enemy and save money at the same time: inflatable weapons. They look just like real ones: they are easy to transport and quick to deploy. You name it, the Russian army is blowing it up: from pretend tanks to entire radar stations.' But the interesting thing is these decoys are not dumb - actually they appear to be highly advanced for what I thought was a WWII-grade aerial photography countermeasures. Apparently they have heat signatures comparable with the military tech they represent, as well as the same radar signature."

Comments

Re:Better still

[qoncept]

Yeah, except they, you know, agreed not to.

Re:Better still

[JWSmythe]

The proper word is "decoy".

    It's a very valid strategy too. If there are 2 or 3 real targets, they may be easy to neutralize. What if those targets became 3000? You'll have an awful lot of your resources spread out to blow up non-targets. After a while, morale can stop dropping when the troops are sent out on yet another mission to blow up a balloon. And that can be dangerous. Thinking that they're "neutralizing" another balloon, and running into a real armed battalion would be a disaster.

    The same applies to all kinds of other scenarios.

    Decoys are useful for lots more than just defensive purposes. If intelligence says an area is occupied, and you're trying to pull a group out quietly, they may be diverted around such decoys, and right into a bigger trap.

    But, if the decoys can be identified, that may not prove anything. 2000 decoy units and 3 real units, you could assume that the real units are protecting the places of value, right? Not necessarily. They only need to be close enough to react. So you have a real unit in front of Bunker A, and decoys in front of Bunkers B and C, you wouldn't necessarily want to attach Bunker A.