Well, you can check in current Ukraine vs. Russia war how both sides lost soldiers for using mobile phones. People tend to forget they carry device that might hurt them in the end.
It's a long time since I did any military stuff and it was before smartphones but I distinctly remember the incessant lectures about carrying unnecessary items that would identify one or one's mission. By those standards carrying a smartphone would definitely be outlawed and if caught one would be up on a charge.
Edit: it seems to me that back then that had smartphones been around they'd have been classified as radio equipment and there were very strict rules and procedures about 'radio silence'.
And as far as front-line battles go, the amount of cheap drones being employed by both sides makes "identification by mobile-phone signal" pretty moot, if you're close to the front-line the other side knows exactly where you're located long before checking with your mobile-phone tower or whatever. I agree though, use of mobile phones is still a pretty good location giveaway when there's troop concentrations just at the back of the front, where it's more difficult to employ drones.
Also, this is the first protracted war fought between near-peer adversaries since the advent of the "IT revolution" (or whatever we want to call the last 30 or so years), there's lots of things that militaries are now learning when it comes to adapting said IT/tech to the battle-fronts and to the soldiers themselves.
Mobile phone signals can be pinpointed from further away, 10km is easily possible, and the cellular network means that you have a network of antennas in a tighter grid than that. And beyond switching off your phone, there is no camouflaging cell phone signals.
So even if you then employ the drones e.g. to aim and correct the artillery (300m precision from cellphone tower cross location isn't precise enough), cell phones will quickly tell you where to start looking with your drones.
You should check some of the war videos from Ukraine, there's lots and lots of drones up in the sky, it's the classic "quantity that has a quality of its own". Some events/attacks/actions get filmed with 3 or more drones, I remember several such events where there were three different POVs coming from those drones.
I'm tempted to say that camouflage has lost most of its value on a battlefield like that of Southern Ukraine. Even though that would probably be wrong, seeing individual soldiers chased by artillery (mortars, mostly) under heavy foliage, while those soldiers are still wearing adequate camouflage, makes me have second thoughts about the relevance of said camouflage.
More generally, I've yet to see a serious discussion coming from the tech circles about how cheap drones have transformed warfare. Eric Schmidt had tried something like that earlier this year in a Foreign Affairs piece [1], but unfortunately the article wasn't that smart, too many platitudes. In his defence, he was writing at the start of the year, for example this "prediction" of his:
> Marines in urban warfare, for example, could be accompanied by microdrones that serve as their eyes and ears.
has already been implemented by both sides (UA and RU) during this past summer (replace "urban" with the fields around Rabotyne or Bakhmut).
Camouflage is never panacea, but useful camouflage exists, even today. I've (almost) stepped on comrades in an exercise that were hidden well enough to not see them from 3m in broad daylight. But for things to work that well, you need to know what makes humans detect their prey. Movement is a dead giveaway, so as soon as you are running you are toast anyways, and only sheer luck might save you. Form and contour is another problem, something human-shaped and green will stand out, even among other green things. See something rectangular in the forest? Bomb it, rectangular trees are rare. Texture is another giveaway, things looking smooth, regular or out-of-place compared to nearby textures. That's why your camouflaged tank will look like a bush or pile of leaves when properly camouflaged.
All this means that of course you have to go beyond camouflage paint and camouflage clothes. Both are a start, and will help to a point, as a base layer, and for great viewing distances. But even before drones, proper camouflage also involves covering yourself and objects in leaves, branches, nets, parking below trees, etc.
Another interesting point about Ukraine war videos: What you also usually do not see are videos of camouflage being broken by thermal imaging. Both sides have thermal equipment, but I guess are reluctant to point their enemy at how much or how little of it they have, and how vulnerable or not vulnerable the others' camouflage techniques are to it.
Also, smaller drones have a limited reach. To get at the juicy targets (logistics, headquarters) way in the back, you need more expensive and rare long-range drones. So I guess the drone density will sharply drop off beyond the first lines of trenches.
Agreed, and I also agree with your other comments. But those limits (luckily for troops on the ground) are because to make detection better and more sensitive is expensive and this has to be traded off against the loss of drones and the risk of downed or crashed ones being reverse-engineered to determine their capability. Also, providing countermeasures such as thermiting the electronics when in trouble or downed not only adds precious weight but also increases costs significantly. Moreover, not only is detection sensitivity a tradeoff but the tech one gets often depends on what's actually available at that instant. Next month, week or even next encounter the tech might have improved.
