'Trickery wins every time': Russia is using an old kind of military deception

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Russian inflatable jet tank weapons

REUTERS/Thomas Peter

A worker inflates a model of a Russian T-72B tank standing next to an inflatable dummy of a SU-27 fighter jet at the compound of the RusBal balloon manufacturer outside Moscow, April 8, 2009.

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The Russian Ministry of Defense has started deploying an old kind of military deception: inflatable weaponry.

The Russian government has a growing supply of inflatable military gear, including tanks, jets, and missile batteries, provided by hot-air balloon company RusBal, as detailed by a report by The New York Times.

A demonstration in a field near Moscow illustrated the ingenuity behind the idea.

The inflatables deploy quickly and break down just as fast. They transport relatively easily, providing targets that may not only drawing the enemy's fire but also affecting their decision-making process, burdening a rival's leadership with the task of verifying targets.

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"If you study the major battles of history, you see that trickery wins every time," Aleksei A. Komarov, RusBal's director of military sales, told The Times. "Nobody ever wins honestly."

Inflatable weaponry has a history on Europe's battlefields. Prior to the Allied invasion of Europe in 1944, Gen. George S. Patton was placed in charge of the First US Army Group (FUSAG) - a phantom force housed in cities of empty tents and deployed in vehicles made of wood, fabric, or inflatable rubber.

After Allied forces had a foothold in France, the "Ghost Army," as it came to be called, continued to serve a purpose, as it was responsible for more than 20 illusions that befuddled German military leadership and disguised actual Allied troop movements in France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany.

Moscow's modern-day iteration of the inflatable army fits with a distinctly Russian style of subterfuge: Maskirovka, a Russian doctrine that mixes strategic and tactical deception with the aim of distorting an enemy's conception of reality, bogging down decision-makers at every level with misinformation and confusion.

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Maskirovka is a longstanding practice of Russian planners. During the Cold War, maps created for the Russian public were filled with tiny inaccuracies that would make them useless should they fall into the hands of rival military planners. The cartographer who came up with the ruse was given the State Prize by Josef Stalin.

Russia military inflatable weapons tanks missiles

REUTERS/Thomas Peter

Workers inflate a model of a Russian S-300 long-range surface-to-air-missile system at the compound of the RusBal balloon manufacturer outside Moscow, April 8, 2009.

A more recent version of maskirovka was displayed in Ukraine in 2014, when masked or otherwise disguised soldiers showed up in Crimea, and later by other soldiers purportedly "vacationing" in eastern Ukraine.

According to The Times, Russian military leaders were dubious about the inflatable hardware at first, but they appear to have been won over.

"There are no gentlemen's agreements in war," Maria Oparina, the director of RusBal and daughter of the founder, told The Times.

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"There's no chivalry anymore. Nobody wears a red uniform. Nobody stands up to get shot at. It's either you or me, and whoever has the best trick wins."

Read the full New York Times story here >>

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