ISIS Built Fake Wooden Tanks to Confuse Eyes in the Sky
ISIS has taken to building fake tanks to confuse Coalition air power, according to recent reports from The Washington Post. The tanks, made of wood, are meant to confuse pilots and intelligence analysts into thinking the organization has more armored vehicles than it actually does. The good news is that it's not likely to work.
According to the Post, Iraqi forces discovered a building that was cranking out wooden vehicles when they retook a village north of Mosul. The Iraqis captured three fake tanks, and five wooden Humvees.
Building fake vehicles is a time-honored practice dating back to World War II, when the Allies built an entire fake army group to fool the Germans. Operation Quicksilver, as the deception campaign was known, set up vast numbers of inflatable and wooden tanks to confuse German aerial reconnaissance missions.
These days, thanks to technology, the technique is a lot less effective. Although many pilots still identify their targets with the naked eye, a lot of targeting is done with systems such as the Sniper advanced targeting pod. Designed to help pilots positively identify and then attack targets on the ground, Sniper allows the pilot to get an image-stabilized view of the target in high-definition, forward-looking infrared.
In the infrared band, a real tank will look differently than a fake tank. The rear engine grill, the barrel of a gun that has been recently fired, and actual, living crew members will appear as "hot" or at the very least unevenly heated. A wooden tank however will be of uniform temperature and simply uninteresting when viewed this way. The HD quality video feed will also be able to pick out the clean lines of a real tank from the rough, uneven lines of a tank hastily nailed together with plywood.
The Sniper pod is carried by a number of anti-ISIS coalition tactical aircraft, including the B-1 bomber, F-15E Strike Eagle, F-16 Fighting Falcon, and A-10 Thunderbolt. It's used by U.S. tactical aircraft as well as coalition allies including Jordan, Turkey, and Belgium.
It's possible to fool forward-looking infrared-lighting fires to simulate a hot engine compartment for example-but the tanks also look just plain janky. There's no real danger of confusion here.
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