How to Hide From Drones: Lessons Learned in Modern War

hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground so today we're going to be taking a look at a very specific topic on small uas systems and different camouflage techniques and tactics that you can use to hide from them so camouflage itself is not a new topic but recent events more specifically this conflict the conflict between armenia and azerbaijan have catapulted small uas systems into the spotlight once again and this is not a concept this is not something that has been uh that is new either but during the second nagorno-karabakh war the war between armenia and azerbaijan small uas systems were a very decisive tool um you know whatever you want to call the war we call it the lawnmower war because one of the main reasons and and and tools that were used in that conflict which lasted only six weeks long was uas systems you had armenia and azerbaijan both using small uas systems in conjunction with modern day tools modern warfare uh you know things like guided you know munitions precision weapons or even artillery right so that sort of stuff combined with small uas systems using other modern war tools has been a wake-up call for a lot of people now those of us in the defense industry have known about this for a while and really the defense industry as a whole really started getting very serious about researching these small uas systems back in 2018 and actually long before that but most doctrine was essentially finalized in 2018. we've been we've known about it for gosh probably 10 years before that back back going all the way back to 2008 but the the main point is that small uas systems have been used by insurgent groups for a very long time most notably isis and this is where our sort of experience comes in with them um uas systems for the longest time have been regarded as sort of like a range toy for you know lack of a better term the taliban really didn't use them in afghanistan they still haven't to this day really use them at all um you've got some limited use of them you know attacking airfields you know like down in helmand and things like that but it really has just been you know uas one or two attacks a year and even though those aren't confirmed at all i don't think there actually is a confirmed case of a uas system being used to target something in afghanistan i think the first one was last year um actually now that i think about it but anyway i'm sure someone will comment below um without actual data but the point is that afghanistan is very different than iraq and syria and isis in iraq and syria used drones like the dji phantom quite extensively and they not only use them for observation but they use them for targeting they had you know the ability to remotely drop warheads mortars uh hand grenades and and all do this with multiple drones at the same time and then also have another drone overhead to videotape the whole thing for propaganda so you know a few years ago the defense community said whoa this stuff is that's no longer a range toy these things are killing people and i think one of the main turning points was when a drone was able to drop a hand grenade into an ammunition dump and it was being used by government forces the local government forces their local military and that was a wake-up call because that video was circulated uh all over the internet i'm sure you could find look it up and find it of essentially a football stadium or a cricket stadium imploding on itself because a small hand grenade was dropped in there into an ammunition dump so that was when the world started noticing that these small uas systems are huge and as such a lot of doctrine has come out lately we have stuff like the islamic state and drones by you know don rassler there come out in 2018 we even had updates to joint publication three tag zero one you know countering air missile threats that was updated to to talk a little bit about these uas systems or at least allude to it and then most importantly we have consumer grade or user grade or you know in the trenches viewpoints we have actual soldiers who are concerned about these things on the front lines as it were writing about these in blog posts and you know unit level tactics and training and stuff like this and this is why the this topic has become sort of reignited and one of the reasons that we're doing this series now is because now we can freely talk about a lot of this stuff um in in the open and one of the great things that has come out of the marine corps intelligence school down there in damn neck virginia great place highly recommend going there the one of the things they have done is create a camouflage sop for the marine corps and it's very interesting it's very short guide it takes a very sharp difference from it takes a very different viewpoint than most military doctrine i'm sure those of you out there that have been in the military can remember making flash cards to pass some kind of either advancement exam or some kind of soldier board or whatever um studying all this doctrine going flipping through field manuals that are just boring you know and and just really mind-numbingly boring stuff just to remember some kind of random statistic it's never going to freaking help you on the battlefield well the marine corps intelligence folks created this guide with a different viewpoint so a lot of people have been aware that camouflage as a entity has been around for a long time like i've said in fact it's been around for like hundreds of years like i mentioned but really we started to be concerned about it in warfare when aircraft started being used for for warfare for the very first time so this is a screenshot from a training video from 1941 showing soldiers how to camouflage things and also really just the importance of camouflage as a as a tactic and war and that has been around like i said for a very very long time the