How to Hide From Killer Drones
11th July 2026
i\In recent months Russian military lorries in Ukraine have begun sporting a striking new colour scheme of vivid black-and-white stripes. As camouflage goes, it is not much use against human observers. But then, it is not intended to fool biological eyes. Its aim is to frustrate the machine-vision systems that are fitted to the Ukrainian drones that zip around battlefields looking for prey.
The stripes are reminiscent of the “dazzle camouflage” used by the Royal Navy in the first world war. But whereas dazzle camouflage was intended to break up a ship’s silhouette, making it difficult to judge its speed and heading, the new variant aims to fool machines into thinking that a lorry is not, in fact, a lorry at all.
Machine vision is based on pattern-matching. A model is trained by exposing it to images, some of which contain lorries (or tanks, or aircraft) and some of which do not. Over zillions of exposures, the computer deduces rules that allow it to identify the things its trainers want to teach it about. Because zebra-striped trucks are unlikely to appear in the training data, says Todd Humphreys, an engineer at the University of Texas at Austin, an ai that encounters one in the real world may not realise what it is looking at.
Assuming, of course, that’s what you want to do.