To paraphrase Sun Tzu, the go-to quote source for every hack military writer, “Bullshit is cheaper than bullets.”
Deception is the original smart weapon. The first great deception was at the start of aerial warfare, when the town Ipswich of England, fearing a Zeppelin raid, turned all its lights out. The townspeople lit a bonfire on a large common, put up acetylene torches on bushes to imitate public lighting, and lit many squibs. The Zeppelin bomber ignored the town and dropped its bombs on the illuminated common. It was relatively easy to fool the pilots of aircraft, and the practice of pilot deception developed many tricks. Rivers were covered in coal, cities blacked-out, factories disguised as great towns (with even drying laundry put out on weekly cycles) and radio navigation signals mimicked. Saving your own air force was vital for survival. Decoy or ‘dummy’ aircraft placed as tempting targets for enemy air attacks have saved many lives and aircraft. Creating decoy aircraft wastes enemy resources and confuses their estimates of your strength. Wasting enemy weapons and time is a good thing, and the decoy aircraft are bloodless heroes.
With the advent of thermal image sensors, a good decoy might use a heat source (even a hot oil drum) to mimic the heat signature of a recently flown fighter jet. With metal particles in rubber or plastic, or even metal itself, the aircraft can also generate a radar return that mimics that of a real aircraft.
Hush-Kit has entered over one hundred years’ worth of dummy data into our Cray-III supercomputer (see below) enabling a hand-picked expert virtual panel to present an informative snapshot of their findings in this area.
10. Hawker Sea Hurricane Mk. IIc ‘Sydney Camm-o-flage’
Score: nil
For decades, this image has bounced around the Internet and purports to be a wartime dummy Hurricane, part of the British Air Ministry’s effort to deceive the Luftwaffe early in the Second World War. One panellist insisted it was a prop from a play performed at his school in the Midlands in 1976. Other sources contradict that memory, suggesting it is the wartime output of a woodworking class at an Australian penitentiary. The contention that this is a New York City parade float was dismissed for lack of reasonable evidence.
8. Bell P-59A-1 Airacomet prototype ‘Guerilla Bell-end’
Score: 5.1/10
In fairness, this is a disguised aircraft rather than a full dummy, a false moustache rather than a mannequin. Never built in numbers (though 66 would be a fair number today) or sent into action, the P-59 was a top-secret programme that helped establish so much of what was to come. Tarpaulins and a removable ersatz propeller were utilized to obscure America’s first jet aircraft during testing. With a big four-bladed ”prop” a similar tail and a tricycle undercarriage, unwelcome observers could mistake the rare P-59 for a Curtiss project, the P-63 Kingcobra.
Test pilot Jack Woolams, a keen practical joker, also adopted a clever psychological trick to discredit any possible witness reported of the aircraft. If another aircraft was sighted near the XP-59 he would put on a gorilla mask, a derby hat and smoke a cigar. Clearly, no one would take reports of a dapper gorilla flying a propellerless aircraft seriously.
7. Runway Su-30 ‘Bansky Flansky’
6. MiG-29 ‘Ful-simila-crum’
The Belgrade Aviation Museum in Serbia is full of surprises; where else can you find the remains of a shot-down F-117 stealth fighter? In the two months of bombing of Yugoslavia, NATO discovered that stealth was not invulnerable and re-learned the lesson from Deliberate Force four years earlier, that technology hates wet weather. Yugoslavia’s small force of MiG-29s was vastly outnumbered, and five MiG-29s were destroyed in the air by US F-15s and US (and one Dutch) F-16s. Life was pretty dangerous for the Yugoslav MiG-29 community, so much was done to try and protect them. One was damaged beyond repair in air combat but returned but limped back to friendly ground it had a second life as a decoy. There were also six purpose-built MiG-29 decoys known as L- and M-18s. Only one of these full-scale decoys survives, it did serve its purpose but was hot by “a dysfunctional NATO rocket” and enough survived for it to be rebuilt as a museum exhibit.
