Has sabotaging weather gathering and analysis services ever been used as a military tactic?

by DawgBro
BritainOpPlsNerf

Yes, to an extent. Rather a better answer is having this information to hand is always necessary and useful; therefore denying it to the enemy is equally necessary and useful.

During the Battle of the Atlantic in WWII the Allies had a natural strategic advantage with being able to keep abreast of changing weather conditions, aided primarily by the fact that they had stations on either side and along the way (North American East Coast - Iceland - The British Isles). Weather formations in the Atlantic generally move Eastwards, which meant departing convoys from the North American coast moved with the weather.

The Kriegsmarine could do nothing about this, obviously, save level the playing field. U-boats, converted liners and weather aircraft all operated in the North Atlantic and were all expected to keep the Naval high command abreast of changing weather conditions. All of these were stop-gap measures, and all of them patchy at best. Finally, especially with relation to weather-related aircraft, the Allies went out of their way to patrol and destroy these weather patrols. Denial of information, no matter how niche, is always an important objective in conflict. The Kriegsmarine also attempted to establish Arctic weather-posts, I'm unsure of their success on the matter and any Allied attempts to stop them.

I'm going to pull in /u/an_ironic_username here so he can weigh in and correct me. Generally speaking during 1940-1943 the greatest threat for an Atlantic convoy travelling in any direction was from submarine attack; but surface conditions must be favorable for a submarine to engage visually, be it on the surface or at periscope depth. Convoys moving with storms, swells or other unfavorable but sail-able conditions could protect themselves with nature itself; making an attack by sound is a low-accuracy proposition for a submarine, for example.

PS: You may want to refine to a period because the mods may slay this for being 'throughout history'

AnOldHope

Sorry, we don't allow throughout history questions. These tend to produce threads which are collections of trivia, not the in-depth discussions about a particular topic we're looking for. If you have a specific question about a historical event or period or person, please feel free to re-compose your question and submit it again. Alternatively, questions of this type can be directed to more appropriate subreddits, such as /r/history or /r/askhistory.