Mad About Science: Camouflage

By Brenden Bobby
Reader Columnist

Camo is a common sight in North Idaho. Whether it’s covering a giant, lifted truck that’s ironically drawing more attention to itself, or a group of hunters hunkered down in a duck blind on the Pack River Delta one early October morning, we’re used to seeing what we’re not intended to see.

As pivotal of a development as camouflage has been for hunting and militaries around the world, it’s surprisingly new in the history of warfare. Up until the repeating firearm, stealth on the field of battle was not a primary concern for most military forces. Rather, generals and warlords of ages past preferred their foes to see their full force to instill fear at the sheer size of their army. A similar psychology is at play when confronted by a black bear or a mountain lion — by making yourself appear larger and more fearsome, you have a greater chance at scaring away the beast.

This kind of psychological warfare made sense when you were within shouting range of your opponent, and seeing a fearsome foe could cause you to make a critical error and delay a strike, or even run from the battlefield. This became much less important when weapons could be rapidly fired over great distances and it became more important to remain unseen, untargeted and unknown. 

You may be wondering to yourself, at what point exactly did scales tip into the favor of military camouflage? And why is it a French word, when it’s used around the world?

U.S. soldiers show how different camouflage patterns appear in the field. Courtesy photo.

Up until 1915, in the middle of World War I, a portion of the French army uniform was a pair of bright red trousers. This was pushed heavily by the French military brass to bolster the agricultural industry, particularly in the production of the common madder plant, Rubia tinctorum, which yields a deep-red dye often used to color leather, wool and silk. 

The leadership of the French army (properly known as the Armée de Terre, literally “army of land”) pushed for this to the detriment of their troops, who were being thrown into a meat grinder on the front lines. At some point, and many casualties later, the leadership conceded and recruited French artists to develop a uniform that would help conceal troops from the hail of gunfire on the front lines.

Duck Dynasty would have been a very different show if everyone had been wearing cherry red pants.

Early camouflage used fewer patterns than camo today, often the enlisted artists would use familiar dyes to match the surrounding terrain. This made sense at a time when optical enhancements like scopes weren’t as readily available to the rank-and-file soldiers serving in the trenches. This trend continued into World War II, as there was still a heavy reliance on iron sights with weapons, but this is when patterning began to appear more commonly on vehicles.

Ships received a unique patterning system that used angled geometric shapes to create a disorienting illusion as the ship would move along the horizon. This made the ship more visible in many ways, but it became much more difficult to land a crippling strike, as it was difficult for the gunners to visually target key architectural elements on the ship. This was a very short-lived development in camouflage as radar made ship-to-ship targeting far more reliable.

Despite radar development, camouflage was still extensively used by warplanes with a technique called countershading. Planes would have different colors and patterns on their lower half than they would from above. This made them more difficult to spot from any angle, unless the plane was performing a roll. Most air-to-air combat at this time was performed with automatic guns rather than radar-guided weapons, which may have explained why planes continued to remain camouflaged throughout the war while ships were not.

Camouflage has evolved considerably in the past two decades as technology and the nature of warfare has changed. Powerful optics are more readily available to frontline soldiers — the technology not only increases magnification but can also perform tasks like thermal imaging or providing low-light vision. Camouflage has had to create adaptations to counter all of this, without adding excessive weight to the soldier. 

Multi-spectral camouflage comes in many forms, but works to disrupt not only the visual spectrum but also infrared and radar as well, though this is more frequently utilized on vehicles.

To a degree, one could argue that most modern camouflage functions less to fully obfuscate the soldier and more to mitigate a potentially lethal shot by throwing off a combatant’s ability to visually discern what they’re looking at. In a way, this is similar to staring at one of the optical illusion books you may find at the library: You know what you’re looking at, but your brain is spinning in circles trying to make sense of it.

The growth of computer-assisted design has created many new forms of camouflage that serve a whole host of purposes. Hunters’ camo may have imagery of leaves, twigs or rounded blobs of black, brown and green, while military camouflage has a more pixelated appearance, and there’s a reason for this.

Certain animals see the world differently than humans do. Deer and other related ungulates are only able to see with a sharp clarity from about 20 feet away, similar to what we can view from about 60 feet away. Deer can only see the world in blues and browns, and aren’t able to pick up colors in the red-and-orange spectrum, which is why we can wear blaze orange camouflage and still remain invisible to the deer. 

While it sounds like we have an edge over deer in every way, they’re actually much better than humans at detecting and processing movement in low-light conditions. Their brains are able to process movement information four times faster than ours, giving them an immense advantage to escape before we’ve even drawn up the rifle.

Also, the deer aren’t shooting back at us, so that’s a plus.

Stay curious, 7B.