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Russian Troops Are Trying to Make Themselves Invisible
The clever bastards are actually pulling it off in some areas.
During my time in the 101st Airborne Division, our unit had a motto: “We own the night.”
The ability of military units to fight confidently at night grants a distinct tactical and psychological advantage. There is nothing more unsettling than being stalked by something that can see you clearly in the dark.
After the first Russian invasion in 2014, the United States started supplying Ukraine with night vision and thermal imagers.
Despite the current ubiquity of these devices in Ukraine, under-supplied Russian soldiers are starting to come up with ingenious ways to make themselves invisible to Ukrainian forces.
To reduce their thermal signature, some Russian troops are turning to mylar ponchos, or ‘space blankets’, to cloak their heat signatures.
Our eyes are evolved to see in the visible light spectrum. But if our eyes could see in a slightly longer wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum, we would see the world in infrared.
In that range, anything above absolute zero emits thermal radiation.
This means that certain infrared imagers or cameras can see in complete darkness, through smoke, or low visibility…
