Concealment: Why Things Are Seen

Lesson Overview

This lesson opens the fieldcraft half of the course. Having learned to find their way, a soldier must now learn to operate in the field, and the first skill of operating is often to do so without being seen. Concealment is not a trick or a costume. It rests on understanding why the human eye picks a soldier out of a landscape, and on defeating each of those reasons in turn. This lesson sets out the recognised reasons a soldier is seen and how each is beaten, then turns those reasons into a method: the principles of camouflage and concealment, applied to a static position, to a soldier on the move, and to the kit they carry. It ends with the honest point that in some of the Army's most important work a soldier does the opposite and tries hard to be seen.

This is the knowledge layer. Concealment is a craft, learned by doing and corrected by an instructor who can see what the soldier cannot, and it is built and certified on real terrain, in changing light, including on airsoft military-simulation exercises where a thinking opposing force punishes every fault at once. What this lesson gives is the understanding the practice rests on, so that when a soldier is corrected on the ground they know which principle was breached and why it mattered. By the end you will be able to name the recognised reasons things are seen and explain how each is defeated, apply them as a checklist to yourself and to a position, set out the principles of camouflage and concealment as a working method, distinguish cover from view from cover from fire and choose a position that uses background and ground, and explain why concealment is a tactical and training skill that a search-and-rescue soldier deliberately reverses.

Key Terms

• Concealment: protection from being seen; it hides a soldier but does not necessarily stop a bullet.
• Cover from view: anything that hides a soldier from observation, such as vegetation, shadow, or a hedge.
• Cover from fire: anything solid enough to stop or reduce the effect of rounds and fragments, such as an earth bank, a thick wall, or a vehicle.
• Silhouette: an outline made obvious by appearing against a contrasting background, above all the sky.
• Personal camouflage: the disruption of a soldier's own shape and shine, and the matching of their colour and texture to the surroundings, using issued means and local vegetation.
• Siting: the deliberate choice of where to place a soldier or a position so that the ground itself does most of the concealing, before any camouflage is added.
• Field discipline: the collective control of every sign a soldier or section gives off, kept up under three headings: track, light, and noise.

A soldier must often be unseen

Much of what a soldier does in the field depends on not being noticed. To observe ground without being observed, to move without drawing attention, to hold a position an adversary cannot find: all require concealment, and concealment is a discipline, not luck. The eye and brain are very good at picking a person out of natural surroundings, because things are seen when they contrast with those surroundings, and the human form, its movement, and the things a soldier carries contrast with open country in almost every way the eye is built to catch. The fieldcraft answer is not to hope to be missed but to understand precisely what gives a soldier away and to remove each giveaway in turn.

These reasons are well known and long taught, and worth learning by heart, because in the field a soldier must apply them without stopping to think. There are nine a soldier returns to constantly, making a checklist to run over themselves and over any position: shape, shadow, silhouette, surface and shine, spacing, movement, colour and contrast, noise, and track or sign. Two more, position and scale, complete the longer list the Commonwealth armies teach, and are explained alongside the others below. Learn the checklist until you can run it from memory, because that is how it is used: not read off a card, but applied at a glance, again and again, to yourself and to your surroundings.

Why things are seen, and how each is defeated

Shape. The eye knows a thing by its outline, and at a distance the outline is recognised long before any detail. The human shape is unmistakable: a head and shoulders, two arms, two legs, and the hard straight lines of a rifle or an antenna read instantly as a person, because nature has few straight lines and no shape quite like ours. Shape is defeated by breaking up the outline. Drape and disrupt it with scrim, with the garnish on a helmet net, and with vegetation cut sparingly from the immediate area, until the human form dissolves and the eye finds nothing it recognises. The aim is not to add a great bush but to break the line, so where the eye expects the clean curve of a helmet or the square of a shoulder it finds a ragged, irregular edge.

Shadow. Shadow works two ways, and a soldier must understand both. First, light and shade reveal an object's form: against a dark background the lit surfaces of a soldier stand out, and against a light background the shadowed sides show. Second, and more important, an object casts a shadow that may be plainly visible even when the object itself is hidden; the eye tends to accept a large dark area as uniform and will miss a soldier deep in shade but catch the long shadow they throw across open ground in low sun. So a soldier uses shadow, settling into it so the eye passes over them, but also watches the shadow they cast, keeping it on broken ground rather than letting it reach out clean across the open, and remembering that the shadow moves through the day as the sun does and must be checked again.

