The Soviets liked to do this sort of thing too. They'd have a groups of bombers fly past during demonstrations. Except instead of many groups of bombers, it was one group of bombers that would fly off, make a circle out of sight, then make another flyby.

This let the US to greatly overestimate Soviet production, and produce huge numbers of their own weapons to "match" the Soviets. So it all sort of backfired on the Soviets, since they mostly just convinced the other side to put their much greater productive capacity to use.