For example, to cloak an armoured vehicle, you might drape it with the branches of trees. Once upon a time, the way that troops, equipment, and structures were concealed required use of natural materials. The right camouflage for the environment in which you’re operating can prevent the enemy from figuring out what you’re doing until it’s too late to counter your move. In any offensive or defensive situation where you must visually trick the enemy in order to achieve a particular objective, camouflage is absolutely essential. If you need to go undetected just long enough to successfully spring an ambush on the enemy, again camouflage is the answer.Īnd if you need to slip past the enemy without them ever knowing you were in proximity, cloaking yourself in camouflage will help you reach the relative safety of your own lines. If you need to conceal your position, camouflage is the right tool for the job. In this instance, the strategy of which we speak is one employed to gain advantages in a theatre of war (or in multiple theatres).Īt its most basic, then, camouflage is any material designed to fool an enemy’s eyes into not seeing you, your equipment, or your hiding place. Military Camouflage has a codename, MILDEC (short for “military deception”), which means it’s not just a type of material or piece of equipment but also a strategy. Fooling the enemyīefore proceeding further with our discussion of military camouflage, we need to clarify what camouflage actually is. The camo patterns and camo colors are typically screen printed or dye sublimated onto the fabric before the clothing is stitched together. Well, the type of camouflage made for wear by soldiers comes from textile mills and other raw-materials producers that manufacture camouflaged fabrics for sale by the bolt to garment makers like us. When you ask “Where does camouflage come from?” you don’t mean etymologically. With the right camoufler, you could make the vehicle look from a distance a lot less like a vehicle and much more like a piece of the grove. The word camouflage is of French origin (the actual word is camoufler) and the idea it conveys is that of taking something visible and rendering it invisible by making it look like something other than what it actually is.įor example, let’s say you have an armoured vehicle parked next to a grove of trees. Military camouflage is different from others in the sense that the theatres and the detection methods change from natural to man-made, thus shifting from conventional patterns to the multispectral holy grail of which we all dream. Military camouflage is any material or means that can be used by armed forces to make it harder or, ideally, impossible to be seen at a distance by an opposing armed force before or during a tactical operation. It’s not like the camouflage you might wear in the civilian world as a hunter or as someone trying to be “tacticool.” But what is it that makes military camouflage “military?” And just how ingeniously different from civilian camouflage must it be to achieve effectiveness on today’s battlefields? Let’s take a look now at military camouflage (or concealment tech, as it’s better known nowadays). We can further split areas of effect into two subcategories, the first being visual, the other non-visual. To recap, camouflage is designed for a specific environment or task. In this post, we’ll focus on the visual differences and inherent properties of the patterns. In a separate post, we touched on the differences between hunting camo patterns and those for military use. In an earlier post, we discussed the different types of camouflage.
Indeed, the science at this point is millenia old, but it is really only in the last hundred years that camouflage producers acquired the deep understanding of the laws of physics and physiology that permit the remarkable array of camo patterns and camo colours now available to military forces around the world. As you’ll come to appreciate by reading this post, modern military camouflage works as well as it does because it is based on long-settled scientific precepts. Traditionally, camouflage is a pattern-and-colour design formulation intended to make soldiers and equipment less visible to enemy eyes. But among the very most effective disguises is camouflage, the purpose of which is to make soldiers and equipment less visible to enemy eyes. The least effective disguise is a fake mustache. There are various ways by which soldiers can disguise themselves to either avoid an encounter with hostile forces or gain over them the element of surprise.
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