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An Arctic fox walks on Svalbard archipelago on August 27, 2020, near Longyearbyen, Norway. It\u2019s best known for its thick, warm fur that is also used as camouflage. (Maja Hitij\/Getty Images)<\/p>\nIn a future battlespace, boats, vehicles and weapons could deploy and travel with outer shells or coverings that change with the terrain \u2014 or even light and time of year \u2014 to add an extra layer of concealment.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That concept was one of the key testing lines of effort in an Army Corps of Engineers and Army Research Laboratory experiment in Pituffik, Greenland, earlier this year. The whole endeavor was part of a broader testing series organized by the International Cooperative Engagement Program for Polar Research (ICE-PPR) and the Office of Naval Research, a multi-national endeavor that underscores the ever-increasing importance of the Arctic as a warfighting domain.<\/p>\n
It is also a domain that presents unique challenges for camouflage, said Dr. Tom Douglas, a research chemist and senior scientific technical manager of the Army Corps of Engineers\u2019 Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory Alaska Research Office in Fairbanks, Alaska.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s dark for some periods; it\u2019s light for other periods,\u201d Douglas told Military Times in an interview. \u201cEverything can look kind of yellow or orange when the sun\u2019s setting \u2026 you\u2019ve got sea ice, which can look kind of gray \u2026 You can stand out pretty blatantly in a vast open white field where there\u2019s no vegetation, right? So there\u2019s that, and then thinking about coatings or snow covering things, and maybe making it worse now that your camo doesn\u2019t work.\u201d<\/p>\n
Anthony Fragoso, a cold regions artificial intelligence lead at CRREL, said that his lab worked with ARL staff during ship-to-shore operations to test \u201ca number of novel coatings,\u201d using sensors to assess the effectiveness of concealment.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you go beyond the visible, which our adversaries can do, snow in certain wavelengths looks black. But it\u2019s white in visible,\u201d Fragoso told Military Times in a separate interview. \u201cSo trying to match that is a challenge.\u201d<\/p>\n
Researchers, Fragoso said, were inspired by Arctic foxes in Pituffik, which change colors over the course of the year \u2013 from white in the winter to brown in the summer.\u00a0<\/p>\n
An Arctic fox walks on Svalbard archipelago on August 27, 2020, near Longyearbyen, Norway. It\u2019s best known for its thick, warm fur that is also used as camouflage. (Maja Hitij\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n
\u201cThings that are reversible, flexible is kind of what we\u2019re after,\u201d he said, adding that researchers considered units like the Alaska-based 11th Airborne Division, which also regularly deploys to the Pacific.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re the Arctic Angels, but they are also worried about fighting in the jungle,\u201d he said. \u201cSo they don\u2019t want to paint stuff white, and then it has to go to Taiwan.\u201d<\/p>\n
While still at the scientific research and development level, the work is making its way to operational units already, with upcoming plans to test a rapidly deployable coating system on the Army\u2019s Cold Weather All-Terrain Vehicles in Alaska.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Alaska National Guard is going to fly over it with helicopters, film it with thermal, all that stuff,\u201d Fragoso said. \u201cEverything now is counter-[unmanned aerial systems], so it\u2019s making sure stuff isn\u2019t being spotted from above by a $1,000 drone.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mike Parker, the cold regions mobility lead for CRREL, emphasized that this effort to test flexible camouflage extends beyond the Arctic. <\/p>\n
With surveillance from above essentially a given in contemporary warfare, additional layers of concealment, particularly those that can be easily altered to fit changing environments, are in unprecedented demand.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt has to remain flexible, and all aspects of it are on the table,\u201d Parker said. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t have to be just a coating; it could be a fabric \u2026 anything that can give us the tactical advantage is being evaluated.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In a future battlespace, boats, vehicles and weapons could deploy and travel with outer shells or coverings that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":675115,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[285915,33727,285916,9595,6325,285917,277315,285918,35238,12392,33755,285919,285920,12391,246,3024,61,285921,60,164303,285922,82,113704],"class_list":["post-675114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-11th-airborne-division","tag-alaska","tag-alaska-national-guard","tag-arctic","tag-army","tag-army-research-laboratory","tag-ausa-2026","tag-camo","tag-circulated-army-times","tag-circulated-defense-news","tag-circulated-military-times","tag-cold-regions-research-and-engineering-laboratory","tag-cold-weather-all-terrain-vehicle","tag-dn-dnr","tag-environment","tag-greenland","tag-ie","tag-international-cooperative-engagement-program-for-polar-research","tag-ireland","tag-office-of-naval-research","tag-pituffik","tag-science","tag-us-army-corps-of-engineers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=675114"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675114\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/675115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=675114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=675114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=675114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}