If China invades Taiwan, Taiwan will not notice because a drone has been disguised as an optical illusion for months

In modern aviation, each aircraft carries a unique “digital license plate” that identifies it to the world in real time. It makes perfect sense. It is a system designed to provide transparency and security, but it also demonstrates a most disturbing paradox: what appears on a screen is not always what is really flying.

China has just put it into practice.

A bird, a fighter or a drone. A Reuters investigation has revealed that, since last August, at least 23 flights over the South China Sea have been registered under the callsign YILO4200, associated with a long-range Chinese military drone, although the signals it emitted told a different story.

It happens that on civil radars it appeared as a sanctioned Belarusian freighter, also as a British Typhoon fighterlike a North Korean plane or even like a Western executive jet. These were not specific errors or programming errors. Was a deliberate impersonation of air identities by manipulating 24-bit transponder codes that identify position, course and speed.

“We have never seen anything like this.” The middle counted that open intelligence analysts and those responsible for aerial tracking platforms agreed on something unusual: this pattern was unprecedented. It was not the classic drone flying “in the dark” without emitting a signal.

It was just the opposite. He flew showing a false identity, changing it even in the middle of the journey, testing in real time to what extent he could “dirty” the aerial chart. “We had never seen anything like this,” summarized one of the experts who analyzed the data. It didn’t seem like an accident or a technical anomaly. It seemed like a conscious attempt at operational deception.

The ultimate optical illusion. The drone, identified as a Wing Loong 2 With a 20-meter wingspan, it took off from Hainan and traced star- or hourglass-shaped patterns for hours over sensitive areas, including naval routes and areas frequented by submarines.

In one of the missions the identity of a Typhoon of the RAF with that of three other aircraft in just twenty minutes before virtually “landing” like the Belarusian plane. On another occasion he posed as that same freighter while the real aircraft was simultaneously taking off in Europe.

It was a full-fledged aerial optical illusion sustained for months.

Taiwan as a backdrop. Not only that. Apparently, the trajectories were not random. Many were projected towards the Bashi channelcritical point between Taiwan and the Philippinesand when superimposed on a map of the island they crossed areas of military interest around Taipei and its southern coast.

In fact, they also brushed against American and Japanese bases in Okinawa and the Ryukyu. It wasn’t just about surveillance. The pattern therefore suggests a digital rehearsal to a bigger stagea test of how to generate confusion in the early stages of a crisis in the Strait.

Confusion in decisive milliseconds. They remembered in research that, in highly automated conflicts, milliseconds can separate detection from firing.

Introducing noise, false identities and contradictory echoes can delay critical decisions and overwhelm chains of command. Although masking would hardly completely fool advanced military radars, it can sow doubts, hide intelligence missions, or fuel disinformation operations. The key is not so much to disappear. Is seem like something else.

If China invades, the warning could be a fiction. Ultimately, the most disturbing idea is not only that a drone has been eight months in disguise in front of Taiwan’s radars. It is rather that that capacity has been tested with patience, repetition and apparent impunity.

If you will, if China finally decides to go beyond in Taiwannot even the island itself is going to realize at the first moment what it is seeing on its screens. Because from now on, what appears might not be what actually flies. And that is the true revolution of the movement: a possible invasion that begins, not with missiles, but with a false identity flashing on the radar.

An “ally” that comes close and that in reality is not so much.

Image | 中文（臺灣）：​中華民國總統府, Mztourist –

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