A Russian Soldier Dressed As A Penguin Was Doing A Pretty Good Job Avoiding Thermal Drones
Desperate to hide from heat-sensing drones, Russian troops are wearing some pretty silly thermal camouflage
Heat-sensing thermal drones are proliferating all along the winter front line
To avoid detection, Russian troops are wearing any thermal camouflage they can afford
Experimenting with toilet tents, emergency blankets, hunting ponchos and other products, troops are learning that even the silliest thermal camo is better than no camo
That wasn’t a giant penguin marching across the treeless no-man’s-land in broad daylight somewhere along the 1,100-km front line in Ukraine in a recent video posted by a drone team working with Ukraine’s airborne forces. Nor was it a Russian soldier dressed as a penguin, even though it sure looked like it.
No, it was apparently a Russian soldier wearing a $75 thermal poncho, the kind that campers or hunters might wear to stay warm while outside in the harsh winter.
Made of heat-trapping fabric often embedded with metal filaments, thermal ponchos can trap almost all of a wearer’s body heat. That not only keeps them warm, it also masks their infrared signature as seen from the outside. To a drone equipped with a thermal camera, a thermally camouflaged soldier should be indistinguishable from the surrounding snowy landscape.
The poncho didn’t save that unfortunate Russian, however. An explosive first-person-view drone swooped in and graphically killed the Russian. But that doesn’t mean the poncho didn’t work. The same video that depicted the soldier’s fatal droning also included a brief shot from an attacking drone’s point of view.