basics of camouflage have not changed the you know the earth the way that you interact with the earth and and how you can hide in a natural environment has really been the same since humans have been on this planet right you know dirt isn't purple you know it's brown it's been brown for a hundred years we know this and you know camouflage you know the techniques and materials have been upgraded but the general principles remain the same um however we can note that even though the basics haven't changed and you can quite literally get a field manual from the us army or any army in the world really back from world war ii or even world war one when they started to recognize the importance of camouflage but you could grab a field manual from world war ii look at that training film from 1941 and the principles have not changed it's still applicable to this day and it is vital now here's the thing just because it hasn't changed any does not mean that people do it right it's just like the whole simple versus complex argument right just because a problem is simple does not mean that it is isn't very difficult right so you know swimming across the atlantic is fairly straightforward you you go to the beach and you look towards the ocean get a compass bearing and you just swim right well that's pretty straightforward it's almost impossible to do that right so um it that's a that's something to to keep in mind is that these basics haven't changed and so we can rephrase the basics we can create this brand new cool product um but really the basics haven't really changed that much so we can just make it more palatable to more people so one of the things that was done um was there there were several different exercises that we can publicly talk about when it comes to camouflage detection and this is a screenshot from one of these after action reports talking about how this particular unit was very ill-equipped for camouflage so let's go through this after action report and we'll talk about some of these images and we'll talk about what it means for camouflage but also how to adapt that sort of thing to a civilian atmosphere right because not a whole lot of us are concerned about isis dropping a mortar on our head with a dji phantom however we are greatly concerned about maybe our local uh local law enforcement using a drone to observe things right or maybe you know the military using a drone or something like that that you know for whatever reason it good or bad right people are concerned about that so we wanted to talk about those concerns by using an actual doctrine product that's really good so yeah like i said you know these screenshots show that this is you know from a a raven or a dji phantom you know type small uas system and this shows that you know these vehicles had made really no attempt other than getting off the road they've made no attempt at really camouflaging themselves they're easily easily seen and in this next image like this this is a company-sized element they have made absolutely no attempt to try to camouflage themselves not only have they erected tarps on the surface but they've parked their vehicles right in the middle of the road right at intersection of roads there's no camouflaging heading anywhere inside and they've lined up their packs so that as an analyst if i see this image now i know that it's a company-sized element because i can count all the individual rucksacks there so there are we could probably spend an hour dissecting this one image and show exactly what was done wrong here but honestly we're not in the business of going down the ttps for a military unit like we are not military doctrine writers right we're trying to help ordinary people right so what does this mean to us well it means that a lot of that doctrine has been thrown out with a lot of different buzz words and a lot of people will recognize these words from like i said exams or soldier boards or whatever you know size shape color shadow shine contrast texture movement those different buzz words are used to describe different ways to uh conceal things different different methods of concealment you can use a whole bunch of words to say essentially the same thing and really that's what the doctrine is trying to get away from instead of memorizing a sort of acronym instead of memorizing a page document really this document this pdf that the marine corps put out the intel weenies over there the document they put out kind of goes against that and it's really just a list of simple eight simple things you don't have to memorize this there's no really big buzz words right it's just hey if you do these eight things this will be your 80 solution and that's what we're going to go over today we're going to go over this list of eight different things that you can do to prevent your detection from an a small uas system so they also came up with standards and that's really what more or less half the document is if you read into it and the standards are look we're not going to do this whole thing where we talk about learning objectives and like this is what you learned did you not learn this this is the standard quoting some kind of random field manual that nobody cares about this is basically saying hey this is what you need to do and this is what every marine needs to be able to do and it's very simple language right it's like you know all marines need to be able to know how to camouflage your helmet you know that sort of stuff it's really simple and that is one of the things that we like about this plan and this document and why this document will most likely be talked about but not by by uh more people than just us really so um let's go down this list of things and we'll talk about some of the screenshots within you know other aars and talk about you know how they apply to a civilian so first up is this image now this is quite an obvious image this looks like either sunset or sunrise