Silhouette. To appear against a smooth, contrasting background is to be seen at once, because the outline stands out hard and complete with nothing to break it. Any flat, even background will do it, water or a bare field, but the commonest and worst is the sky. The rule is close to absolute: never cross or pause on a skyline, and never let yourself be framed against any plain background. Silhouette is defeated by always keeping a background behind you, moving below the crests rather than over them and standing against trees, banks, or broken ground rather than the open. When a crest must be crossed, cross it where there is a backdrop of higher ground or vegetation beyond, cross low, and cross fast.

Surface and shine. A surface that does not match its surroundings draws the eye, and a smooth or reflective surface worst of all. Texture is the relative smoothness or roughness of a thing: rough ground, like a field of grass, holds many small shadows and reads as dark and broken, while a smooth surface throws light back flat and even and reads as a hard, made object. Worse still is true shine, the flash of light reflected off glass or metal, caught quickly by ground and air observers alike and one of the surest giveaways there is. The culprits are worth naming: a wristwatch face, glasses, the lens of an optic, a belt buckle, a clean weapon working part, mess tins, and the natural shine of the skin of the face and hands, all worse when wet, and wet kit is the rule rather than the exception in a damp climate. Surface and shine are defeated by dulling and roughening. Cover or turn away glass, tape or subdue bright metal, bind shiny surfaces with disruptive material so long as it does not foul the working of a weapon or block a sight, roughen smooth surfaces so they carry the broken texture of the natural world, and tone down the exposed skin of the face, neck, ears, and the backs of the hands so none of it throws back the light.

Spacing. In nature things are seldom regularly spaced, so regular spacing is a signature of the made world and attracts the eye even at a distance where the individual objects cannot be made out. Soldiers strung out at even intervals, kit laid in a tidy row, vehicles parked in a line, all read as artificial. This is defeated by keeping natural, irregular intervals. Never line up evenly; let the spacing between soldiers and objects be uneven, as a scatter of bushes or rocks would be, while still keeping the tactical spacing a task demands. Irregular does not mean bunched: the discipline is to be uneven, not to be close.

Movement. Of all the giveaways, movement most catches the eye. Movement by itself seldom tells an observer exactly what a thing is, but it is the surest revealer that something is there: even when shape, shine, and all the rest are perfectly handled, the eye is drawn to motion, and finds it at the edge of vision, through peripheral sight, even when concentrating elsewhere. A sudden movement against a still background is seen at a great distance. Movement is defeated by moving only when necessary, then slowly and deliberately, and by freezing the instant there is reason to think one is observed. A soldier who holds still is far harder to detect than one who moves, however well concealed, and the discipline of stillness, of not fidgeting, not turning the head sharply, not shifting for comfort, is as much a part of concealment as any camouflage.

Colour and contrast. Colour aids an observer when there is contrast between the colour of a thing and its background, and the greater the contrast, the more visible the thing. Colour alone seldom identifies an object, but it helps to find one and to confirm a doubtful sighting. Tone matters too: the darker, duller shades of any colour draw the eye far less than the lighter, brighter ones. A pale face, clean light webbing, or a bright stripe against a dark hedgerow is found at once. This is defeated by matching the surroundings and choosing the duller tone. Match the predominant colour of the actual ground, add colour and texture that blend with the immediate surroundings, and favour subdued, darker shades over bright ones, remembering that what blends in dark woodland betrays a soldier on pale open ground or among rock.

Noise. The eye is not the only sense that betrays a soldier; sudden noise contrasts with the normal quiet just as a shape contrasts with the ground, and sound can pinpoint a position as surely as a flash of shine. Loose kit that rattles, a sloshing water bottle, a buckle tapping a weapon, careless speech, a cough: each carries far across open country, further at night, and further still in still or cold air and over water. Noise is defeated by securing and padding every source of it before moving, controlling the voice to the lowest level that will serve, and timing any unavoidable noise to a natural sound that masks it. This is the heart of noise discipline, which the Observation, Judging Distance, and Movement lesson (Lesson 07) treats in full as one of the collective field disciplines.

Track or sign. A soldier and a section leave a record on the ground as they pass, and a trained eye reads it as easily as a map: boot prints in soft soil, crushed grass, broken vegetation, a track worn into a slope, disturbed earth, and dropped litter. Tracks are especially revealing from the air, where they betray not only that someone passed but the type, strength, and even the intentions of those who made them, and a track that runs up to a position and stops is an arrow pointing straight at it. Track and sign are defeated by leaving as little as possible and by hiding what is left. Move on hard ground or grass rather than soft soil, go round vegetation rather than through it, route any unavoidable track to follow natural lines such as hedges and field edges where it is least conspicuous, and run a track past a position rather than ending it there so the position is not given away. Short stretches of fresh track can be brushed out or covered with natural material, and every scrap of rubbish is carried out. This is track discipline, and like noise discipline it is a collective habit, covered further in Lesson 07.

