back
41 comments
Fascinating. Funny side effect:

> Warner Brothers executives later insisted that their own lot receive the “Kelley Treatment.” They decided that their sound stages looked too much like aircraft hangers from the air, and feared that Japanese bombardiers, fooled by the Clover Field camouflage—or by Lockheed’s, only three miles to the north—would bomb their studio instead!

This cool. I grew up about a mile from one of these plants and it is wild to see the old photos. A story from my grandfather (probably not true) is that the week after Pearl Harbor Jack Warner had someone paint on the roof of the Warner Bros Studio something like “Hirohito, Northrop is over there”. When Jack Northrop heard this he was furious and gave Mr Warner one of the rare verbal lashings of his life. As a token of remorse Warner offered to lend the studio’s staff to help camouflage the aircraft plant.
I wonder if the directions to Northrop were painted in English or in Japanese.

I lived in Burbank for a few years and one of the early days of living there I did a history of the city kind of rabbit hole. The large amount of camouflaging was one of the things that I learned about that really stood out as something that unique to being on the West coast during that time.

The very first name that came to my mind was Jasper Maskelyne. He led British camouflage efforts during WWII, and sure enough, while they don't come right out and say it, the mention of him studying British work makes me think that Ohmer must have worked with him.
Related to that: during WWII the US commissioned a fleet of inflatable decoy "tanks" https://ghostarmy.com/bio/f/Equipment/418. They were built by the Patten Company (no relation to George S. Patton, different spelling), and in the early 2000s I rebuilt the Patten Company's website. They have since removed that historical footnote from their site but you can probably find it on the Internet Archive.
Jasper Maskelyne understood misdirection. He was one of the most famous magicians of the age.
Physical honeypots.
Tldr: not Eureka of tv show fame
I miss the 2000s procedural sci fi detective shows.

I have fond memories of watching Fringe and Eureka with my dad.

Sigh. I have fond memories of watching Fringe and Eureka with my kids.
Hear hear.
I find romance when I start to dance in Boeing Wonderland
Can re-appaer again. If Russia won't be stopped, a war with Russia and Chine will be imminent.
They'll be vastly less effective in the age of precision guided bombs and missiles. The locations of the existing factories are already well known and not disguised and China/Russia can use their satellites to find any new built factories as well.
Ukraine and Russia both actively use wooden, inflatable, and painted decoys in the current war. [1][2]

China's ICBM silo fields are almost certainly a strategy of mixed decoys and real silos. [3][4] China builds new silos under inflatable domes so you can't easily tell via satellite. [5]

Decoys and camouflage are very much so still a thing. I don't think they would persist if they were not cost effective.

[1] https://read.bradyafrick.com/p/russia-adds-decoy-aircraft-to...

[2] https://iari.site/2024/10/13/the-strategic-role-of-decoys-in...

[3] https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/1212340/chinese-icbm...

[4] https://fas.org/publication/a-closer-look-at-chinas-missile-...

[5] https://fas.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/OrdosSilos-2002x8...

It's easier to do with dedicated military facilities than it is with factories and particularly in the Chinese silo examples they can't hide they're building something there just disguising what it's purpose is. It's a lot harder to do that with a factory where you need to fake a lot more signs of life, material deliveries, workers, finished products rolling off the line.

I'm not saying decoys as an entire category are dead just that disguising factories like the US did in WW2 is unlikely to work well in the modern world. We're way past the age where you can hide a whole huge factory. Imagery is just too good to hide something that large with that much activity around it.

Ukraine's still building stuff somehow though.

Like here's a Sep 2024 source[1] (but anonymous) that says while some factories are underground others are "at ground level, but duplicated and others even camouflaged behind huge sets. The location of these factories is top secret."

Could be propaganda though. I doubt we'll really know until after the war ends.

[1] https://archive.md/uZLFi#selection-999.23-999.155 ( https://www.elmundo.es/internacional/2024/05/09/663b9bc3fddd... )

Yeah, the Russia-Ukraine war has been an odd one. It's hard to tell how much of that is modern air defenses making it tough to do deep strikes reliably, holding back for diplomatic/strategic reasons, or the Russian armed forces being a paper bear. Of those I tend to credit modern defenses and the paper bear combo more highly.
Yes, even if it looks natural on visible light bands it won't on infrared or synthetic apeture radar imagery.
I assumed the latest weapons are GPS guided, and just zero in on a long/lat coordinate. Though I guess that would be vulnerable to jamming/deception so maybe they do use visual guidance systems.
> I assumed the latest weapons are GPS guided, and just zero in on a long/lat coordinate

Germany's Taurus for example is muuuuch more than that. It uses a sensor fusion model - GPS of course, but also inertial measurement, planetary volume modules (i.e. terrain data) and imagery. It's essentially designed to be a first-response system, able to strike Russia right where we want it, and Russia (in theory) should not be able to counteract it.

