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.
