Russia’s Inflatable Tanks Are Back In Action

The Russian army’s 45th Separate Camouflage Engineer Regiment—the famed “inflatable regiment”—is at it again. One of the regiment’s inflatable decoy T-72 tanks caught the attention of a Ukrainian drone operator somewhere along the southern front of Russia’s wider war on Ukraine, on or before Monday.

The 45th Regiment isn’t the only unit erecting balloon decoys across Ukraine as Russia’s wider war grinds into its 20th month. The Ukrainian military also has decoy units with inflatable versions of some of Kyiv’s latest weaponry, including air-filled High-Mobility Artillery Rocket System launchers and M-1 tanks that a Czech firm manufactures.

The aim of these decoys should be obvious. They can draw the attention of enemy drone and artillery strikes, depleting expensive shells and missiles at low cost to the decoy’s owner. A decoy might cost as little as $10,000. One of Ukraine’s Excalibur GPS-guided shells costs $70,000.

The 45th Separate Camouflage Engineer Regiment descends from the 45th Engineer and Sapper Regiment, which stood up in 1980 and later fought in Afghanistan. The regiment, based in Vladimir Oblast east of Moscow, transitioned to the decoy role in 2006—but shuttered soon thereafter.

The Kremin reformed the unit in 2017 and supplied it with decoys matching many of the Russian armed forces’ main weapons. Sukhoi fighters. S-300 air-defense batteries. T-72 tanks.

The 45th Regiment’s engineers ride in Kamaz trucks with their deflated decoys squeezed into glorified body bags. A team can inflate a decoy “in a few minutes,” according to Izvestia.

A trained drone operator can tell an inflatable decoy by its lack of detail—and by the telltale shadows cast by the rods that prop up its droopy bits, such as its gun barrel.

At night, a drone crew might tell a decoy from the real thing by looking for the telltale heat signature a real vehicle registers. And at any time of day, electronic-warfare specialists can differentiate between decoy systems and real ones by way of their electromagnetic emissions.

The 45th Regiment has an answer to the infrared problem: it can install heaters inside its decoys. However, it’s more difficult to make, say, a fake radar installation emit the same signals as a real radar installation.

Difficult, but not impossible. Both the Ukrainians and Russians possess so-called “threat emitters,” which are tiny radar devices that send out signals without receiving or processing them. In peacetime, militaries use these emitters for training; in wartime, they could install them alongside decoys to create multispectral fakes.

Adding emissions to a decoy makes it more expensive. A single threat emitter might cost $30,000.

A decoy’s biggest tell, however, might be contextual. A tank or missile launcher doesn’t operate in isolation: it’s part of a small unit that’s part of a larger unit that’s part of an overall force that’s pursuing an objective across time and space. Military operations, and the forces that undertake them, are complex.

By contrast, decoys—even ones that are hot and emit—are simple. Yes, the Russian army has a regiment whose job it is to set up potentially hundreds of decoys. No, that regiment can’t deploy whole inflatable armies with all their interconnectedness. To tell a decoy tank from a real one, look for the one that’s sitting there all by itself, doing nothing.

Zoran Dobrosavljevic, a senior consulting engineer at Roke Manor Research in the United Kingdom, told Journal of Electromagnetic Dominance that the decoy industry is a long way from scaling up—and adding a convincing electromagnetic dimension to its fakery.

“It’s one of the more complicated things to achieve when you’re trying to mimic an entire battlegroup,” Dobrosavljevic said. “And unless it is absolutely nailed on, even down to the modulation types and the timings, then a capable adversary will realize that a decoy isn’t real.”

And so it is that the drone that lingered over the 45th Regiment’s decoy T-72 this week did so only briefly. It didn’t take long for the drone operator to realize they were looking at a balloon.