For forces in Ukraine to go unnoticed, a challenge is that better automatic target-detection software is helping operators find needles in the haystacks of data being collected
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 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.
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.
Both designs would add but a trivial amount of weight to military fatigues, notes Alon Gorodetsky, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Irvine, who leads the project. The technology, he says, could be ready within a few years. Such materials, he adds, might also be used as insulation for the better control of heat flows in electronics.
Wilder things, even more deserving of Dr Hogervorst’s description, are in the pipeline. Hyperstealth Biotechnology, a firm in Maple Ridge, British Columbia that has designed some 15,000 camouflage colouration patterns for more than 50 countries, is now making objects appear invisible. Its “Quantum Stealth” system uses translucent plastic sheets with rows of elongated lenses called lenticules.
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