ISIS is using wooden tanks and bearded mannequins to try and trick US warplanes over Mosul

It depends - the outcome we are looking for, the Iranians are looking for, the Kurds are looking for, Turkey is looking for, the Iraqi Government is looking for, or the one the IS commander in Mosul is pursuing. They are not the same - and there is where deception really can effect an attacker.

LTC Eric Udouj - The outcome I was referring to was the defeat of ISIS in Mosul, not the after effects. Agree your points. Our air power and military assistance on the ground ensures success, regardless of how temporary it may be.

Actually think they took it from the Serbs in their successful defense against NATO air strikes. It was an item being taught in several places to show how to negate air superiority. The US effort in WWII was a great strategic and operational deception, and we have usually found ourselves on the end of being deceived since then. For a city fight - no one in my mind holds a match to Prince John at Yorktown. Magruder had maybe 10,000 troops and used every trick in the book to make it look like a huge force. The siege of Corinth, MS also comes to mind.

We also used in Desert Storm as part of the Left hook to mask the movement of the 2nd MARDIV to hook around and breach through Iraq to flank the Iraqis. We built a hole fake battle field camp made out of wood and camo netting, they also landed Helos on and off making it look like we were masking troop movements. The Task Force was Task Force Troy 1st MARDIV Recon. The task Force was around 400 Marine Infantry Company, Recon Company, LAV platoon, and TOW platoon, Combat Engineers and 21 Man Seabee Detachment (That was my Team) and Army PSYOPS/Intel unit.

CPO (Join to see) - And that was our last real operational level deception ... and that was the war before these last 15 years of war. But excellent point Gerald - it was one of our best efforts in deception.

But we dont... and agree. But even way back when I was a tanker - we had a means to figure in heat signature as well as visual. But the forces attacking Mosul... visual is a critical item for them with out thermals.