Position and scale. Two further reasons complete the list. An object is often identified by its position in relation to its surroundings: a long object on a railway line is taken for a train, similar shapes strung along a riverbank for boats, and an unexpected lump on a bare skyline for exactly what it is. The lesson is to avoid the obvious, expected place and use the unremarkable one. Scale is the giveaway of a thing that differs greatly in size from those around it; an object much larger or smaller than its neighbours stands out where one of ordinary size would not. Both are reasons to choose a position that fits its surroundings rather than one that contradicts them.

The principles of camouflage and concealment as a method

Knowing why things are seen is half the skill. The other half is turning that knowledge into a method a soldier applies in order, every time, to themselves and to a position. The method has four steps, done in this sequence because each makes the next less work.

First, site well: let the ground do the concealing. Effective concealment depends first and above all on the choice and use of background and ground; this is the controlling decision, the one that governs every measure that follows. Before adding a single piece of camouflage, a soldier chooses where to be. A position is sited in natural cover, in shadow, off the skyline, and with a solid background behind it, so the shape of the soldier disappears into the surroundings rather than standing out from them. A soldier who occupies the ground without altering its appearance, settling into a fold or the shade of existing cover, is most of the way to being hidden before any further effort. The common and fatal error is to take the position with the finest view, the knoll or the crest, and so be silhouetted from every direction below; the disciplined soldier accepts a poorer view from a place that hides them, because a position that is seen is no position at all.

Second, break up and tone down shape and shine. With the ground chosen, the soldier disrupts what the ground cannot hide. The outline of the helmet, body, and weapon is broken up with the issued means and a little local vegetation, so the curved, familiar shapes the eye knows are made ragged and strange. Every reflective surface is dulled. The exposed skin is toned down, but the point is not simply to darken it: it is to break up the shine and the recognisable pattern of a face, bringing down the high parts that catch the light, the nose, cheekbones, ears, and forehead, and darkening the flat areas, so the face no longer reads as a face. More is applied for work at night. This second step is what most people picture when they hear "camouflage", but note its place in the order: it assists the siting; it does not replace it.

Third, use natural and artificial materials sparingly, and keep them fresh. Concealment may use both what the ground provides and what the soldier carries. Natural concealment, the bushes, grass, and shadows already in place, needs no work and no renewal and is always the first choice. Artificial means, scrim, garnish, and nets, are added where the natural is not enough. Cut natural material, vegetation taken from one place and added to a soldier or a position, sits between the two and must be handled with care: arrange it so it blends with the surroundings and faces the right way, use only as much as breaks the outline, and replace it as soon as it begins to wither, because cut foliage pales and wilts within the hour and a wilted bush stands out worse than no bush at all. Camouflage discipline is essential precisely because surroundings change, shadows move, and foliage wilts; camouflage applied once and forgotten will, before long, mark a soldier out rather than hide them.

Fourth, keep track, light, and noise discipline. None of the first three steps is worth anything if the soldier then betrays the position by the signs they give off, so the method is held together by field discipline under three headings. Track discipline keeps the trail to and around a position to a minimum and hides what cannot be avoided. Light discipline treats any light at night as a beacon, a torch, a screen, even a watch face caught by the moon, and so means no unnecessary light and any essential light shielded and brief. Noise discipline secures every source of sound and controls the voice. These three are the routine of leaving no trace, the soldier and section passing through ground and leaving it as they found it. They are taught in full as collective disciplines in Lesson 07; here it is enough to know they are the fourth and indispensable step of concealment, and that the best-camouflaged soldier in the field is found in an instant by a swept torch, a dropped wrapper, or a careless word.

Two judgements run through all four steps. First, everything is judged against the actual ground the soldier is in, by place and by season, never against a fixed idea of what camouflage should look like. Second, camouflage assists but behaviour decides: the soldier who sites well, breaks up their shape, and then lies still and silent beats the soldier with the finest camouflage who moves carelessly or breaks a skyline. Camouflage is the easy part to see and the smaller part of the result.

Applying the method: position, person, and kit

The same four steps apply whether a soldier is settling into a static position, moving across country, or laying out their kit, but each emphasises different parts of the checklist.

