Camouflage has been used in ground combat throughout history, but primarily by hunters called to temporary military duty rather than formalized armies, against whom they often were pitted. The earliest forms – such as covering a combatant with dirt, mud, or bits of foliage – are still in use, even by the most technologically advanced militaries. But, as with all other elements of warfare, camouflage also has been and will be heavily affected by new materials and science.
It was not until the 1800s that national armies, initially troops of the British Empire in India and South Africa, began to shed brightly colored battle dress for neutral colors that would make them more difficult targets. But even limited camouflage did not become a semi-regular part of military dress until World War I. In the years between the two great wars, military leaders finally began shedding the millennia-old concept that concealment in combat was “shameful” and started looking for ways to increase warfighter survivability through combat uniforms that did not stand out from their background.
Three of the most influential – and diverse – factors in this effort were American author Gerald Handerson Thayer’s 1909 book, Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom, insights into how humans perceive what they see from early 20th century German Gestalt psychology, and the avant-garde work of cubist and impressionist painters. Combining the three, along with studies of the concealment methods of hunters, American Indians, and other non-European cultures, led to a far different style of battle uniform during World War II.
A major shift in camouflage design was developed in the late 1990s for the Canadian military: employing a computer-generated blending of pixels – essentially, square spots of varying size – that formed no specific pattern. An advancement on the basic effort to confuse an observer’s brain, variations on that theme were quickly adopted by other nations, especially for post-9/11 operations in Southwest Asia.
Most nations now employ a variety of camouflage patterns, for use in different environments (snow, jungle, desert, urban, etc.) by different groups (army, navy, air force, special forces, police, etc.). Some variations may be on the road to reversal, such as the divergence of U.S. Army and Marine Corps designs during the past decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The two may come back together if they see success in recent efforts to develop a new universal pattern, enabling warfighters to wear the same combat fatigues into almost any environment (snow being a primary exception).
Camouflage does not make the wearer “invisible,” but tricks an observer’s eye and brain into failing to see a clear separation of the edges of the wearer’s profile from the colors and shapes around him. As a result, while the eye still sees the camouflaged warfighter, the brain – which processes images by filling in for the small area of color the eye actually sees – is tricked into accepting the pattern as part of the background and not as a person.
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