The ultimate stealth protection for anything on or over a battlefield would be the ability to disappear from view, leaving no visual, electronic or infrared (IR) signature for an enemy to detect.
Work is underway to develop technologies that conceal, cloak or otherwise make objects appear to vanish. In many cases, the value of these technologies is in their ability to dupe an enemy into thinking he sees something besides a threat or potential target—background vegetation, for example, or an innocent vehicle. Even if the image an enemy detects only confuses him for seconds, it could be enough time for a friendly force to evade fire.
There are a number of invisibility research—or, more accurately, cloaking—projects attracting interest and funding from militaries and other organizations around the world. Two in particular have come to the fore: the Adaptiv Active Defense System from BAE Systems of the U.K., which uses IR cloaking technology and is reportedly within two years of being production-ready for use on ground, air and sea vehicles; and the Black Fox electronic thermal IR countermeasure system from Eltics Ltd. of Israel, which is likewise designed to make vehicles invisible to thermal sensors.
These technologies represent real-world solutions to concealment. They are designed to counter IR surveillance and targeting technology by confusing remote sensors, including those on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), heat-seeking missiles or in use by gunners with thermal vision systems. They would not be effective against a squad of soldiers or an observation team that maneuvered near enough to observe a target with their own eyes.
These approaches contrast with what most scientists are doing in cloaking research, which typically involves devising techniques for manipulating electromagnetic waves of visual light to conceal 2-D and lately 3-D objects. This usually involves “transformation optics,” which bend electromagnetic waves and control the emission of light from an object. Other researchers use metamaterials, man-made composites that derive their properties from nano-scale structures rather than their composition, to alter the path of light and conceal objects. Some work involves so-called cloaking carpets that hide objects from IR radiation and microwave detection, again by bending and warping emissions around or away from objects.
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