Since Operation Double Cross was mentioned before, I thought I'd start a thread about such cases when the military believed the darndest things, and took WTH decisions based on it. So not necessarily always "intelligence" as in information, but sometimes even as in IQ ;)
My submission to get the ball rolling would be the WTH decision in 1943 for the German Uboot command to order all METOX detectors shut off permanently.
In case someone doesn't know what I'm talking about, the Brits very early took to putting anti-submarine radar on coastal command planes, and then the Leigh lights, which were actually guided by the radar and also indicated the optimum bombing height. Effectively with the two you could start a pretty precisely aligned bombing run from miles away, switch on the lights at the last moment (the radar became useless under half a mile or so), and they'd go exactly on the surfaced sub. Which would soon become, shall would say, permanently submerged.
The French however had developed the obvious counter to being pinged by radar, namely, you can just have a receiver that picks up the pings: the METOX. It actually works better than some may think, because such a passive receiver's picked up signal is only decaying with the inverse square rule, while active detection has an inverse fourth power rule. So you can actually detect that there's a plane searching the area before it has any chance of picking YOU up.
But the French device was even better. Since the anti-submarine radar needed tweaking to keep the right resolution as it approached a sub, the sub could also know the exact distance of the plane (again, purely passively) and if it's picked you up (since then the signal would start getting tweaked to match your position.)
Unfortunately, there was another equation in getting detected: Enigma and later huff-duff. The Germans were losing a lot of subs, because the Brits could find their position one way or another. Usually by getting lucky and cracking a 4-rotor Enigma message anyway.
So even with the early warning installed, the sub losses were going up. Somehow the Brits were finding the subs anyway. Well HOW? Since they were convinced that their Enigma code is completely uncrackable, and surely their subs don't send long enough messages for their position to be triangulated (both assumptions awfully false), the Germans started thinking long and hard about what ELSE could be giving away the sub positions. AH-HA! If we have a system that detects ASW radar, the Brits must have gone one step further and made a system that detects our detector. Surely they detect the METOX! TURN IT OFF!
What makes this an especially stupid idea is that you CAN'T detect a passive receiver. You can detect something that sends a signal, which was the detection that the Germans had installed on their subs. But you CAN'T detect that someone is passively receiving your signal.
So turning the damned thing off permanently removed the valuable early warning, and only really helped the Brits.
My submission to get the ball rolling would be the WTH decision in 1943 for the German Uboot command to order all METOX detectors shut off permanently.
In case someone doesn't know what I'm talking about, the Brits very early took to putting anti-submarine radar on coastal command planes, and then the Leigh lights, which were actually guided by the radar and also indicated the optimum bombing height. Effectively with the two you could start a pretty precisely aligned bombing run from miles away, switch on the lights at the last moment (the radar became useless under half a mile or so), and they'd go exactly on the surfaced sub. Which would soon become, shall would say, permanently submerged.
The French however had developed the obvious counter to being pinged by radar, namely, you can just have a receiver that picks up the pings: the METOX. It actually works better than some may think, because such a passive receiver's picked up signal is only decaying with the inverse square rule, while active detection has an inverse fourth power rule. So you can actually detect that there's a plane searching the area before it has any chance of picking YOU up.
But the French device was even better. Since the anti-submarine radar needed tweaking to keep the right resolution as it approached a sub, the sub could also know the exact distance of the plane (again, purely passively) and if it's picked you up (since then the signal would start getting tweaked to match your position.)
Unfortunately, there was another equation in getting detected: Enigma and later huff-duff. The Germans were losing a lot of subs, because the Brits could find their position one way or another. Usually by getting lucky and cracking a 4-rotor Enigma message anyway.
So even with the early warning installed, the sub losses were going up. Somehow the Brits were finding the subs anyway. Well HOW? Since they were convinced that their Enigma code is completely uncrackable, and surely their subs don't send long enough messages for their position to be triangulated (both assumptions awfully false), the Germans started thinking long and hard about what ELSE could be giving away the sub positions. AH-HA! If we have a system that detects ASW radar, the Brits must have gone one step further and made a system that detects our detector. Surely they detect the METOX! TURN IT OFF!
What makes this an especially stupid idea is that you CAN'T detect a passive receiver. You can detect something that sends a signal, which was the detection that the Germans had installed on their subs. But you CAN'T detect that someone is passively receiving your signal.
So turning the damned thing off permanently removed the valuable early warning, and only really helped the Brits.
via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/2tJ5pAq
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