"Gordon" wrote in message
ups.com...
Mistaking an F-4 for a Scooter or a MiG 21 is like mistaking an 18-
wheeler for a Hummer. Sure, a moron could do it.

I've been following the overall thread with interest; good points made, and
some neat facts brought out.

As a former artillery forward observer, who had to be pretty good at target
recognition (it seemed sometimes that half the documents I packed around
were recognition sheets and manuals), may I mildly point out that not every
soldier (sailor, airman, marine etc) is an avid enthusiast of military
vehicles (whether that be AFVs, aircraft, artillery, engineering equipment,
trucks etc) and hence to *them* a lot of things do look alike.

These recognition manuals get printed for two reasons - one, for the people
who genuinely really, really as part of their MOS need to be good at
recognition, and two, for the more casual user who hopefully won't fire
their ATGM at the wrong AFV or start shooting at the wrong helicopter if
they've gotten a few clues that some enemy things look sort of like some of
our things.

I'll agree that I myself would not, for example, mistake the above three
aircraft. But I can think of comparisons where that could easily happen, or
could have happened, or has happened, in all of the categories of military
vehicles.

It's also not just an issue of being _wrong_ - sometimes it's seeing an
aircraft or AFV for the first time at 5000 metres, and in the case of the ac
moving fast or high, and simply not knowing *what* it is...hence the
manuals, so you can scramble through them and try to figure out what you
see.

I happen to be a military history enthusiast myself, and this also aids in
target recognition, and always has. But I found during my time in the
Marines that very few of my enlisted peers were also military
history/technology enthusiasts (except for the technology that they were
using themselves), and hence that broad, studied base of dozens of reference
books simply did not exist for them...they were a tabula rasa at the time
they enlisted, and identifying vehicles, aircraft and equipment is a
time-consuming skill.

I'm sure that everyone in this thread remembers how to many Allied soldiers
in WW2 every German tank was a Tiger. While this is no doubt exaggerated, I
have no doubt that many Allied troops in Normandy, spotting a long-barrelled
MkIV at 1500 or 2000 metres, probably did think it was a Tiger.

The point I am trying to make is, it's easy to get so caught up in one's own
knowledge of vehicle recognition that one forgets that most people aren't
that good at it.

AHS