probably sunset and you can see shadows very long these these vehicles are very very close together these labs you can see the bottom of the screen to have the uas operators they're not camouflaged at all they're just laying down in the in the bush um but their camouflage uniforms don't match with the area they're in so they're kind of obvious now the point with this very first one is imagine these taking these two labs you take this one right here and you take it and you move it off off screen a little bit well this image that you're looking at this is the field of view for this drone this particular asset so if you move things away you make it harder for the the same uh two vehicles to be seen in the same shot so like right here this is a very photogenic thing you can get two vehicles right there next to each other but if you move them apart from each other you disperse them and makes it harder to count and your sensor can only look at one at a time so that's uh that's something that's very very important also what's important is really the term dispersion what it was used for and created as a concept really since artillery was issued is what if a mortar round lands right there what if an artillery round lands right there that would take out both vehicles quite easily and that's uh that's no good so dispersing for a warfare type thing may mean dispersing to prevent everybody from getting killed all at once by a uh some kind of artillery munition or a bomb or something but really dispersion when it comes to civilian sector is hey if you spread far enough apart they can't see two people in the same frame so in the same you know field of view of the drone unless they're using something like some kind of other sensor that i'm not sure we can probably talk about like a gorgon stair type thing but the issue with this is that they're not dispersed they're right next to each other so that's why the first rule is to disperse into multiple small elements and displace often um that's just a key thing dispersion you know dispersing yourselves um dispersing your people is very very crucial and this is where it comes to once again the civilian factor you know um people who aren't trained are going to have a hard time with this if you're telling me that hey i'm getting shot at and i need to go you know on my own 100 feet that way um you know people are going to have you know a huge psychological effect and that's where the civilian sector comes in so you know it's scary for troops to be in a foxhole 100 feet away from your buddy your battle buddy and you know you start getting mortar rounds that's pretty scary for people who aren't experienced to that and it is terrifying for civilians you know if if it ever came to that um so the psychological impact of dispersion is is something that that has to be factored in as well and you have to train around it right also another thing to consider is that what we learned from the the armenia azerbaijan conflict is that modern war in modern war vehicles are going to offer a false sense of comfort i you know i can't tell you how sobering it was to watch these armored vehicles just get hammered and just peeled apart like a tin can because some off-the-wall cheap you know less than 50-pound drone was overhead and putting a laser spot on it for precision guided munition that was terrifying to watch and i'm sure it was terrifying for a lot of people who have been on the receiving end of some of those weapons before so it's very sobering is that we think that hey even the military gets the idea of oh staying in a vehicle is cover not anymore unless you can conceal that vehicle a lot of modern munitions can can punch right through a lot of that stuff so um yeah that's just something to consider for civilians yeah get out of your vehicle because there's no way a civilian vehicle can be camouflaged to the efficiency that a military vehicle can so that's something to consider up next is this next one this one is a pretty big one you can see these are you know uas operators again these guys i think we're doing some kind of tongue-in-cheek game where they were trying to find their doing some training exercises where they're trying to find their enemy uas operators and they did and now they're in a report that the whole internet is reading but they made no attempt to hide here they didn't get off the road there's shadows everywhere there's all kinds of stuff they they stick out like a sore thumb so what if we were to give them some camouflage so if we give them some tarps we put them on you know put some adequate camouflage that matches their background on the hoods we put some here on the side to take out those shadows put one here on the other side as well and then we put them working underneath the camouflage net they disappear they disappear even in the middle you know the open terrain they're going to disappear quite easily so that's why number two is to find a concealed sight and conform to the terrain you know use your to the train to your advantage like everybody has ever been taught when it comes to camouflage but one of the things that is hard for people to recognize and this happens this is why the us military gets hit with this all the time is do not stop in the open and for civilians it's a lot easier than the military because as you know the military likes to joke roughly 99 of the time is is spent sitting around waiting wondering what the hell the hold up is so that is a huge security thing if you're going to stop and you're going to stop for more than say 10 seconds prepare to stop for 30 minutes or more i cannot tell you how many times all of us here have either been in convoys or seen convoys just just stop on the road and like the worst possible place to stop the most obvious place for an ambush you know it's just it's just horrible the way that logistics works sometimes so if you have any control over this at all and civilians