Constructed from metal and wood, the decoys were rather good, the radome and tyres are suspiciously accurate and may have been scrounged from real MiG-29s.
5. Douglas P-70 Havoc/A-20 Boston ‘The Boston Wangler’
Score: 8.6/10A solid, mid- to late-war dummy edition of a typical Allied attack aircraft. Precisely the right amount of detail to fool the Luftwaffe’s big Robot, Zeiss and GXN cameras while avoiding overuse of labour and materials. This is a prime example from the brilliant deception of Operation Fortitude, the Allied effort to mislead the Germans as to where the landings would take place.
Items like this were part of a long-running and detailed scheme that fooled Berlin as to where the Allied landings in France would materialize.
4. Ghost Army North American P-51 Mustang ‘Mustang Folly’
Score: 8.9/10Regardless of their level of quality or the materials employed, it is singularly vital that a dummy aircraft be installed at a realistic height above the ground. This allows proper shadows to form. Shadows are what photographic interpreters often work their magic with when peering down at prints taken from a reconnaissance platform. Certainly, this nicely decorated ”Mustang” would appear to have that covered. It was one of thousands of items produced by a brainy and creative American unit dedicated to simulacra of basically everything from landing craft to armoured vehicles to entire airfields. Often, they backed up their efforts with recorded sound effects and fictive radio traffic. At one point, an American unit of under two thousand, the innocuously named 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, simulated a combined-arms force of 30,000.
3. Messerschmitt Bf 109 Straßenbahn Typ ‘Falscher Zwillingskämpfer’
Score: 9.2/10A perfectly well-executed counterfeit of the Luftwaffe’s day fighter made even better in two ways. First, camouflage via netting amplifies the appearance of authenticity. Such netting remains a basic expectation for almost all military assets within range of enemy action. Second, that uncommon narrow-gauge trolley-and-rail system below the fuselage. Moving this fake would be quick and easy, deepening the level of deception by simulating in hostile aerial reconnaissance photographs not just a fighter but its anticipated ground movements over time.
3. Inflatable F-16 Fighting Falcons ‘Windscreen Viper’Score: 9.3/10 (provisional)
A massive hit with the assessment panel, particularly among judges with home-swimming pools, are two generations of inflatable F-16s. The first was a USAF project impressive in its accuracy that appears to have been cancelled along with the Cold War. Just look at the clear canopy and realistic weapons load. Exactly the thing to foolishly waste a guided bomb on. The second was an entrepreneurial effort which lost several points for colour scheme goofiness. If Russia is firmly in the inflatables camp, we can reasonably expect the United States to return to this area, as well as China. Usually, that’s how these things work.
Several images on this page are from this remarkable company.
2. Inflatable Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-31 ‘Boxhound’
Score: 11/10High mobility, rapid deployment, lightweight, ease of operation, cost-effectiveness. Name a single post-millennium weapon system achieving all these things. Name one made on a sewing machine in a repurposed hot air balloon plant. Also, name a weapon maker whose product lineup includes bouncy castles for children. All the judges were impressed by the Rusbal MiG-31, awarding numerous points for its undeniable fun factor. Speculation ran wild during online panel discussions about secret devices for inflatables that overcome infrared systems and radar. Expect to see inflatables like this in future conflicts right alongside pricey, complicated high-tech systems.
Beyond number 1
Cargo Cult ‘Straw dog’
Score: 3/10
When World War II ended, the US and Japanese abandoned many military airbases in the Pacific region, and with these, the flow of cargo. This was rather traumatic to many remote Melanesian populations, and cults developed, promising the return of the life-improving cargo. To entice the cargo to fall land in planes, which it was believed would be a gift from their ancestors, islanders imitated the same practices they had seen the airbase personnel use. In an act of sympathetic magic, life-size replicas of aeroplanes were built from straw and wood, and new landing strips cut from the jungle, ‘control towers’ were also built with controllers wearing wooden facsimiles of headphones. Though the story is somewhat sad, the purpose of the dummy aircraft is certainly the most fascinating.
Stephen Caulfield & Joe Coles