Submission + - Better camouflage is needed to hide from new electronic sensors (economist.com)
SpzToid writes: Camouflage ranks highly among the arts of war. Thanks to innovations such as fractal colouration patterns, which mimic nature by repeating shapes at different scales, the distance from which naked eyes can quickly spot soldiers wearing the best camouflage has shrunk, by one reckoning, by a fifth over the past two decades. That is impressive.
On today’s battlefields, however, it is no longer enough to merely hide from human eyes. People and kit are given away as well by signals beyond the visual spectrum, and devices that detect these wavelengths are getting better, lighter and cheaper. Thermal sensors are a case in point. Today, one that costs about $1,000 and weighs as little as five sachets of sugar can, in good weather, detect a warm vehicle as far off as 10km.
As Hans Kariis, deputy head of signatures research at the Swedish Defence Research Agency, notes, that is well beyond the range at which a small drone would be spotted. Two decades ago, he adds, a less sensitive thermal sensor weighing a kilogram cost ten times as much.
For forces in Ukraine keen to go unnoticed, the challenge is not just that precision sensors are multiplying, on land, in the skies and in orbit. It is also that better automatic target-detection software is helping operators find needles in the haystacks of data being collected.
Look out!
For example, software called Kestrel, developed by Sentient Vision Systems of Melbourne, Australia, scans feeds of visual, infrared and radar data, and places red boxes around people and other potential targets, even as their positions in the frame move. Sentient says Kestrel has been deployed on more than 3,500 crewed and uncrewed aircraft since its introduction in 2009. The pertinent data processing, which also classifies objects and calculates ranges, can be done aloft—a bonus, for an aircraft may collect more data than can be streamed to computers on the ground.
As Maksym Zrazhevsky, an analyst with Molfar, an intelligence firm in Dnipro, Ukraine, observes, the fighting in his country shows how these advances have made it far harder to camouflage military assets. This no doubt helps explain why, as Mr Zrazhevsky notes, Russian forces in Ukraine have resorted to using sections of timber to disguise military refuelling vehicles as civilian logging lorries. However clever that may seem, there’s a rub. The 1949 Geneva Convention on warfare bans “the feigning of civilian, non-combatant status”, as Article 37’s “Prohibition of perfidy” puts it.
But there is a different, convention-compliant approach to reducing the chance of appearing in an enemy’s cross-hairs. Rather than make targets seem civilian, design special camouflage that tricks electronic sensors as well as human eyes.
One developer of such “multispectral” camouflaging is Saab, a Swedish industrial giant. Its Barracuda unit sells camouflage netting for vehicles and soldiers that reduces both radar reflections and heat signals. To handle radar, it contains a layer of specially crafted (but secret) semi-conducting polymers that absorb a portion of the incoming beam. That stops reflections revealing tanks and other military gear underneath. Formulating the polymer is tricky, says Johan Jersblad, a senior camouflage engineer at Saab. If it is too conductive, the netting itself will appear on a radar screen and become a target.
Saab’s nets’ heat-signature reduction comes from an insulating material, also of undisclosed composition, which reflects infrared radiation from what it is covering back towards its source, be it an engine, a gun or a body. To better fool soldiers or software scanning thermal imagery, the material also reflects cooler wavelengths emitted by surroundings like the ground and vegetation—in effect, stealing their temperature from them. The material in question is distributed unevenly, to mimic heat variation in the natural world. Dr Kariis reckons today’s multispectral camouflage cuts in half the range at which an asset can be spotted by many sensors.
On today’s battlefields, however, it is no longer enough to merely hide from human eyes. People and kit are given away as well by signals beyond the visual spectrum, and devices that detect these wavelengths are getting better, lighter and cheaper. Thermal sensors are a case in point. Today, one that costs about $1,000 and weighs as little as five sachets of sugar can, in good weather, detect a warm vehicle as far off as 10km.
As Hans Kariis, deputy head of signatures research at the Swedish Defence Research Agency, notes, that is well beyond the range at which a small drone would be spotted. Two decades ago, he adds, a less sensitive thermal sensor weighing a kilogram cost ten times as much.
For forces in Ukraine keen to go unnoticed, the challenge is not just that precision sensors are multiplying, on land, in the skies and in orbit. It is also that better automatic target-detection software is helping operators find needles in the haystacks of data being collected.
Look out!
For example, software called Kestrel, developed by Sentient Vision Systems of Melbourne, Australia, scans feeds of visual, infrared and radar data, and places red boxes around people and other potential targets, even as their positions in the frame move. Sentient says Kestrel has been deployed on more than 3,500 crewed and uncrewed aircraft since its introduction in 2009. The pertinent data processing, which also classifies objects and calculates ranges, can be done aloft—a bonus, for an aircraft may collect more data than can be streamed to computers on the ground.
As Maksym Zrazhevsky, an analyst with Molfar, an intelligence firm in Dnipro, Ukraine, observes, the fighting in his country shows how these advances have made it far harder to camouflage military assets. This no doubt helps explain why, as Mr Zrazhevsky notes, Russian forces in Ukraine have resorted to using sections of timber to disguise military refuelling vehicles as civilian logging lorries. However clever that may seem, there’s a rub. The 1949 Geneva Convention on warfare bans “the feigning of civilian, non-combatant status”, as Article 37’s “Prohibition of perfidy” puts it.
But there is a different, convention-compliant approach to reducing the chance of appearing in an enemy’s cross-hairs. Rather than make targets seem civilian, design special camouflage that tricks electronic sensors as well as human eyes.
One developer of such “multispectral” camouflaging is Saab, a Swedish industrial giant. Its Barracuda unit sells camouflage netting for vehicles and soldiers that reduces both radar reflections and heat signals. To handle radar, it contains a layer of specially crafted (but secret) semi-conducting polymers that absorb a portion of the incoming beam. That stops reflections revealing tanks and other military gear underneath. Formulating the polymer is tricky, says Johan Jersblad, a senior camouflage engineer at Saab. If it is too conductive, the netting itself will appear on a radar screen and become a target.
Saab’s nets’ heat-signature reduction comes from an insulating material, also of undisclosed composition, which reflects infrared radiation from what it is covering back towards its source, be it an engine, a gun or a body. To better fool soldiers or software scanning thermal imagery, the material also reflects cooler wavelengths emitted by surroundings like the ground and vegetation—in effect, stealing their temperature from them. The material in question is distributed unevenly, to mimic heat variation in the natural world. Dr Kariis reckons today’s multispectral camouflage cuts in half the range at which an asset can be spotted by many sensors.
