For anyone living in the 21st century, it’s hard to imagine a battle scene that isn’t plastered with camouflage: soldiers in muted green-brown fatigues, marching beside tanks painted the same colors. These days the pattern is even a perennial fixture of mainstream fashion. But in fact, it’s a relatively recent military tactic, albeit one with roots in some of the most ancient survival strategies.
More than 2,000 years ago, in The Art of War, the Chinese strategist Sun Tzu wrote that, “All warfare is based on deception.” No doubt our ancestors found ingenious ways to hoodwink the enemy long before that. As military historian Guy Hartcup argues in his history of camouflage, “Man has practiced the art of concealment and deception in hunting and warfare from the earliest times.”
Nevertheless, camouflage in the modern sense only emerged in the modern era, as a defensive front in the global arms race. While armies grew more adept at warfare, wielding deadlier weapons, it became essential to keep troops and equipment hidden whenever possible. To figure out how, they turned to the masters of stealth.
Camouflage in the Natural World
Our species has taken camouflage to impressive levels, but many other animals got there first. Snowshoe hares melt seamlessly into a wintry landscape, octopuses alter their skin color to match surrounding hues, and stick insects become indistinguishable from the twigs around them. Over hundreds of millions of years of evolution, nature has worn just about every conceivable disguise.
In fact, early inspiration for wartime concealment came from the investigations of 19th-century naturalists. One of the first to document all this trickery was the British biologist Edward Poulton, in his 1890 work The Colours of Animals. In the living world, as Poulton saw it, color often served some deceptive purpose.
“By far the most widespread use,” he wrote, “is to assist an animal in escaping from its enemies or in capturing its prey.”
Whether or not he realized it, he was spelling out the principles that would guide military camouflage in the coming decades.
Read More: How Did Animals Get Their Spots and Stripes?
The Invention of Camouflage
Soon enough, others with similar ideas would connect the dots explicitly. Abbott Thayer, a New England artist sometimes credited with the invention of camouflage, was deeply influenced by his observations of nature. He grew especially preoccupied with the dual-toned look of certain animals — dark on top, light on bottom, like a shark.
Thayer realized this pattern counteracted a phenomenon that he, as a painter, knew well: When light falls on a three-dimensional object, it shades that object in such a way that it appears solid, and thus easier to detect. His discovery came to be known as countershading, or Thayer’s law, and he quickly sought a practical use for it. During the Spanish-American War he suggested that American ships be counter shaded, and even received a patent for the process in 1902.
He stretched his theory further, insisting that the coloration of every species — even those as ostentatious as the peacock — somehow contributed to its concealment, when many instances have better explanations. Still, Thayer showed us how much we could learn from the covert creatures around us.
Read More: 4 Hidden Ways Animals Camouflage Themselves
How Camouflage Techniques Evolved Over Time
Camouflage played only a minor role in ancient and medieval warfare, according to military historian Tim Newark. It might have lent the element of surprise to an ambush, like Prince Malcolm’s. But disguise doesn’t work so well up close, and at the time, combat was mostly a hand-to-hand affair.
Military technology advanced apace throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, and by the early 1900s the threat of aerial reconnaissance made camouflage indispensable.
World War I and the Rise of Military Camouflage
At the dawn of the First World War, with aircraft now flying above the battlefield, pilots had a birds-eye view of the enemy position and could relay information about high-value targets to their own artillery. Allied ships also faced a new danger in German submarines. As a result, armies on all sides had to think harder about how to protect their personnel and resources. The time was ripe for a revolution in camouflage.
The word itself, derived from the French camoufler (a slang word meaning “to make up for the stage”), first became popular in English during this period. Though strongly associated with blending in — like a chameleon perched invisibly in plain sight — that isn’t the only possible kind of camouflage. As it turned out, another version flourished during the war.
In some countries, the military recruited artists to create disorienting new designs, and many converged on a distinctly avant-garde approach: disruptive camouflage. These bold, abstract patterns often appeared lifted straight from a Cubist painting.
Unlike traditional camouflage, the intent was not to conceal but to mislead. The most famous example is “dazzle painting,” credited to British artist Norman Wilkinson. By breaking up a ship’s outline with strongly contrasting black and white lines, the pattern made it difficult for submarines to discern the vessel’s precise shape and course.
It worked — one U-boat commander, quoted by Newark, said “It was not until she was within half a mile that I could make out she was one ship.” According to Hartcup the U.S. bedazzled more than 1,200 ships in 1918, and less than 1 percent were sunk by torpedo.
Camouflage in World War II and Beyond
The First World War was the “Cambrian explosion” for military camouflage, as a team of researchers at the University of Bristol wrote in a 2017 paper on the cultural evolution of camo: concealing strategies were devised not only for ships, but also for aircraft and tanks and static structures. But it would take another two decades before the first infantry began to wear standard-issue camouflage uniforms.
In 1929 the Italian army developed its now-famous telo mimetico pattern — random blotches of forest and field colors, basically — for tents, and eventually someone had the bright idea to print the pattern on clothes. During the Second World War, the German army borrowed its ally’s design, while the Soviets and Americans tried to replicate it.
“Camouflage uniforms became more commonplace in the frontlines of World War II,” the researchers write, “and by the end of the Vietnam War, camouflage matured into a global phenomenon.”
Though telo mimetico spawned loads of variations over the years, almost all (including the current U.S. Army Combat Uniform) are recognizable as riffs on the original theme — recognizable, that is, when you can see them at all.
Read More: 5 Insects That Perfected the Art of Camouflage
Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
Archive.org. Camouflage: A history of concealment and deception in war
Library of Congress. The Colours of Animals
Art History. Abbott Thayer and the Invention of Camouflage
Google Patents. Process of treating the outsides of ships, &c., for making them less visible
The Royal Society. Cultural evolution of military camouflage
Cody Cottier is a contributing writer at Discover who loves exploring big questions about the universe and our home planet, the nature of consciousness, the ethical implications of science and more. He holds a bachelor's degree in journalism and media production from Washington State University.
