Why are these military jets painted pink? Is this another example of the military “gone woke”? Well, no. In fact, these unusual paint jobs helped the Allies defeat the Axis powers during World War II, specifically on the North African front. The whole idea behind a pink paint job is simple: camouflage. When you think of camouflage, you might picture something like this (though this one looks cool but isn’t useful)
or maybe like this.
So why pink?
Let’s take a trip back to World War II. These pink vehicles originated with the British Long Range Desert Group (LRDG), deployed against the Axis forces in North Africa. Experts in desert warfare, they discovered something astonishing: pink paint provided effective camouflage in the desert under certain conditions.
There are conflicting stories about how this discovery came about. One version suggests that a British aircraft went missing, and during the search, teams found it nearly invisible because the desert sands had stripped most of its paint, revealing a pink undercoat that blended with the surroundings. Another version claims that an airbase ran out of regular paint and had to use the pink undercoat on ground vehicles, which they quickly realized made them harder to detect.
Either way, the reason pink works is simple: in the desert, warm colors of sunlight scatter more easily due to environmental conditions, giving the horizon warm hues, from orange to pink. As a result, pink blends into these settings, especially at dawn and dusk.
The first vehicles to deliberately use this color scheme were from the British LRDG and the SAS, whose pink-painted vehicles became known as “Pink Panthers.” This color scheme later extended to aircraft like the Spitfire and P-40. Pink camouflage even made a brief comeback in the 1980s.