That's also, no matter if I like it or not, one of the reasons why we didn't deliver Taurus. For it to work, we'd either have to hand Ukraine the systems and data required to program the missiles (which we don't want because the risk is very high that someone sneaks the stuff off to Russia) or we'd have to send our own troops to do the programming (which we don't want because obvious reasons - remember, Germany doesn't have an equivalent to US SAC/SOG). And on top of that comes that we don't want to risk Russia finding out just how well it works and to maybe even develop countermeasures.

Strategic and cruise missiles are meant to operate in doomsday scenarios without active guidance and instead use a combination of inertial navigation, celestial navigation and terrain matching.
Infrared can be fooled with low tech fire pits or more high tech infrared lamps
It has been demonstrated time and time again that the simplest implements of war are always the most effective.
You'd think that. One of the biggest takeaways from WWI (and undeniable takeaways of WWII) is that complex weapons work better. Chemical attacks could kill thousands of men without risking a single life on the behalf of the attackers. Tanks and armored vehicles were protected from any of the simple implements that infantry could carry, and forced a complete rethinking of battlefield strategy. The concept of air superiority began to define who advanced on the ground, and the modernization of naval forces revolutionized the tactics used in standoff warfare.

It's comforting to repeat humanist aphorisms like "war never changes" but the reality of the matter is that 100,000 people had never died so quickly in any age before the atom bomb.

This is a silly statement given that guns beat arrows and arrows beat rocks. I believe you meant something more specific. What we are seeing in Ukraine is a war of attrition.
Has it? Small drones be they for surveillance, dropping munitions or for suicide runs seem like they've been quite effective in Ukraine.
Ukraine has also been vigilant in making hyper-realistic wooden replicas of various types of equipment, some even including heating elements in them so they look correct on thermal cameras.

If you've seen how glitchy/blurry the drone footage can get with jamming, it'd be easy to be fooled by a decoy.

Jamming makes precision guided munition not so precise. For example Excalibur shells are useless in Ukraine.
It hasn't stopped threats like ATACMS or other precision munitions. The larger the munition the better the guidance stands up to interference up to cruise missiles that can use terrain following or inertial guidance to strike quite precisely without needing GPS at all.
You don't even need guided bombs. Dumb bomb targeting is highly accurate today. The computer will show on the HUD the impact point of the bomb based on aircraft velocity, altitude, drag characteristics of the bomb etc.
Next stage thus? built standardized stockpiles, store in the middle of nowhere in containers, assemble on route.
There will be no war between Russia and the USA for the next four years since the USA will just give Russia whatever it wants.
Putin made all his moves against Ukraine during Obama/Biden and Biden/Harris terms and was mostly unchecked (especially Crimea) so I've never understood this opinion.
The terms when the USA didn't just give Russia whatever it wanted.
I'm hopeful that 'business' will prevail and #47 goes merchant of death mode to sell to those we'd like to see remain countries.
Zero chance. This is what nukes are for. If China or Russia is hitting millitary strategical targets in the continental USA they will be nuked. If they can still hit the USA after that with vision guided weapons then somehow all legs of the triad has failed.

There is no possible scenairo where it would make sense to camuflage these factories again.

Both countries have nukes and methods to deliver these nukes. Nuking China will also nuke the USA. There is a reason why Russia can't use their current nuclear weapons and it's not humanity.
I read all your sentences and agree with them. Still I can't see how that changes my conclusion.

The point of putting up disguises like these is that you think it is possible that the enemy flies over the target with something which uses visual piloting (a crewed bomber, or a camera guided cruise missile or similar).

A strike like that at the continental US at a military target like the Boeing assembly halls would either trigger an overwhelming conventional response (against foes without nukes) or would trigger a nuclear attack (against foes with nukes). The day the USA can't or won't do one of those responses is the day it lost the war. You might as well raise the flag of the attackers over the white house because it is over. (Which just to be clear is just a different way to say that it won't happen. The USA will strike back. Even if for some reason it is much diminished and literally fractured and cornered.)

And since the foes also know this they won't send bombers against the Boeing factories. Because of the consequences that would entail.

Here's hoping Russia and/or China never launched any satellites to image the area before your re-appearing camo is installed.
That plus that they haven’t heard of google maps.