The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is developing an “invisibility cloak” comprised of a smoke-like obscurant to disguise US forces from their foes. This would replace the controversial white phosphorus, which has burned the flesh off of human beings.
DARPA said the obscurants will be “deployed in certain ways to allow one-way vision through the plume.” The new military gadget is still in its infancy, but the “smoke” could consist of liquid aerosol spray or manufactured material.
The US military employs white phosphorous to create a smoke screen, but it causes severe burns that can last up to eight hours if it comes into touch with the skin, making it hazardous for American troops and civilians caught in the crossfire.
The new obscurant developed by DARPA would not only be safe to come into touch with but also to breathe. Current obscurants necessitate the use of respirators by soldiers in the field.
The Coded Visibility (CV) initiative began in July 2022 and is scheduled to run for the next 54 months.
DARPA has picked many colleges in the United States to research, produce, and test obscurants that match its requirements.
This includes developing new obscurants made of numerous particles with customized properties, and adjustable particulates, and demonstrating both passive and asymmetric vision capabilities in the laboratory, pilot, and field tests.
In all technological domains, teams will also build new modeling and simulation tools for obscurants to engineer plumes and evaluate sensor performance.
Rohith Chandrasekar, CV program manager in DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office, said in a statement, ‘The teams we selected aim to develop new types of non-hazardous obscurant particulates that can be tailored to provide asymmetry – that is, to allow US and allied forces to see the enemy through the plume in one direction, while the opponent cannot see through the plume in the opposite direction.
‘A passive asymmetry strategy will likely necessitate the deployment of several obscurant materials in certain configurations to enable one-way vision through the plume.
“We are also investigating the more fundamental difficulty of proving active asymmetry, which requires only a single obscurant material that can be tweaked in real-time to potentially enable dynamic management of its properties after being placed and in collaboration with sensors.”
This research aims to eliminate the use of white phosphorus that ‘burns to the bone,’ which was recently employed in Syria in 2019 – and heartbreaking pictures of the carnage showed youngsters with severe burns.
Although Turkey is prohibited from using chemical weapons, Hamish de-Bretton Gordon, a British chemical weapons specialist, claimed the burns seemed compatible with white phosphorus. The clip was captured as Turkey was attacking the Kurds.
The video depicts a little boy brought to a hospital in Tal Tamr, near the border city of Ras al-Ayn, whose skin had seemingly melted off his body.
As he is transported into the hospital, he can be heard pleading, “Dad, please stop the burning!” before a dose of morphine is administered. It is believed that he suffered for 12 hours before being helped.