A static position. A position is where siting matters most, because the soldier will be there long enough to be found. Choose a place in cover and in shade, off the skyline, with a background behind it, and concealed from every direction it might be observed from, not merely from straight ahead: a place well hidden at eye level from the front may be plainly in view from higher ground or from a flank, so before settling the soldier asks, honestly, from where could I be seen. Site low, against the side of cover, with only as much of the body exposed as is needed to observe or act, for the common fault is to crouch behind a low wall while the head and shoulders break the outline above it. Watch where the cast shadow will fall as the sun moves. Where a position is dug, the spoil, the disturbed earth thrown out, is itself a giveaway and must be concealed or carried away, and the position is overhead-broken so it is not obvious from above. Keep the track to and from the position off the soft ground and run it past rather than up to the position. Then keep the camouflage renewed and the discipline tight for as long as the position is held.

A person on the move. On the move, movement and silhouette dominate the checklist, because the soldier cannot rely on a fixed background and the eye is drawn to motion above all. Move by short bounds from one piece of cover to the next, choosing the next position before leaving the present one and never leaving cover until ready. Keep below crests and never cross a skyline; where a crest must be crossed, cross low and fast where there is a backdrop beyond. Move slowly and smoothly, freeze when there is any reason to think one is observed, and use the dead ground, the folds and hollows the ground offers, to move unseen. Crossing open ground or an obstacle, keep the silhouette as low and the time exposed as short as possible, and cross a road or track near a bend or a narrow point where the line of sight is short. Even moving through tall grass, change direction from time to time, because a steady straight line through grass makes an unnatural wave that a still observer catches. The detailed drills of moving as an individual and as a section belong to the Patrolling and Tactical Movement course; what concealment adds is the reason behind every one of them.

Kit. Kit is concealed by the same principles applied to objects rather than to the body. Shine is the first enemy: cover or turn away anything that reflects, glass, metal, mess tins, and the lenses of optics, because even under good overhead cover a shiny surface can flash through a small gap. Shape and surface come next: break up the hard, regular outlines of equipment with scrim or tape, and darken webbing and kit that age and repeated cleaning have faded, since faded kit contrasts where new kit blends. Lay kit out at irregular intervals rather than in a tidy row, so spacing does not betray it. Secure and pad everything that could rattle, for kit is a common source of the noise that gives a position away. And keep any cut foliage added to kit fresh, replacing it as it wilts. The rule for kit is the rule for the soldier: dull it, break up its shape, vary its spacing, silence it, and match it to the ground.

Choosing and using cover

Running through all of the above is a distinction a soldier must hold clearly in mind, because it can decide whether they live or die. Cover from view hides a soldier from observation but does nothing to stop a bullet: a hedge, a bush, a patch of shadow, a thin fence hide the soldier but offer no protection if fired upon. Cover from fire is solid enough to stop or reduce the effect of rounds and fragments: an earth bank, a thick wall, a substantial tree, a vehicle, and even the smallest depression or fold in the ground gives some. The two are not the same, and to mistake one for the other is dangerous. A soldier who crouches behind a hedge believing it will protect them has confused being hidden with being safe, and a hedge stops nothing. Some cover gives both at once, a thick wall with vegetation along it, and that is best of all, but a soldier must always know which kind of cover they are using and never assume that because they cannot be seen they cannot be hit. The handling of cover under fire belongs to the Weapon Handling and Safety course; what this lesson fixes is the distinction itself, so the soldier never confuses concealment with protection.

An honest note: when a soldier wants to be seen

Everything in this lesson teaches a soldier to be unseen, and it is right to be plain about when that is the aim and when it is not. Concealment is a tactical and training skill. It belongs to operating against an adversary, to exercises, and to the field discipline beneath them, and a soldier learns it because the field may one day require it. But the Royal Kaharagian Army's most frequent and most important field work is search and rescue, and there a soldier does the exact opposite. A searcher wants to be found. Working a hillside for a lost and frightened walker, a soldier makes themselves as visible as possible, in high-visibility clothing, with light and sound and movement, so the very person they are seeking can see them and come to them, or signal back. The principles of this lesson are not abandoned in that work; they are inverted, and the soldier who understands why things are seen understands equally well how to be seen, which colour and movement and silhouette draw the eye, and uses that knowledge to be found rather than to hide. Know the skill, then, as a discipline to be applied or reversed according to the task, and remember that it is built and certified on the ground, where an instructor can see the soldier as an adversary or a casualty would, and correct what the soldier cannot see for themselves.

