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Zebra Dazzle

Dazzle camouflage, also known as razzle dazzle (in the U.S.) or dazzle painting, is a family of ship camouflage that was used extensively in World War I, and to a lesser extent in World War II and afterwards.The British zoologist John Graham Kerr proposed the application of camouflage to British warships in the First World War, outlining what he believed to be the applicable principle, disruptive camouflage, in a letter to Winston Churchill in 1914 explaining the goal was to confuse, not to conceal, by disrupting a ship's outline. Kerr compared the effect to that created by the patterns on a series of land animals, the giraffe, zebra and jaguar. Taking up the zebra example, Kerr proposed that the vertical lines of ships' masts be disrupted with irregular white bands. Hiding these would make ships less conspicuous, and would "greatly increase the difficulty of accurate range finding".