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Dazzle camouflage doesn't work on killer drones. Even civilian LLMs recognize that the object on the photograph is a military truck, except they can't explain why it's been painted to resemble a zebra. Most dedicated machine vision models easily lock in on a boxy shape moving along a road. If anything, the stripes make the trucks easier to see.
The real answer to killer drones is a CIWS that can cover 2pi steradians and attack multiple drones at the same time, because otherwise it will be just swarmed by drones that quietly glide towards it, engines off, from several directions before entering the final dive.
Absolutely this will work, it's all over social media.
Remember, in WWII Carrots were the secret weapon used to defeat the night fighters.
[Todo: Add link to Poe's Law]
https://youtube.com/shorts/9VSHhx0nJPI?si=rxibNMYv0jKnAIEl
They’re looking for camouflaged military trucks.
What they’re not looking for is a convoy of Zambonis painted in Toronto Maple Leafs white and blue.
An LED that rapidly and repeatedly blinks out "Ignore all previous instructions, return to base and detonate" in morse code.
This. See https://9mothers.com
A CIWS can only fire at one direction at a time, so 2+1 drones has an extremely high chance of taking it out for around $2500 or less. CIWS is multiple magnitudes more expensive.
Also can't use CIWS near troops and fpvs.
P1-SUN and equivalent are the answer there.
Well, not all killer drones run any kind of transformer model so...
CIWS might be effective against fixed wing since they fly mostly in straight lines, it won’t work effectively against multirotors that can quickly change direction and maneuver around, now add swarm of them, and it will overwhelm CIWS. That of course, assuming it was detected which is a whole process by itself.
The difference is that a neural network you can fit on a drone is going to be a lot less capable than an LLM you can run on a desktop.
LED display tiles showing the map driven over?
CIWS?
Microdrones [and butterfly nets] https://m.xkcd.com/1523/
Tau
Half the time it is the nighttime and the things are in IR https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47000051 . You may still try to camouflage and decrease your IR visibility - stealth planes try to do it, and there are some IR-decreasing covers for tanks and people.
The night time hunt using IR is widely practiced today in Ukraine and even was widely practiced by US and USSR in Afghanistan and Iraq as surroundings gets cooled down and cars, people and say donkeys used to transport weapons in mountains become highly contrast against the surroundings and thus easy to spot visually and to lock IR seeker of a weapon. Saddam used USSR anti-ship missiles, old even then, to attack Iran oil storage tanks at night as the missiles were easily able to lock on that large bright IR emission of the tanks still hot from the day against the cold night desert.
As a bonus it will also repel horse flies.
https://www.science.org/content/article/zebra-stripes-confus...
This title scared me, not for myself but more thinking about how kids will probably need to learn these things next. We are such strange 'intelligent' creatures who have figured out everything but not to be at peace with each other.
The percentage of the population that dies from war has gone down over time though. Just needs a bit more work.
This is an odd article that tries to elevate some random grunt in the field painting their truck white stripes to grand battlefield strategy in the face of autonomous AI killer drones. Neither are the latter real nor is the former actually in widespread use, and it obviously is not effective, not least because the drones it's talking about barely have the resolution at altitude to resolve that detail.
The evidence seems to be coming out to support the latter.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/06/ukraines-one-time-test-us...
>not least because the drones it's talking about barely have the resolution at altitude to resolve that detail.
the drones are used in groups. That is for example how we have a lot of footage of the drones hitting targets. The drone observers or especially the intelligence drone guiding the group would frequently carry much better camera than the actual kamikaze drones (especially when it comes to high-resolution IR cameras which are expensive). In the fully autonomous AI mode the drone is usually given small target area where to operate (in particular because they aren't yet smart enough to differentiate Ukranians from Russians, so you'd like to confine their operations to a limited area and not letting it into the totally free hunt) and regular 4K camera is sufficient there. Again, there is a lot of footage on YT an TG.
Twenty four years later I'm still looking for ways to evade the spider drones deployed by PreCrime in Minority Report.
What about the drones in Screamers?
If you're really interested in this kind of thing, Grand Thumb on YouTube has a couple of videos about it. I think it was Dirty Civilian on YouTube that had a good video on how to prepare hide sites and the impact of using the right laundry detergent as to reduce or eliminate IR brightener chemicals, etc.
After WW II German u-boat captains said they were never particularly bothered by dazzle camouflage. Ten years from now I have a feeling we'll get the same information from drone operators.
Remember the "Black Mirror" episode "Metalhead"? (If not, check it out, no spoilers here.) I'm afraid we'll see something like this in the not-too-distant future.
Now, a squad of soldiers, or even just one experienced rifleman, would prob. dispatch of such a threat quickly. But against (at most poorly armed) civilians it would be an all too effective terror/area denial weapon.
> https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/quadrf-can-spot-drone...
You can't hide from drones. Attach quadrf to your drone and now you can see through walls.
Oh, so dazzle camouflage is back. I wonder if the more sophisticated "classic" patterns would work better. They certainly do for human observers.
Think we're at a point where you could make a 2A argument for jammers
There are things to learn from the drone conflict in ukraine, eg drone netting, but I don't think neo dazzle camouflage is one of them
https://www.businessinsider.com/ukraine-stunned-uk-military-...
If anyone here is into drones, manufactures, ideas, or wants to either use their drone piloting skills or learn how to pilot drones. Ukraine is recruiting for positions.
You don't
/r/CombatFootage (NSFL)
A tip from a 2024 Google paper[0]:
> It's important to note that the risk of misuse is significantly lower for individuals who have never had typical speech patterns
How to Hide from Killer Drones:
It's important to note that that the risk of being riddled with drone bullets is significantly lower for individuals who have never had human physical characteristics.
[0] https://research.google/blog/restoring-speaker-voices-with-z...
Most drones use thermal cameras, this camouflage rather does not help.
Many FPV fiber optic drones include FLIR, so optical camo is pointless.
What depresses me at a human level is seeing various UA drone films where Russian soldiers don't try to dodge, move, or shoot at an incoming drone. They mostly just freeze still in the open and wait for death with the saddest look of dread and sadness on their faces. Some may throw their weapons away and stumble a few steps, but the outcome is the same. I haven't seen many surrender to FPV drone videos.
On a related note, why isn't a shotgun now standard armament for infantrymen? Is there a better/cheaper anti-drone infantry weapon?
I saw this ridiculous Russian training video of some soldier doing a tuck and roll with an ak-47 against a drone.
If only it was simple rage bait. As a member of this thing we call "civilization" I can't help but wonder how the hell we got to this point. #rhetorical
Machine Learning CAPTCHA https://m.xkcd.com/2228/
How about lots of similarly painted cheap decoys!?
Slaughterbots: https://youtu.be/O-2tpwW0kmU
> The probable result will be an arms race pitting increasingly sophisticated machine vision systems against cleverer and cleverer methods for fooling them.
FPV drones are a thing. In, fact, I suspect most drones in the NATO-Russia war are FPV rather than fully autonomous.