Potemkin Army

The Discover blog reports on a Potemkin army:

Russian balloon maker Rusbal is working on an order from the country’s defense ministry to supply full-scale inflatable military models. The realistic-looking hardware is used in battlefield positions and to protect Russian strategic installations from surveillance satellites, distracting snoops and protecting real combat units from strikes. They can look like real vehicles in the radar, thermal, and near infra-red bands, so they’d even look right through night-vision goggles.

And now from Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Act V Scene IV — you know, the cool part where the incoming army disguises itself as the Birnam forest):

MALCOLM
    Let every soldier hew him down a bough
    And bear’t before him: thereby shall we shadow
    The numbers of our host and make discovery
    Err in report of us.

Nothing much new, then. Simple visual misdirection is the magician’s greatest asset.

See also:

• Edison’s Warriors, a great article in Cabinet about the U.S. 3132nd Signal Service Company in WWII, a sonic deception team that created strategic disruption using wire and tape recordings with acoustical engineering help from Bell Labs
• Operation Bertram
• The Ghost Army