#24: Questionable Tactics
During World War II, the British military explored various unconventional tactics to counter the threat of enemy submarines, and one particularly quirky idea involved training seagulls to defecate on enemy periscopes. The thinking was that if seagulls could be conditioned to target periscopes with their droppings, it would obstruct the vision of submarine crews and potentially reveal their positions.
However, this plan had a rather humorous and unexpected flaw. Seagulls, while excellent coastal birds, couldn’t fly far enough out to sea to make this strategy effective against submarines operating in deeper waters. So, despite the ingenuity behind the idea, it turned out to be more comical than practical and was eventually abandoned in favor of more conventional anti-submarine measures.