The crazy drone war in Ukraine has entered an unusual phase: Russia is hiding its vehicles with paint

The scene is one of the most remembered from the First World War. It happened when the British Navy began painting their ships with huge stripes and geometric shapes in 1917, when many thought they had gone crazy: instead of hiding them, they made them more visible. However, that idea ended up spreading to thousands of ships because it achieved something much more important than hiding them: making it difficult for the enemy to know where to aim.

War is no longer just against humans. The evolution of drones in Ukraine is pushing the battlefield into increasingly alien terrain. For centuries, camouflage had an obvious objective: to deceive enemy soldiers, observers or pilots. Now Russia is recovering the technique born in World War I for a completely different purpose.

Its Ural and KAMAZ trucks are appearing covered in black and white geometric patterns, similar to those used by ships trying to confuse German submarines, but this time the recipient of the deception is not a person looking through a periscope, but an algorithm trained to recognize vehicles from the air.

When the enemy is an AI. The proliferation of Ukrainian drones equipped with artificial vision systems is changing the rules of the game. These devices no longer depend exclusively on a human operator to identify targets in real time, but can learn to recognize, classify and track vehicles using image recognition algorithms.

The Russian bet is to visually alter the appearance of its trucks to the point that the software cannot identify them with enough confidence to authorize an attack. It is an unprecedented form of war: physically modifying the world to exploit the limitations of artificial intelligence.

The new race between drones and countermeasures. The painting is only the latest chapter in a long chain of improvisations that emerged during the war. Before, and as we have been saying, metal cages arrived on armored vehicles, the so-called "turtle tanks", protective nets, structures with spikes and even logs placed on vehicles as improvised armor.

Russian bombers covered with old tires and warships painted with special patterns to break their silhouette seen from above also appeared. All of these solutions respond to the same phenomenon: drones have become such a ubiquitous threat that any method capable of making their identification difficult deserves to be tested.

Vehicles are no longer safe in the rear. The importance of these measures reflects the extent to which drones are expanding the scope of warfare. Thanks to artificial intelligence, attack systems can autonomously search for targets over huge areas, distinguish active vehicles from destroyed ones, and even operate in coordinated swarms.

Thus, logistics trucks that could previously move relatively calmly away from the front can now be located and attacked tens of kilometers away. The rear has become an extension of the battlefield and every moving vehicle is a possible target.

A battle between programmers and painters. The big question is whether these paints will really work. Algorithms can be quickly retrained and learn to recognize new patterns, while sensors such as infrared could be less affected than conventional cameras.

However, even temporary effectiveness would have value if it forces the adversary to devote time, resources, and computing power to solving the problem. That is perhaps the most striking conclusion of this latest bizarre story: the drone war in Ukraine has reached a point where combats no longer only pit weapons against weapons, but also software against camouflage, engineers against engineers and algorithms against paint stains specifically designed to fool a machine.

Image | X, Wikimedia

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