As I said in my post to the comment, I'm not up to full speed on the tech being used in drones in Ukraine but over 20 years ago I was working on tech that could easily identity many targets at once. What's happened since is that this tech has become much, much more miniaturized and a great deal more sensitive not to mention much cheaper.
Right, seriouly advanced detection tech is already here as its development was already underway before the conflict for both industrial and military purposes. It's now just a matter of packaging it to be suitable for drones, and you can bet London to a brick that there are dozens working to better integrate the different technologies.
Combine it with new miniature camera tech, new LIDAR and back-end (AI) processing and it's phenomenal what can be achieved nowadays. I'd venture that if this conflict continues to drag on then you'll likely see a huge and very worrying change in drone capability.
"Camouflage is never panacea, but useful camouflage exists, even today. I've (almost) stepped on comrades in an exercise that were hidden well enough to not see them from 3m in broad daylight."
Agreed. Whilst it was long ago, I've not forgotten going A-over-T after tripping over another's legs during war games and ruled as 'dead' by the umpire thus no longer a participant because camouflage worked. That said, back then one of camouflage's giveaways was the face. We were trained to look for eyes which was effective (if close enough) because unless facial camouflage is applied properly the eyes stood out, and as most soldiers applied it to themselves and the fact that they weren't much good at incorporating the eyes in ways that created a 'delusional' image, it was a known weakness. Moreover, the facial camouflage took a lot of removing so there was resistance to applying enough of it.
Again, I'm not up to date on how facial camouflage has improved or is applied today but I'd be almost certain it wouldn't stand scrutiny from the best electronic systems. It'd be a real worry if one side had sophisticated tech in their helmets and the other didn't.
I can't say that I'm fully up on the latest cameras used in drones but I've been employed on the engineering side of video tech and surveillance and it's clear there's no end of the trickery that modern cameras can get up to. Modern sensors can easily respond to both IR and UV and with the right filtering can be made very selective in what they see.
Combine this with front-end motion detection and back-end processing and one has a really powerful detection system. I'd reckon with this tech that traditional camouflage would be nigh on useless. Moreover, if the drone were coupled by link to 'home' and very powerful back-end processing with AI then the game would be up for troops on the ground (seems to me either these guys are either extremely patriotic or they're unfamiliar what the tech will do). That's not the end of it either, there's also LIDAR that will see through much camouflage, combine it with those camera sensors and anyone on a battlefield would stick out like the proverbial.
Incidentally, this type of detection goes back a long way so it's now well developed tech. Film was made IR-sensitive before WWII and during the War Kodak perfected a false-color IR reversal film for detection of camouflage, etc. As a keen photographer I used to use a later 35mm version of this film and it was surprisingly good at emphasizing objects that weren't highly visible with normal color film.
https://kolarivision.com/the-irchrome-infrared-photography-f...
That's understandable, but for as long as war has been conducted soldiers' lives have always been long stretches of utter boredom followed by short episodes of horror, death and destruction. It's always been this way, there are many accounts of where waiting in anticipation have seemed worse than the conflict. Managing armies in quiet periods has always occupied commanders' attention, it's why, say, brothels were allowed near the Western Front by high command in WWI despite the risk of VD (which was often a chargeable offense).
Also, to almost always keep in touch with the loved ones from back front, I can imagine that that has to be good for morale.
Reckon it definitely would be, but from what is being said about consequential deaths one wonders if it's too much of a luxury. There's no doubt that decades ago that a luxury of this type on the battlefield (even if it had been available) would have been unthinkable as commanders would have deemed it a strategic danger—giving away a platoon or battalion's position, etc. I can't see why something as fundamental as weakening strategy would have changed nowadays but then I'm not a commander. (Incidentally, there's any number of references to such strategies but there's two that stand out: Sun Tzu and von Clausewitz, I doubt there's a commander in the world that hasn't studied them—BTW, I'm not suggesting for a moment you read them.)
Perhaps, these days, with the abandonment of conscription in many countries, militaries have made a pragmatic decision to allow smartphones as an enticement for people to join the military. I've not followed this recently (as I once would have), if so, then I'd reckon it's a nasty callous tradeoff.
Re your last point, it's my understanding that troops in Iraq and Afghanistan also carried phones but I'm unfamiliar with the rules that would have applied.