obviously do if you have to stop your vehicle in the open camouflage it as best you can you know throw a cami net over it over it that's better than not civilian vehicles are made to be shiny right so the there's no matte color on any civilian vehicle that comes out of a normal car lot right so having some kind of cover for that car is devastatingly effective especially when you're looking for a shiny car you don't see a shiny car you tend to move on now if you can't do that if you cannot camouflage your vehicle stop your vehicle get like if you're going to be stopped for a period of time don't get out and stand right next to the vehicle like these guys are doing move off sight move away preferably out of danger close range of whatever munition is coming at you and if you're a civilian and you're not so much worried about you know your your local sheriff's department dropping grenades on you or something like that if you're worried about being observed stay get away from your vehicle even just stepping offline you know off the line of your vehicle away from the road 100 feet with the right camouflage can work wonders so that's something to keep in mind too is to you know make sure that if you're going to stop stop when you can hide essentially another thing to keep in mind is night time being able to resist thermal traffic and and this image shows a dismounted company walking along the road because they forgot that at night there's this thing called thermal variation and the road is going to be quite considerably warmer still than the human body or colder depending on your area i think in this particular image it was colder the road was cold and the uh the leaves and the foliage around were were hot from the for the day so they were quite easily seen now if you take all those people right there that are on that road you move them off into offline just just off to the side of it a little bit and they disappear so people tend to have a very predator-like view of thermal imaging and thermal imaging it can be easily thwarted but it really depends on what kind of sensor you're up against and what kind of materials you have and really the environment also matters as well so basically everything matters you know the the point is is that the u.s military is trying to get into the mentality of getting get back into a pure you know peer versus peer a near pure adversarial conflict right we have spent decades learning how to fight insurgents with an ak in five rounds in the magazine we've spent decades trying to figure out how to fight that and honing our skills on that and we haven't other than the usual ntc rotation or deployment to poland or something like that we haven't really been focused on a war with like china which is why the uh you know comet on the marine corps and a lot of the marine corps staff have come up with you know new plans for things like you know reducing tanks and all that kind of stuff which you can read about on your own the point of that digression is to say that look in foreign countries yes the united states owns the night it is very hard to use sensors to your advantage in other countries but in america we have this thing called citizenship and that citizenship allows us to buy things that are itar controlled things like flear sensors for things like night vision goggles like right now i you know you can go buy night vision goggles that are better than the ones used by roughly 99.99 of the military and a lot of people do there's a lot of private companies out there that do that and that stuff's kind of going away like we had a whole episode on protected technology and how um that technology is going to go away because the military has realized that here at home they don't have the advantage they don't necessarily own the night anymore they rent it and you know the ability to you know i can't tell you how many people rely on infrared lasers to uh call in helicopters well if you've got night vision goggles you can see everything but if you don't have night vision goggles you can't see anything so a lot of our infrastructure is built around fighting you know people in the desert with no technology but at home we have that benefit of technology so use it if you've got it if you have night vision goggles there you go you can more easily come to the later steps we're going to talk about here in just a minute and up next is uh having the right set of camouflage and this is something that not a whole lot of people tend to grasp or they know they instinctively know but they don't really know they don't really follow it so rule number four is or guideline number four is camouflage everything blend with your surroundings this is like a no duh statement if i have ever seen one but the thing is is that your camouflage has to actually work so like here in this particular image these guys were doing the right thing like you know god bless them they were trying they got they didn't park in the middle of the field they parked off in the shadow or what was the shadow of a tree they're they're you know parked in such a way they've got their caminet out and everything but you know god bless them they're camping it's the wrong color so if we were to help them out a little bit here by grabbing a piece of that foliage and terrain and then moving it right over to cover them up guess what they disappear instantly if they had the right color they would be invisible right so for the civilian sector this matters a lot because i think that especially nowadays we tend to want to go for these gucci camouflages you know i remember when multicam came out and everybody wanted it because you couldn't buy it because it was this thing called w-2 scorpion and it was like this brand new camouflage that was so cool right and uh you know same thing with you know the nwu's for the navy they came with that you know guacamole colored camouflage that the navy seals were using or