6 WTF Military Plans Too Dumb For Movies

6

Rwanda Launched a Massive Airborne Invasion With Hijacked Airliners

After the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, the cartoonishly corrupt Congolese dictator Mobutu Sese Seko decided to help some murderous Hutu shitheads with their sequel plans. This angered Rwanda, which promptly conquered the Congo in seven months ... despite being 1/89th the size of the Congo. However, the new, Rwandan-installed Congolese dictator Laurent-Desire Kabila quickly decided to tell Rwanda to screw off. This also angered Rwanda, which promptly launched a daring airborne invasion to bump him off too ... despite not having an air force. 

In August 1998, Rwanda's leaders had their BFFs, the Banyamulenge, stage an uprising in the Eastern Congo. Commandos led by General James Kabarebe seized two Boeing 727s and two Boeing 707s during the chaos, then they forced some random pilots they kidnapped to help start the bloodiest war since World War II.

The commandos flew to the other side of Africa, landed in the middle of enemy-held Kitona Airbase, and jumped off the rear airstairs of still-moving 727s like an army of D.B. Coopers. After stealing the airport, Kabarebe forced his stolen pilots to use his stolen airline to fly in thousands of Rwandan and Ugandan soldiers. He also used suitcases full of money to persuade thousands of dissident Congolese soldiers in the area to dissent so hard that they switched sides with all of their tanks and artillery. He quickly gathered an army of somewhere around 18,000 men. For comparison, the United States landed about 17,000 airborne troops during the Normandy Invasion. 

After Rwanda essentially cheat-spawned a massive, unopposed army 1,200 miles away from Rwanda itself, it captured (and raped and pillaged) Congo's coastline, oil fields, and main hydroelectric dam. If you ignore the widespread atrocities both sides were now committing (like most of the world did), there weren't any problems ... Until Rwanda's old allies, Angola, Zimbabwe, and Namibia, unexpectedly decided they were fed up with Rwanda's bullshit and switched sides. Angola counter-invaded and recaptured (and re-raped and re-pillaged) the area Kabarebe had taken mere days earlier. Zimbabwe just barely stopped Rwanda from taking the Congo capital at the completely absurd Battle of N'Djili Airport, where Zimbabwean fighter jets had to bomb the other end of the same runway they were taking off from. Namibia's army eventually showed up and got a participation trophy. 

Cut off and surrounded by multiple armies, Kabarebe activated his plot armor and teamed up with UNITA to surprise-counter-counter-invade Angola, where his army essentially built their own airport in the jungle and flew away on notorious arms trafficker Viktor Bout's private air force in the middle of the night. 

"Operation Kitona" triggered the Second Congo War, AKA "The Great War of Africa," AKA "Africa's World War." Whatever you call it, this massive regional war directly involved a whopping 34 countries and armed groups and killed over 5 million people. It mostly ended in mostly stalemate in 2003, but some fighting continues to this day.

5

Azerbaijan Spammed Armenia's Air Defenses With Antique Biplanes (In the year 2020)

If you were distracted by another news event between September 27th and November 10th, 2020, you likely missed the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Their beef was over Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed mountain region that has historically been owned by whoever last ethnically cleansed it. Their first war over the area ended with the Soviets invading and annexing both countries, sooo that was a bit of a mulligan. Still, Armenia won the next war, which caused Azerbaijan to get really salty and start this war by invading Nagorno-Karabakh with Syrian mercenaries. Hey, third time's the charm. 

4

A German Battlecruiser Got Sunk Four Times (Twice Due to an Eccentric Scrap Metal Merchant)

In the early 1900s, some British guy had a terrible idea: Let's build ships with the "FU" firepower of a dreadnaught battleship, but with so little armor they might blow up if the enemy kicked it hard enough, and also give them a stupid poser name like "battlecruiser." The Germans copied these deathtraps, and that's how SMS Seydlitz happened. 

3

One of the Deadliest D-Day Beaches was The Practice Beach in England

A few weeks before D-Day, Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered "Exercise Tiger," a full-scale practice landing for Utah Beach. It would be just like the real invasion, except on a random British beach that didn't have any Nazis near it. 

The first problem was that the Nazis showed up, which was quite rude as they hadn't been invited. Nine German torpedo boats found out about the exercise and managed to slip into the practice invasion fleet during the night and sink several landing ships, killing over 700 Americans. So that's, like, 2.5 gulf wars right off the bat, and they hadn't even started the actual fake landings. 

Now, Eisenhower wanted the landings to be as realistic as possible. This meant full battle loadout, live ammunition, naval bombardments, and - most realistically of all - hundreds of men needlessly dying in a random bureaucratic screwup. Some of the landing craft were running late, so the landings got delayed by an hour. Some of the assault boats didn't get this memo, while most of the Navy did. As a result, a bunch of guys went in at the original time and were massacred by the practice naval bombardment.

Of course, Exercise Tiger was quickly covered up and forgotten about, and all the survivors threatened with court-martial if they ever told anyone about it. Communication failures were fixed, strategies improved, and an aggressive air-sea campaign against German torpedo boats waged. The exact death toll is a bit fuzzy because of the cover-up, but it was somewhere between 700-ish and 946. Ironically, this meant Exercise Tiger killed more men than the actual landings on Utah Beach. Depending on how exactly you count the numbers, it arguably killed more men than any D-Day beach except Omaha as well. 

2

The US Built a C-130 Cargo Plane That Could Land in a Football Stadium (Using Dozens of Rockets and Missiles)

When Iran took a bunch of American diplomats hostage, America's answer was to have some of the hostages pretend to be a Canadian film crew, which you probably already knew. America's slightly less famous second answer was Operation Eagle Claw, a convoluted rescue mission where part one had Delta Force land a bunch of helicopters and airplanes on an Iranian highway in the middle of the desert, hang out for the night, and hope no Iranians noticed. They wound up detaining the 40-something Iranian bus riders who noticed them and then caused a massive fireball by blowing up a random fuel truck with a rocket launcher. Then the driver of that fuel truck hopped into a passing pick-up truck, which Delta Force tried and failed to chase down with a motorcycle, like some sort of life-and-death Looney Tunes cartoon. Then some of the helicopters broke down, and -- for good measure -- one of the working helicopters flew into an airplane after the mission had already been aborted.

Clearly, that live-action Team America: World Police prequel left room for improvement. First off, Operation Eagle Claw had too many steps. America's answer #3, Operation Credible Sport, aimed to skip most of those pesky steps and "simplify" the whole operation by ... uh ... attaching dozens of rocket motors, anti-submarine missiles, and anti-radar missiles to a giant C-130 cargo plane they would redesignate "YMC-130". The idea was to make a giant, one-use, makeshift almost-helicopter that could land and take-off inside the football stadium across the street from the embassy. Yes, there is a video.

1

The Russians Mistook a Bunch of British Fishing Boats off the British Coast for Japanese Torpedo Boats

Around the turn of the 20th century, Japan and Russia got into a dispute over who would get to push around China and Korea. The diplomatic option failed because Russia mistook Japan for some random punk-ass country it could send silly offers to. Hostilities erupted in 1904 when Japan launched a surprise attack on Russia's Pacific Fleet without declaring war first, a total dick move that would never work on anyone else ever again.