camouflage

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camouflage

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camouflage, in military science, the art and practice of concealment and visual deception in war. It is the means of defeating enemy observation by concealing or disguising installations, personnel, equipment, and activities. Conventional camouflage is restricted to passive defensive measures. The surface camoufleur, for example, does not try to prevent aerial surveillance by jamming the enemy’s radar but rather seeks to deceive the enemy by proffering misleading visual information.

Both concealment and deception adversely affect the enemy’s intelligence effort. The withholding of information compels him to increase his surveillance efforts, and thus to divert from combat a greater number of personnel and machines. The receipt of incorrect reports may confuse the enemy and may thus contribute to indecision on the part of the enemy commander, costing him critical time and resources and even leading him to make wrong decisions.

Conventional camouflage does not try to obviously impair the enemy’s gathering of information but rather seeks to give false information to the enemy without arousing his suspicions. Countermeasures, on the other hand, do impair the ability of the sensing device to “see” and are not concerned with whether the enemy is aware of this action as long as his ability to detect is destroyed. For example, the dropping of tinfoil from aircraft in flight and the launching of diversionary guided missiles are designed to confuse, divert, and saturate air defense systems; they are normally considered countermeasures rather than camouflage.

Camouflage, from the French word camoufler (“to disguise”), came into English usage during World War I when air warfare was introduced. The development of military aircraft exposed enemy positions to aerial reconnaissance, which could be used for purposes of directing artillery fire and anticipating potential offensives. Each major army therefore organized a camouflage service of specially trained troops to practice the art of deception. By World War II the increased capabilities of aircraft for long-range bombing threatened warring countries in their entirety, not just the front lines, thus increasing both the importance and the scope of camouflage. At the same time, camouflage concepts were broadened to include active deception of the enemy as well as passive concealment against observation and aerial photography.

In World War II practically everything of military significance was camouflaged to some degree using such materials as mottled, dull-coloured paint patterns, cloth garnishing, chicken-wire, netting, and the use of natural foliage: these disguises were intended to make a weapon, vehicle, or installation indistinguishable from the surrounding vegetation and terrain when viewed from the air. Almost all tactical vehicles carried camouflage nets and were painted in greenish, grayish, or brown colours. All military personnel received training in camouflage fundamentals during basic training.

Dummies, displays, and decoys were widely used during World War II to accomplish various objectives. In Great Britain and Germany entire airfields and large manufacturing plants were camouflaged to protect them against aerial attack. False targets were also set up to divert enemy bomber attacks from real targets. At the close of the war the British air ministry reported that:

A network of 500 dummy cities, airfields, shipyards and other targets so realistic they blazed at night under enemy attack caused thousands of tons of German bombs to drop harmlessly on open fields during the Battle of Britain. Mock airfields drew even more raids than the real ones—443 compared with 434 on actual installations. The fields appeared so genuine that Allied pilots had to exercise great care to avoid trying to land on them.

In evaluating German camouflage in World War II, the United States Strategic Bombing Survey reported that:

Protective concealment was practiced with greater variety of materials, probably with greater ingenuity, and certainly with greater expenditures of manpower, than had been used by any warring nation previously. One of these ambitious camouflage projects was undertaken in Hamburg where the inner basin of the Alster, measuring roughly 500 by 450 yards, surrounded by the main business district, was covered to make it appear like terrain.

In the Second Battle of el-Alamein (1942), the British commander Bernard L. Montgomery surprised the German commander Erwin Rommel by using dummies combined with a feint. Montgomery’s intention to force a gap through the German defensive system in the northern sector was masked by a long-term deception designed to make the Germans think that the attack was to take place in the southern sector. By skillful use of dummy material, Montgomery shifted his tanks and other equipment to the north without any visible decrease of strength in the south. These deceptions kept Rommel guessing where the actual British attack would take place during the battle, which was won by the British.

Another notable use of dummies was in the elaborate simulation of an entire army in England prior to the Normandy invasion in an effort to confuse the Germans about where the invasion force would land. During this time German reconnaissance aircraft often reported “loaded fleets in British ports and large-size mechanized units in the field.” These displays in reality consisted of pneumatic decoys made to resemble different types of weapons and concentrations of landing craft, tanks, trucks, and artillery. Dummy assault boats drew some of the defensive fire during the actual assault on the Normandy beaches. The protective concealment provided by smoke was also effective during World War II. Land and sea movements, fleets at anchor, and preparations for river crossings were all temporarily hidden by blankets of smoke, some extending for miles. The 60-mile- (100-kilometre-) long smoke screen along the Rhine River that covered the reorganization of the Allied 21st Army group and its subsequent crossing of the river in March 1945 was probably the greatest smoke cover ever produced.

The Korean War (1950–53) brought little change in camouflage techniques. But a variety of new detection devices appeared in the 1950s and ’60s that were used to notable effect in the Vietnam War. The Communist guerrilla units in that conflict used stealth, natural concealment, and camouflage very effectively, and sophisticated electro-optical sensing devices were often used by American aircraft to pinpoint these elusive forces’ presence in the dense vegetation of combat zones. American aircraft and drones were equipped with television, radar, infrared scanning devices, acoustic detection, and high-speed photographic equipment with multiple filters. American ground battle area surveillance equipment included television, radar, and aids to night vision.

Camouflage research and development have meanwhile provided new techniques, materials, and equipment for countering such surveillance devices. Improved pneumatic devices were produced to simulate items of military equipment such as trucks, armoured vehicles, artillery, and guided missiles. Other materials were developed to simulate bridges, convoys, bivouac areas, airstrips, marshaling yards, post activities, and supply dumps. Computers have now become a standard tool of analysts seeking to piece together large masses of photographic and other data in an effort to distinguish between real and dummy/decoy activities by an enemy.