In Practice: The Observation Post Above the Valley

A section is set to watch a track running along the floor of a valley during a night-and-day exercise, reporting any movement along it without itself being detected. The corporal siting the observation post works the method in order. He sites first: he rejects the obvious knoll, fine though the view is, because anyone on it is silhouetted against the sky from below, and instead settles the post a little down the forward slope, in the shade of a stand of scrub that gives both a background and broken cover, choosing the poorer view from the place that hides his soldiers. He checks where the morning sun will throw their shadows and shifts the post so no shadow reaches out clean across the open ground below. Only then does he have the soldiers break up and tone down: they dull their optics and the working parts of their weapons, tone down and disrupt their faces and hands against the night shine, and dress their helmets and shoulders with garnish and a little local vegetation, which he has them renew as the cut growth wilts through the day.

He uses materials sparingly, taking only enough scrub to break the outline, and keeps the discipline tight. The soldiers settle at uneven intervals, as the scrub itself grows, never in a line. They route their approach over the hard ground at the back and run it past the post rather than up to it, conceal the little spoil they disturb, secure every loose strap, and speak rarely and low. Above all they move slowly and seldom, for the corporal has warned them that movement is what the eye on the track below will catch first, even when everything else is perfect. The scrub gives them cover from view, but he reminds them it would stop no bullet, and he sites the soldier who must observe most low against an earth bank a few paces back, which would. Through the long watch nothing about the post draws the eye; it is, to anyone on the track, simply more hillside. The same section, tasked a week later to search that valley for a missing walker, turns every one of these principles on its head, dressing in high-visibility tabards and calling and showing lights, so this time the lost man, not an adversary, is the one meant to see them. The skill is the same; only its direction has changed. Both the hiding and the being found are practised and assessed in person on the ground, the tactical side rehearsed on airsoft military-simulation exercises under marshals, where a thinking opposing force finds in seconds the fault an instructor might take an hour to point out.

Check Your Understanding

1. Name the recognised reasons that things are seen, and explain briefly how each one is defeated. Which is said to catch the eye most, and why?
2. Set out the four-step method of camouflage and concealment in order, and explain why siting comes first and why it is said that "camouflage assists; behaviour decides". What is the difference between cover from view and cover from fire, and why is mistaking one for the other dangerous?
3. Take a static position, a soldier on the move, and a piece of kit in turn, and for each name the giveaways from the checklist that matter most and what the soldier does about them. Why must camouflage be matched to the actual ground and kept fresh as conditions change?

Reflection (write a short paragraph): This lesson is honest that concealment is a tactical and training skill, and that in search and rescue, the RKA's most frequent field work, a soldier deliberately does the opposite and makes themselves as visible as possible. Think about how understanding why things are seen helps a soldier in both cases, hiding an observation post in one and being found on a hillside in the other. What does it tell you that the same knowledge serves both aims, and why must this skill be built and judged on the ground, including on airsoft milsim exercises, rather than only read about?

Summary

• A soldier must often operate without being seen, and concealment is a discipline built on understanding why the eye picks a soldier out of a landscape, not a matter of luck or kit alone. Things are seen because they contrast with their surroundings.
• The recognised reasons things are seen make a checklist: shape, shadow, silhouette, surface and shine, spacing, movement, colour and contrast, noise, and track or sign, with position and scale completing the longer list. Each is defeated in turn by breaking up the outline, using shadow without casting one, keeping a background and never a skyline, dulling and roughening surfaces, keeping irregular spacing, moving slowly and seldom, matching the surroundings in the duller tone, silencing kit and voice, and leaving little track. Movement most catches the eye.
• Camouflage and concealment is a method in four steps: site well so the ground does the concealing, break up and tone down shape and shine, use natural and artificial materials sparingly and keep them fresh, and hold track, light, and noise discipline. Siting is the controlling step; camouflage assists, but behaviour decides, and everything is judged against the actual ground.
• The method applies to a static position (site, conceal spoil, watch the cast shadow, control the track), to a soldier on the move (move by bounds, keep low and off the skyline, freeze when observed, use dead ground), and to kit (dull the shine, break up the shape, vary the spacing, silence it).
• Cover from view hides a soldier but stops no bullet; cover from fire is solid enough to stop rounds; the two must never be confused. Concealment is a tactical and training skill that a search-and-rescue soldier reverses to be found, and the whole of it is practised and certified in person on the ground, including on airsoft milsim exercises.

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