The Little World

Without firing a shot.

Easy…spread propaganda that you have a new plane that is many generations beyond what your rival has. Produce propaganda and animated simulations of the aircraft and make it do things that are frankly impossible while claiming that you have hundreds of them in secret underground bunkers.

Make accurate scale models of them and film these in such a way as to suggest they are real. If you can make the images look as if they were taken by a spy camera and then smuggle them out to your enemies they will be rewarding.

If you can manage to attach enough fake empennage to a current aircraft to alter its appearance, paint if in a startlingly new colour scheme and fly it over your national day political parade. Circle round out of sight and repeat this enough times to convince people that there are squadrons of them.

This was the outstanding ploy that the Soviet VVS used with the Myasischev Bison bomber, parlaying a half dozen into a major Cold War scare. The fact that the aircraft could never do the task for which it was designed was beside the point – it did result in the construction of 750 Boeing B – 52’s that definitely could.

Can you say ” Own Goal “, Nikita?