This article was most recently revised and updated by Amy Tikkanen.

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strategy

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Key People:: Helmuth von Moltke; Anna Ella Carroll; Bernard Brodie; Sir Basil Liddell Hart; Ōmura Masujirō

Related Topics:: national policy; strategic offense; limited warfare; defensive defense; strategy of exhaustion

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strategy, in warfare, the science or art of employing all the military, economic, political, and other resources of a country to achieve the objects of war.

Fundamentals

The term strategy derives from the Greek strategos, an elected general in ancient Athens. The strategoi were mainly military leaders with combined political and military authority, which is the essence of strategy. Because strategy is about the relationship between means and ends, the term has applications well beyond war: it has been used with reference to business, the theory of games, and political campaigning, among other activities. It remains rooted, however, in war, and it is in the field of armed conflict that strategy assumes its most complex forms.

Theoreticians distinguish three types of military activity: (1) tactics, or techniques for employing forces in an engagement (e.g., seizing a hill, sinking a ship, or attacking a target from the air), (2) operations, or the use of engagements in parallel or in sequence for larger purposes, which is sometimes called campaign planning, and (3) strategy, or the broad comprehensive harmonizing of operations with political purposes. Sometimes a fourth type is cited, known as grand strategy, which encompasses the coordination of all state policy, including economic and diplomatic tools of statecraft, to pursue some national or coalitional ends.

Strategic planning is rarely confined to a single strategist. In modern times, planning reflects the contributions of committees and working groups, and even in ancient times the war council was a perennial resort of anxious commanders. For example, Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War (c. 404 bce) contains marvelous renditions of speeches in which the leaders of different states attempt to persuade their listeners to follow a given course of action. Furthermore, strategy invariably rests on assumptions of many kinds—about what is lawful or moral, about what technology can achieve, about conditions of weather and geography—that are unstated or even subconscious. For these reasons, strategy in war differs greatly from strategy in a game such as chess. War is collective; strategy rarely emerges from a single conscious decision as opposed to many smaller decisions; and war is, above all, a deeply uncertain endeavour dominated by unanticipated events and by assumptions that all too frequently prove false.

Such, at least, has been primarily the view articulated by the greatest of all Western military theoreticians, the Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz. In his classic strategic treatise, On War (1832), Clausewitz emphasizes the uncertainty under which all generals and statesmen labour (known as the “fog of war”) and the tendency for any plan, no matter how simple, to go awry (known as “friction”). Periodically, to be sure, there have been geniuses who could steer a war from beginning to end, but in most cases wars have been shaped by committees. And, as Clausewitz says in an introductory note to On War, “When it is not a question of acting oneself but of persuading others in discussion, the need is for clear ideas and the ability to show their connection with each other”—hence the discipline of strategic thought.

Louis IX of France (St. Louis), stained glass window of Louis IX during the Crusades. (Unknown location.)

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Clausewitz’s central and most famous observation is that “war is a continuation of politics by other means.” Of course war is produced by politics, though in common parlance war is typically ascribed to mindless evil, the wrath of God, or mere accident, rather than being a continuation of rational diplomacy. Moreover, Clausewitz’s view of war is far more radical than a superficial reading of his dictum might suggest. If war is not a “mere act of policy” but “a true political instrument,” political considerations may pervade all of war. If this is the case, then strategy, understood as the use of military means for political ends, expands to cover many fields. A seeming cliché is in fact a radical statement.

There have been other views, of course. In The Art of War, often attributed to Sunzi (5th century bce) but most likely composed early in China’s Warring States period (475–221 bce), war is treated as a serious means to serious ends, in which it is understood that shrewd strategists might target not an enemy’s forces but intangible objects—the foremost of these being the opponent’s strategy. Though this agrees with Clausewitz’s ideas, The Art of War takes a very different line of argument in other respects. Having much greater confidence in the ability of a wise general to know himself and his enemy, The Art of War relies more heavily on the virtuosity of an adroit commander in the field, who may, and indeed should, disregard a ruler’s commands in order to achieve war’s object. Where On War asserts that talent for high command differs fundamentally from military leadership at lower levels, The Art of War does not seem to distinguish between operational and tactical ability; where On War accepts battle as the chief means of war and extensive loss of human life as its inevitable price, The Art of War considers the former largely avoidable (“the expert in using the military subdues the enemy’s forces without going to battle”) and the latter proof of poor generalship; where On War doubts that political and military leaders will ever have enough information upon which to base sound decisions, The Art of War begins and concludes with a study of intelligence collection and assessment.

To some extent, these approaches to strategy reflect cultural differences. Clausewitz is a product of a combination of the Enlightenment and early Romanticism; The Art of War’s roots in Daoism are no less deep. Historical circumstances explain some of the differences as well. Clausewitz laboured under the impact of 20 years of war that followed the French Revolution and the extraordinary personality of Napoleon; The Art of War was written during the turmoil of the Warring States period. There also are deeper differences in thinking about strategy that transcend time and place. In particular, differences in contemporary discussions of strategy persist between optimists, who think that the wisely instructed strategist has a better than even chance (other things being equal) to control his fate, and pessimists (such as Clausewitz), who believe that error, muddle, and uncertainty are the norm in war and therefore that chance plays a more substantial role. In addition, social scientists, exploring such topics as inadvertent war or escalation, have been driven by the hope of making strategy a rational and predictable endeavour. Historians, by and large, side with the pessimists: in the words of British historian Michael Howard, one of the best military historians of the 20th century, most armies get it wrong at the beginning of a war.