claimed to use and uh everybody loved it and so everybody wanted it but they couldn't buy it because it was proprietary and things like that so we tend to go after these gucci camouflages not necessarily because they work but because they're cool and i can tell you right now in our area multicam does not work it shines just like the old ucp you know grandma's couch camouflage it does not work in our particular area so we have to go with some old school stuff you know either m81 woodland which is now becoming its own gucci camouflage or you know depending on what type of area you're in maybe some swedish stuff if you're up in the mountains stuff like that so use the camouflage that works for your area and not the stuff that's just gucci and cool if it's a camouflage that works but it isn't quite sexy use it because it doesn't matter if it looks cool as long as it keeps you hidden that's the goal of camouflage so that's just something to to keep in mind as well is that don't necessarily buy camouflage because it's the next cool thing for everybody to to use buy camouflage because it works and then we come to this one which is this is interesting because one of the aars that we were using for this this was an image that showed success this showed an entire 60 millimeter section of 10 marines with their rucksacks and two tubes they showed this as a great success they're completely invisible well here's the thing we looked at this image and saw a failure and the failure was this uh we can look and see two tracks going everywhere this is what we in the the military or in the field really call a road you can see the two tracks of a tracked vehicle moving through the area and you can follow them you can even find one over there on the side going around this little grove of trees so the the killer one is this one right here going right to that grove of trees now the one way to improve this position if we're going to stay there for any period of time is to get rid of that so if we were to camouflage that you know it looks like it's a grass or some kind of terrain as it camouflage those tracks now look what you've done you've now made it look like that road doesn't exist and the road from the left going to the top of the image also intersects with that same image and it looks like you bypass that grove completely so that is awesome that's exactly what we want when it comes to that type of thing now here's another consideration mostly for the civilian sector as well is that what if you have a second ellipse now we haven't talked about cigarette very much on this channel just yet we have a video coming about sigint ellipses and and how that whole process works but suffice it to say the short version is that imagine a sensor on a drone or something picks up a signal coming from within this oblong shape called an ellipse we don't know where the person was standing when they made that transmission but the person could have been standing over here at this far end and made the transmission or they could have been standing over here and made the transmission we don't know but we know it came from somewhere within this ellipse right so the chances are it's probably going to be from this area and as an analyst if i look at this ellipse i'm going to say aha i know exactly where they were they came they made the they thought they were being sneaky and they are transmitting from this little grove that ordinarily would have been bypassed so that's why this next tactic is to minimize movement and minimize radio calls we're going to have well we've already had like three we've had hours talking about sigit and stuff like that when it comes to you know your local law enforcement's uh capabilities and even like you know some national guard units capabilities but we might have to to talk about that a little bit more in depth but the point is is that imcon you know emissions control is a huge thing it does not matter how well your camouflage like these guys if you erase the tire tracks and make it look like you're just a black hole in the world like you there's nothing there but natural vegetation if you make a you know cell phone call from that area guess what you've just ratted out your all and all that effort that you've gone through is for waste um so yeah that's something to consider so one must remember that movement you know we're not just talking about a moving target versus a static target we're talking moving from uh to and from a hide site is what bags most people most of the time especially when it comes to vehicles and vehicle traffic so and you know and also the radio call thing and radio traffic from a unique area like a grove of trees a very you know if there's a field and there's one tree in it and i detected a radio a transmission coming from a field guess where i'm going to go to that tree because i would guarantee there's an antenna strung up in it so that is why number five is so important and then lastly this this image is is kind of a departure from the military doctrine but this is a screen shot from an incident that occurred back in i think march of this year march of 2020 i might be mistaken on that one but this is a a drone that is operated by the new york police department and this drone depending on which story you believe or how what officially is publicly available basically what happened is this drone captured this kid or this guy practicing airsoft tactics on his roof and they dispatched a team to come arrest him and he was arrested using this drone footage so that is a huge concern um so number six and number seven while they are you know military oriented to you know sixes post air guards and 7 is to plan to operate under uas for the military what that means is hey be aware of what's going on be aware if there's a uas in the area be prepared to either continue mission regardless of it or take measures to take it down now obviously that's a little a little