Obscurannts and the Future Warfighter
WHILE CURRENTLY LIMITED IN SCOPE AND USE BY PERFORMANCE LIMITATIONS, THE IMPORTANCE OF OBSCURANTS AMONG THE WEAPONS AVAILABLE TO THE 21ST CENTURY WARFIGHTER COULD INCREASE IF A WAVE OF POTENTIAL CHANGES TO THE TECHNOLOGY DELIVERS ON THE PROMISES IT HOLDS.
Even in the face of the lengthy and troop-heavy battle deployments of recent years in Iraq and Afghanistan, obscurants, especially large-scale smoke and related effects, are often thought of as relics of a bygone era of military planning and operations.
The limitations of current obscurant technology are obvious when focusing on smaller, well-trained special operations forces that can infiltrate terrorist training grounds to take prisoners or fight in an urban landscape where hard-to-control smoke has the potential to be as much of a deterrent to the enemy as to friendly forces. On the larger scale, while the era of immense battalion deployments and multi-front battles scattered across the globe has not been totally relegated to the dustbin of history, the current crop of obscurant technologies has limited uses on today’s computer-dominated, bombing-dependent, laser-guided battlefield. The is perhaps best illustrated by the lack of large-scale smoke deployment in combat over the last decade.
According to government and private-sector engineers and scientists who deal with military obscurant development, changes in the way smoke and fog technology is deployed and how it will serve the warfighter are coming.
In fact, the very idea of obscurants providing only cover is already an antiquated ideal, one that may become as relevant as a military-issue Colt as new technologies allow better means to control information and counter opposing weapons strikes on the battlefield.
Lieutenant Commander Steven Mavica, U.S. Special Operations Command media relations officer, told Special Operations Technology that, despite their limitations, the historical uses of obscurants remain important to special operations forces for both pre-planned and contingency-based needs.
“The ability to mask movement either entering or leaving an engagement or objective area is a desired capability of all forces,” Mavica explained.
However, when asked about the limits of current technology, Mavica said that existing obscurants are “either too large, too slow to produce desired effects, hazardous to the operator or too slow to disperse.”
Special operations teams deploy obscurants differently than do U.S. armed forces in general. This includes (most prominently for ground-based soldiers) solid-particle-burning handheld smoke grenades that create a thick vision-obscuring cloud.
White phosphorus is one visual obscurant chemical deployed by the Army and Marines, that dates to before World War II. Often used in grenade form as well, its most common use is in artillery rounds fired from a distance.
Marine and Army troops used white phosphorus munitions in the Battle of Fallujah in November 2004 to flush out insurgents’ spider holes and in trench lines. This prompted some critics to point out that white phosphorous can lead to chemical burns and injuries. Electronically fired smoke-making obscurants are also mounted on Humvees, such as those used by Army military police for security convoy operations, and are also found on M1 Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles.
For large-scale obscurant generation, petroleum-based oil is often used. In the Army’s case it is run through a turbine generator that generates a large cloud. These devices are attached to Humvees and the M113 armored personnel carrier smoke platform.
Although visual smoke obscurants remain the most deployed and available to non-U.S. military customers, the Army began deploying a large-scale graphite-based infrared obscurant about six years ago.
On the M56 and M58 smoke generating platforms, a small grenade is shot through the turbine system and mixed with fog oil, creating a combined visual and infrared-spectrum obscurant to counter tracking systems.
The M11 heavy variant carrier is deployed with an M56 smokegenerator platform with similar systems deployed on standard M11s and a heavy Humvee variant. For the big Army, some divisions have chemical companies with obscurant capability support that utilize these large-scale smoke platforms.
On the sea, obscurant smoke has traditionally been used as a screen to offset enemy visual sightings of boats. Today obscurants are being used predominantly as a protection against visually guided (including laser-guided) weapons.
On the special operations front, the impact of obscurant capabilities tends to be more limited in scope because of the nature of the work.
Citing his experience on the ground in Afghanistan, Major Jim Gregory, U.S. Army Special Forces Command public affairs officer, told Special Operations Technology that the corner-mounted nonaimable canister-fired obscurants on vehicles used by his teams proved to be of little use in the arena.
“From what I experienced in Afghanistan, never did we use them,” said Gregory, noting that the Rangers might use them more. “You couldn’t aim them. They would only fire in the direction pointed. We never used them for that reason because you couldn’t control wind direction. They were just not practical.”
When asked whether the vehiclemounted system would have been more helpful if it were better aimable, Gregory said “absolutely. That is why I carried smoke in my passenger compartment,” he added, “So I could throw it in the direction I needed.”
USSOCOM’s Mavica said soldiers and commanders alike would like to see better hand-deployable, instantaneous and nontoxic obscurants to better provide for their defensive and offensive needs.
Such needs are ostensibly a driving force behind USSOCOM’s Enhanced Visual Obscurant and Rapid Dispersal System acquisitions program.
Under the project, USSOCOM is looking to develop a mobile, modular system enabling rapid smoke dispersal to cover room, road or open space of any size in seconds with both visual and infrared protections against second-generation image intensifiers and thermal imagers in the 3-5 mm and 8-12 mm spectral bands.
They are also looking not only for hand deployment, but integration into generation 40 mm grenade launchers, as well as a vehicular-mounted system.
“This is the first effort to identify the capabilities and attributes presently or potentially available,” Mavica said. “SOF seeks a state-of-the-art capability, and it is believed that the desired threshold capability exists within industry. Whether the objective capabilities sought can be realized will be determined over time.”
