12 Weird Military Plans That Never Panned Out

Times when armies thought a bit too far outside of the box.

Published 10 months ago in Facepalm

You don't win conflicts by sitting around, and militaries have always been forced to get creative to succeed in conflicts. But for every brilliant strategic ploy, there are dozens more that never make it off the drawing board. Every D-Day has its Operation Barbarossa, and not every commander is willing to give their version of the Trojan Horse a try. Here are 12 weird and crazy military plans that never panned out.

If you're a cat lover like me, then you know that our feline companions like to pretend like they're not listening to us... all while absorbing every single thing we say. You know, like good spies. The CIA thought this too, and proposed a Cold War plan to implant a cat with recording technology before letting it loose in the Kremlin. The tech turned out to be more difficult to engineer than originally planned, and the idea was scrapped. As cool as that cat would have been, there was never a feline super spy.

But even that crazy plan pales in comparison to using live chickens to help failsafe nuclear landmines. If you want to read about that, check out this collection of 12 weird military plans that never panned out.

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According to BBC, “The 1994 plans were for a six-year project costing $7.5m, but they were never pursued. The plan for a so-called ‘love bomb’ envisaged an aphrodisiac chemical that would provoke widespread homosexual behavior among troops, causing what the military called a "distasteful but completely non-lethal hit to "morale.”

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British inventor Geoffrey Pyke proposed an aircraft carrier made of ice, to operate in cold climates. Unfortunately, the idea never really warmed up after many engineering difficulties.

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During World War II, Britain proposed littering the German countryside with linseed cakes infected with anthrax spores. The spores would have infected cattle, which would have then affected humans upon consumption. It could have decimated German cattle and human populations, but was thankfully never implemented.

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During World War II, Germany planned to drop hundreds of millions of counterfeit pound notes into England. Lead by Major Bernhard Kruger, they did manufacture over many millions of fake notes, but never got enough into Britain to affect anything. They did however use them to pay spies, and in transactions with foreign governments.
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Fearing a massive Soviet invasion during the cold war, the US and UK needed a way to theoretically slow down Russian forces. They settled on nuclear landmines, but needed a way to keep the mechanisms warm. To do this, they proposed burying live chickens along with the bombs, and feeding them. Unfortunately the chickens typically didn’t last more than a week, and burying nukes in allied territory wasn’t a popular idea.

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The United States decided to take advantage of their weather balloons around the world to sneak spied into the Soviet Union. The balloons however, didn’t prove very practical.
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The United States attempted to modify a transport plane with rockets, to allow it to take off and land like a helicopter in an attempt to rescue the Tehran hostages in 1980. The test flights resulted in disasters, and the hostages were eventually released.
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