U.S. Army tests smoke screen built to blind enemy radar

The U.S. Army has developed a smoke screen that hides soldiers and vehicles from enemy radar as well as from enemy eyes. The Millimeter Wave Screening Obscuration Module releases a cloud of coated fibers into the air, and that cloud blurs the radar signature of everything behind it. Engineers at the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Chemical Biological Center (DEVCOM CBC) at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, demonstrated the module in live field trials in August. The center then handed it to the Army office that will test it further and prepare it for fielding.

Battlefield smoke has worked the same way for generations: it blocks what the enemy can see. The Army’s Cold War-era generators, such as the M56 Coyote and the vehicle-mounted M58 Wolf, were built to defeat the human eye, optical rangefinders and early infrared sights. Those screens do almost nothing against millimeter-wave radar, the type used in many modern fire-control radars and missile seekers. A platoon hidden in a dense cloud of conventional smoke can still show up clearly on an enemy radar screen.

“Different sensors are designed to operate across distinct regions of the electromagnetic spectrum,” said Dr. Jill Harland, a research scientist at DEVCOM CBC.

Visible-light cameras work on extremely short wavelengths, while thermal imagers and radars operate on progressively longer ones. Particles that block a camera are simply too small to interfere with a radar beam, so the center’s scientists had to rebuild the obscurant around the radar band itself. Their answer is about 30 pounds (13.6 kg) of specially coated fibers, which a portable device releases into the air, where they hang like thousands of tiny shields and scatter the incoming radar energy.

The Millimeter Wave SOM deploys thousands of carbon fibers into the air to suppress radar capabilities. Photo by Imani Games

Every vehicle, weapon or soldier gives a radar a distinct signature, a numerical value the radar uses to detect and identify the target. During the August trials, the team set up several targets, watched them on radar and then released the fiber cloud around them to measure how quickly the cloud formed and how far the signatures dropped.

“We used radar to observe the cloud formation and show the degradation of the radar signatures of each of those targets,” said Michael Smith, a mechanical engineer at DEVCOM CBC. “As the cloud formed, the signature dropped and we got our obscuration that way.”

Smith said the moment the team watched those signatures fade on the radar screens during live dissemination was a defining one for the developers.

“Our objective is to buy Soldiers critical time on the battlefield, improving survivability directly accomplishes our core mission,” said Smith.

The radar module comes from the same team at the center’s Smoke and Target Defeat Branch that developed the M75 Screening Obscuration Module. That suitcase-sized smoke generator can be run by one soldier, and the Army has tested it at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah since 2018 as the successor to the Coyote. In November 2025, the center mounted an M75 on an unmanned ground vehicle at Aberdeen to conceal soldiers during a simulated wet gap crossing. At the time, the center said the next generation would add infrared and radar obscurants, and the millimeter-wave module is that radar piece now leaving the lab.

The Army is also looking further ahead. In January, Army Contracting Command at Aberdeen Proving Ground asked industry for ideas on a multispectral version of the module, one infantryman could carry and that would screen troops and combat vehicles from ultraviolet, visible, infrared and radar sensors at the same time. Its stated goal is a cloud that forms within 95 seconds, stretches 204 m (670 feet) long and 12 m (40 feet) high, and holds for 12 minutes.

The Millimeter Wave module now moves to the Portfolio Management Executive for Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Defense, which will run the additional testing required before the system is issued to Army units.