Modern warfare

GRENADE LAUNCHERS AND BED SHEETS: AN INVISIBILITY KIT FOR URBAN COMBAT

There are promising research developments in camouflage, including cloaking fabrics that one day will make soldiers and their equipment literally invisible. For instance, a Canadian camouflage maker, Hyperstealth Biotechnology, regularly demonstrates a metamaterial to US military groups that reportedly bends light waves around a target. But this remains a future capability, and on the battlefield today, a dismounted force sent into a city has little that is designed especially for urban terrain.

This leaves obscuration as the most viable option. Obscuration, according to US Army doctrine is “the employment of materials into the environment that degrade optical and/or electro-optical capabilities within select portions of the electromagnetic spectrum in order to deny acquisition by or deceive an enemy or adversary.” In practical terms, and in the context of the urban battlespace, it keeps forces from being seen. The standard device carried by dismounted soldiers for obscuration is a smoke grenade, a piece of equipment that hasn’t changed since World War II. They emit only 50–90 seconds of smoke and can be thrown 35 meters by an average soldier. There are some vehicle variants that offer smoke generators or smoke grenade dischargers but these are not common to all formations, and in dense, urban environments, are simply unfeasible.