bit easier said than done in the military sphere but you know so adapting this to civilians is not exactly an easy thing to do but one must remember if you're going to be doing anything outside in an area that has persistent surveillance don't do anything that is firearms related there is already a slew of ai type software out there that can that can detect the shape of a firearm and and hone in hone in on that even youtube itself has this i'm wondering if this video is going to get flagged at some point and taken down because we have shown this particular image of a firearm so this will be very interesting to see but we also have to remember hostile activities that is a huge thing as well because what is hostile well you know to me a dude practicing airsoft stuff on the roof not necessarily hostile it's interesting to look at and i would freely admit if i was a drone operator and i saw this in new york city i wouldn't be inquisitive but if the dude just looks like he's training you know whatever it's just training if i saw this at a gun range i would not be surprised at all right but if you're in an area where that kind of thing is frowned upon or remember how the whole covet thing went down they were using drones to track down people in public parks you know that might be a hassle your mere presence might be a hostile activity and and sort of you know um consent to search really so these are scary technologies and our laws are kind of wacky right now so that's something to keep in mind really and there's a whole slew of electronic countermeasures out there for the military there's not so many for civilians and there's no electronic countermeasure for a drone for civilians that is legal that we know of because jamming in any form is currently illegal under u.s law so we can't really talk about those electronic countermeasures just yet but we can say they are out there so if you you know want to do your own research go ahead really one of the last points we wanted to make is one of the ones which is you know on the list which is to inspect your signature from the enemies pov and that's why we wanted to put this out because one of the to us when we read this statement we read training training training training is key and this is where um you know either getting your own drone or get having some kind of technology having a buddy you know come try to find you right that's going to be super super important in the coming days weeks months years right so that kind of thing it cannot be understated i cannot tell you how many times people who think they have you know have done really good camouflage stuff they've deployed five or six times but you know when you get them out there and they're having to hide from drones too it's different scenario right so you know when you're deploying to iraq and syria and afghanistan you don't have to build an observation post or a cop or something like that that has to be camouflaged from the air because your adversaries don't have drones at least not in anything you know significant right it's not like you're having to camouflage it like you know from bombers or anything like that but here at home you might have to so you like that's the number one thing is you know we're hiding from drones on our own soil essentially so having the ability to train being able to check your own signature make sure your camouflage works that is vital so you know just to remind everyone of this often repeated quote of you know the more you train in peace the less you bleed in war so that is very very true and even if that war is an information war so you know the more you train and information more the less you bleed the less information you bleed so that's why we wanted to put this video out solely for this last one here to encourage people to get training as much as possible and do the best you can because really the goal here is to be hard to kill that's the really main goal here for for everything that we do is to be a little bit harder to kill than the next guy i i don't think that it take you know for a lot of people it was a wake-up call to see a modern day tank get blasted into oblivion you know to to see a modern day helicopter a modern day uh you know fighter jet get shot down that stuff was very sobering for people and you know that's that's good because it encourages people to be harder to kill and hopefully we can encourage that a little bit as well yeah hopefully this video was helpful leave us a like comment subscribe below do all that jazz usual normal stuff so that we can make it through youtube's algorithms and let our content be seen by a lot of people if you want to download this video you can on lbry tv like i mentioned link of which is below hope if youtube still allows us to link stuff but yeah so that's there like i said we're going to have a lot more content coming out about this sort of camouflage topic particularly when it comes to thermal camouflage and and how that goes we've also got a lot of other videos planned but we wanted to put this out quickly because of you know the reason we've stayed it's very very important to to start training now so uh yeah if you've got an idea for an episode drop us a line go ahead and hit us up on any of our platforms key base email you name it we have it [Music] link up with us there if you've got a question we'll throw it in for question time we have a whole podcast series where if you have any questions shoot them to us in our inbox dm them to us on instagram or whatever platform and we'll do a podcast episode where we answer everybody's questions which has been quite fun for us to do so we really enjoy that we want to continue it so got any questions drop them below we'll throw them in our question time podcast episode and yeah we'll have more of this content coming to you very very soon so you guys know it be harder to kill fight in the shade and we'll see you next time s2 actually