When I was a lieutenant on an air wing detachment to Fallon, NV, I was assigned the responsibility of striking a “terrorist training facility” with a TV-guided Walleye II glide bomb. The Walleye was a big weapon with massive effects – the star-shaped blast frag envelope had an initial velocity of Mach 10 – so whatever you hit with it was pretty much going to be flattened.
There were two ways to employ the weapon: One option was to lock it on to a larger target at range and then just let it fly autonomously to impact. For smaller targets you had to get closer, and for well-defended targets you locked on to a contrast area at long range and then refined the solution using a datalink pod carried either on your own aircraft as you turned away, or on a partner aircraft trailing behind you.
We were given target coordinates and an imagery package to familiarize ourselves with the target area, an overhead offensive counter-air sweep took care of hostile air contacts and simulated HARM launches suppressed longer range SAM defenses. I found the target on the Walleye’s camera, simulated the release and then followed the bomb glide path to target, pulling off at the last moment: Great success!
When it came to post-mission debrief and analysis, the instructors at Strike U. were thoughtful. It turned out that they had used what they considered to be a clever concealment, camouflage and deception (CCD) technique to make my unitary building look like it was two buildings by throwing a “shadow” panel over the center of my target.
“How did you recognize the target?” they asked.
“Well, it was the only target in the center of the target complex,” I answered. They hadn’t bothered to use CCD on any of the surrounding buildings or terrain, and my mind locked on to the relative position of the target within the broader complex, disregarding the shadow panel entirely.
It turns out that they did things better back in the day when the country was actually at war, and CCD might save your actual life.
Pretty impressive, if perhaps a touch paranoid.
Update: While we’re on about history recent and otherwise, here’s a good compilation of color video from the carrier war in the Pacific.
The importance of landing without drift is emphasized. Sunscreen is not.
I dunno about the paranoid bit, Lex, easy to say now. I haven’t studied that apect of the war to know just how seriously Washington and Honolulu took a serious bombardment or even invasion threat, and even a one-shot major damage raid could probably have been repaired fairly quickly, but remember, at the time most thought the very existence of the nation to be at risk–so costs, manpower were of little consideration–better safe than sorry.
Besides, there was both the political and psychological aspect of it all. Politically it was cya, for if an attack HAD occurred, however small, people would have demanded to know why such “prudent,” “precautionary” measures were not taken in advance. Psychologically speaking, such measures emphasized to the civilian population the fact that we were at war and it was NOT business as usual. Isn’t that one of the gripes today?: “The Army is at war–America is at the Mall.” Second, it provided a psychological sense of security and confidence in the nation that it’s leadership was doing everything it could to protect it’s citizens and win the war. So, even if the Pentagon thought at the time that any significantly damaging attacks were unrealistic from a strictly military standpoint, it was probably good motivating psychology for the civilian population in any event.
(I never dropped one, but they say the only problem with the Walleye is that you had to have good contrast. Tgt it against a bridge which had numerous closely-spaced spans all of the same width, for example, and the sensor would follow them all the way down the line to the approach/abutment on the bank looking for the largest outstanding contrasting span, rather than dropping the center of the structure. Was that limitation ever briefed to you guys, Lex? Or did they fix that problem/limitation?)
AS for the motivating psychological factors at play I seem to recall that most of the scrap metal and other items collected for the war effort were never of any real use and that fact was known beforehand but the drives were continued so the populace could feel involved and would share in the sacrifice of the war effort. That sort of thing could never be pulled off now but one of the government’s failings in the GWOT has not been making any effort to have the population become involved, if only symbolically, in the sacrifice involved.
Maybe they are by just having the country go broke so generations to come will feel it as well.
All of the scrap aluminum cookware donated by the people was melted down to make aluminum cookware, as only virgin aluminum could be used to make the aluminum alloy used in aircraft.
Yep, that was an issue. The sensor had a down and left (or maybe it was right) bias, so it tended to run off on linear targets. That could be mitigated a bit by choosing a different attack axis, using the ERDL pod to hold the cursors on target to impact (albeit at a loss of aerodynamic efficiency) or selecting a different weapon.
Right at the end of Allied Force, they had a Walleye left in Roosevelt’s magazine. Pretty well out of meaningful targets, we still needed to either drop that thing, or survey it. Guess which was the attractive choice? So, Fighter Attack Guys do their business on a “weapons storage facility”, strangely located in a farmer’s backyard. BDA the next day confirms, with the sides blown off, that it really was just a barn.
But that is one hell of a powerful warhead.
My Uncle Darrell was an F6F driver. Aren’t you glad it was his generation, and not yours, that had to use axial deck carriers? Man, those guys had balls!
Remember that there had been some small-in-actual-effect but large-in-psychological-effect Japanese attacks along the coast very early in the war from submarines. After the Doolittle raid in April, 1942 there was considerable concern that the IJN would mount a similar carrier raid on the west coast. Given how effective their OPSEC had been leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor there was legitimate concern that despite our efforts at code breaking they were still quite capable of pulling it off.
VR,
Comjam
An urban legend has it that Jack Warner was afraid that the Japanese would mistake his studio for an aircraft factory. He had the set painters paint a sign on the stage buildings “Lockheed That Way!” with a big arrow.
Actually I guess he painted ‘Lockheed’ on the buildings so they would act as a decoy.
a good example of how illusion can affect battles is exemplified by Major Jasper Maskelyne’s efforts in North Africa during WWII
http://www.economicexpert.com/a/Jasper:Maskelyne.html
http://www.amazon.co.uk/WAR-MAGICIAN-Story-Jasper-Maskelyne/dp/0304367095
or the efforts by the CIA
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/11/cias-lost-magic-manual-resurfaces/
I’ve also read of “inflatable tanks” & such in England during WWII to confuse the Germans’ reconnaissance. Which has made me wonder, coming up on Desert Storm, did Saddam attempt similar dummies & camouflage, and if so, was it ever effective? If I were him, I would have been trying to mask my weaknesses. And did we do anything similar, or is this currently only an assymmetric technique used by weaker powers?
Bill,
The Serbians did a very good job of it in Bosnia and Kosovo during the air-ground efforts to “persuade” them of the error of their ways back in the 90’s. Likewise, some Iraqi Army elements figured out how to make a previously bombed tank look “hot” to some IR targeting sensors back in ‘91 so they’d continue to be the recipients of less-than-friendly attention.
VR,
Comjam
The best masking technique I have heard of was used by the Brits in WWII. They put a row of bright lights on the nose and across the leading edge of the wings of sub-hunter aircraft. Contrary to conventional wisdom, this made them more difficult for a German lookout to see because it masked the dark outlines of the aircraft and gave it a brightness closer to the natural brightness of the sky in daytime. Apparently it was shown to be fairly effective, since it reduced the average distance at which an attacking aircraft could be visually detected, thereby also reducing the number of seconds the sub had to dive to a depth sufficient to protect it from aerial bombs and gunfire.
The whole plane based ASW (and anti mine) war was full of such things.
Also determined as useful: Actually polishing the windows on the Catalinas.