One man who clearly believes that this and more is capable from obscurant technology is Army Major Damon Yourchisin, a combat developer and expert in obscuration technology at the Army Chemical School under the Joint Requirements Office for Chemical, Radiological and Nuclear Defense. A former commander of one of the few Army chemical companies with obscurant capabilities, Yourchisin said there is a dichotomy at play with the development of the role obscurants will play in future battle situations and for the future warfighter.
“There is a problem with generating a valid requirement from the field to continue our obscurant capability today,” said Yourchisin. “I don’t think you have anyone saying ‘cancel R&D programs,’ because technology in the future may come up with a breakthrough, but I do indeed see a lack of interest in current platforms and a fear among maneuver commanders and company commanders of smoke use that is making it almost irrelevant in the battlefield today.”
Nevertheless, Yourchisin said the Army continues to have an active program developing next-generation obscurant technologies, particularly infrared and electronics- blocking obscurants, which will have clear uses for special operations forces.
Infrared obscurant development is considered important not only because of the limits of current infrared-spectrumblocking technology, but because infrared tracking and visual detection systems have become more readily available on the world market.
Along with attempting to develop faster means to deploy obscurants, he said there is an active program for developing obscurants in the millimeter-wave spectrum aimed at shutting down enemy electronics. However, even with these next generation technological ideas, some of the same limitations found with current-generation obscurants still must be surmounted.
“We think there are applications in the communications realm,” Yourchisin said. “But what we have traditionally found with current operational smoke—that it is very difficult to control—remains. When you shut down an enemy’s communication systems, there is the possibility of taking that chance with friendly forces as well.”
Because of such concerns, finding ways to better control all types of smoke in terms of how, how long and where it is deployed is prime area of development focus.
For instance, the use of graphite in infrared-obscuring technologies results in the dispersal of particles that take a long time to dissipate. This creates problems in terms of controlling how long they are effective and potentially affecting the users’ own systems. In addition, graphite functions as both a visual as well as infrared obscurant, both of which may not be needed as the same time.
Some of the research into betterperforming infrared-blocking materials that would still allow for visual sighting has proven promising.
Dr. Nelson Claytor, President of Fort Worth, Texas-based plastic-lens manufacturer Fresnel Technologies Inc. received a phase-one development grant from the Army to investigate what sort of structures could be developed to make narrow-band obscurants.
Although the project never moved into phase two or went past the theoretical stage, Claytor said that Fresnel found several shapes of micro-structured plastic materials in the 3 to 5 and 7 to 14 micrometer range that might be useful for blocking certain wavelengths in the infrared spectrum without blocking thermal imaging completely.
“This might do very well in knocking out whatever specific wavelength they [the particles] were designed for, so you could still see through it at some wavelength but might be able to take out a certain seeker wavelength that you know is going to be used against you,” Claytor said.
One top area of interest is the use of carbon nanotubes to increase reliability and effectiveness of infrared obscuration by as much as a factor of 10 over current technologies.
Doug DuFaux, director of innovations at Buffalo, N.Y.-based nanotechnology firm Nanodynamics, Inc. told Special Operations Technology that, while the ability is not there yet, the potential for manipulating one-nanometer pellets of carbon to obscure infrared signals is immense.
“Nanotechnology has a huge potential to increase the effectiveness of some of the obscurants in [a] certain wavelength range,” said DuFaux, whose firm the Army has contracted to explore the technology.
Specifically, the company has explored the potential to aerosolize carbon nanotubes for obscurant purposes. He explained that while you wouldn’t want to use nanoparticles as a visual obscurant, the ability to take a cubic meter of carbon and stretch it so that it retains its strength in a thinner, more reflective form holds promise for scattering light in the ultraviolet frequencies. And like their potential polymer counterparts, carbon nanotubes are environmentally and toxicologically benign.
However, he cautioned against expecting nano-tech to take over the infrared obscurant field anytime in the immediate future. “Nano materials can make an [overall] impact in the near term,” DeFaux said. “Not in the next month, but certainly in a year or few years. Some of the forms of nanocarbons [for obscurant use] may be a little further out.”
Yourchisin said that the more immediate technological innovations will be transitional in nature, such as the use of reflective millimeter-level titanium particles that can shut down a particular bandwidth of spectrum or integration of automation and use of robotics for deployment.
As to the sort of next-generation deployment technologies in which the USSOCOM has expressed interest, he said there is potential for integration of an electronic threat locator and aiming system into Army vehicles to improve deployment times. In addition, the use of robotic and distance-controlled deployment vehicles could allow for smoke-based clearing in urban areas or the obscuring of battlefield movements without creating soft targets for the enemy.
However, he added that the interest in things like robotics and advanced materials is overshadowed by what he categorized as an overall disinterest in obscuration in the U.S. military.
The last major, large-scale smoke-based mission the Army performed was the obscuration of the Baghdad airfield during Desert Storm. This, combined with the fact that engineers and scientists have yet to figure a way to control the impact of weather on obscurant systems, makes future technologies a somewhat hard sell.
“We can’t control the weather,” Yourchisin said. “It doesn’t matter how good I am and how much science I know about obscuration. Unfortunately it is still maintained as an art form.”
Citing the number coming out of Army supply, he does see promise in the fact that even with their limitations, small-scale protective smoke systems on vehicles and personal smoke grenades remain in steady use in current combat situations.
He predicted that technology will ultimately be the saving grace of large-scale obscuration systems.
“Whereas today you have visual on or off or infrared on and off, the next generation in large-area obstructions is going to be tailorable, multi-spectral capable,” Yourchisin said. “I see this as an emerging capability. We will be able to dial in the spectrum we want to shut down, whether it is IR [infrared], near IR, visual or various bands within the millimeter range. We ought to be able to dial that in and ♦