Army Camouflage That Failed to Hide Its Soldiers

https://www.warhistoryonline.com/history/army-camouflage-that-cost-more.html

by howard941 • 7 years ago

92 108 7 years ago

mikece• 7 years ago

While there's the easy joke about "army intelligence" it's also true that camouflage is hard to get right. Not only do you need to blend in/be non-obvious to the naked eye but also infrared, thermal, and other aspects. This is why JSOC has "Camouflage Scientists" for outfitting their Tier 1 units, sometimes on a mission-by-mission basis.

URL: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/27/photo_camo/

dsfyu404ed2• 7 years ago

While there's the easy joke about "army intelligence"

They did the best they could given that the only colors available were the crayons that nobody had eaten.

The Marines are picky eaters, that's why they got better camo.

all23• 7 years ago

The US Army got awful uniforms because someone (or multiple someones) were making money from the deal. Never-mind the only thing an ACU pattern blends in with is grandma's couch [0].

[0] https://www.funker530.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/ACU-cou...

elliekelly2• 7 years ago

I'm sure you're right that it's not an easy problem to solve but it also doesn't sound like they put a whole lot of effort in:

With these problems, the pattern should never have been chosen. However, there was no testing of the design before it was implemented. Research found that there were no studies done on the effectiveness of the camouflage in combat zones.

I'd be willing to bet their users could have quickly pointed them in the right direction if anyone had bothered to ask but the military has a strong preference for information to flow top-down rather than bottom-up.

dragonwriter3• 7 years ago

The actual problem is covered in the article: they planned something else, tested that, made a last minute change to adopt a pixelated pattern because the Marines did it (without the Army testing the particular choices made in adopting their specific pixelated pattern), and got a poor design.

ZanyProgrammer• 7 years ago

The ACU itself was an improvement over BDUs, despite the UCP being not good for anything other than hiding in gravel roads. For example, getting rid of the absurdity of boot shining and pressing the same uniform you’re supposed to wear in the field (and EVERYONE starched their BDUs to cardboard consistency for garrison use).

pnw_hazor3• 7 years ago

not everyone.

dsfyu404ed2• 7 years ago

You need to be pretty close to tell if a BDU is dirty or stained. That has advantages.

Wohlf• 7 years ago

Starching was truly idiotic, it turns your uniform in to kindling, makes it less breathable, and prevents it from absorbing bug repellents. Completely defeated the purpose of having a utility uniform, looking good is what the service uniform was for. We Marines got the same benefits with better camouflage by adopting the MCCUU. Making all our gear coyote was smart too, it takes on the color of the soil around you once you spend some time on the ground. Although that is true for all gear, it works particularly well with coyote.

gumby3• 7 years ago

I have always found starching clothes hilarious: cloth was soaked in starch to make it easier to cut and sew; you want to wash it out before use to make it comfortable.

The conceit of adding starch back in later to make something look new is already funny; to do it routinely is absurd.

Of course anyone who has been in the military of any country knows "absurd" is a pretty frequent factor.

dmh2000• 7 years ago

i was in the 70's era with baggy solid green fatigues and they you usually got one or two wears out of them before they needed to be starched again. They looked good for about the first hour after new starch and then terrible. Apparently there was no need for camo during the cold war.

that said, I did see that Avengers End Game got the 70's fatigues right. And also the hideous baseball cap we had to wear.

mcguire3• 7 years ago

"Apparently there was no need for camo during the cold war."

Well, you were going to be fighting in western Europe and living in NBCW suits all the time anyway....

zip1234• 7 years ago

I always liked the pictures of it blending into couches: https://havokjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/ACU-couc...

briandear• 7 years ago

I was at Benning in the circa 2004 era and in my unit, we expressly forbid starching. However, that was definitely not true for many other units.

jcranmer3• 7 years ago

Of course, there is the idiocy of using Velcro for field uniforms. Most of those patches aren't going to get swapped out all that often.

rurp• 7 years ago

I heard from a military friend that the Velcro was useful for being able to discard patches in case it looked like they might be captured, so as to deny information to the enemy.

I'm skeptical that there's much utility there, but maybe someone better informed than me can chime in.

umvi• 7 years ago

Most military personnel are working in offices anyway, and this new uniform probably saved $5B worth of repetitive uniform maintenance in man-hours (ironing, shining, etc).

I would hope spec-ops in the field aren't just wearing standard issue ACUs but rather are highly adapted to the specific terrain they are working in.

C1sc0cat2• 7 years ago

I suspect that for on base there was a considerable about of ironing and shining or does the USA not go in for bulling boots.

ianhawes• 7 years ago

IIRC most JSOC operators wear MultiCam, which as the article pointed out, is a Crye Precision proprietary blend.

koala_man2• 7 years ago

The pop-up video ads after every single paragraph effectively camouflaged the contents for me...

everdev4• 7 years ago

Try an ad blocker:

https://github.com/ghostery/ghostery-extension

koala_man2• 7 years ago

What are my options on Android? Switching browsers and side loaded apks?

Larrikin• 7 years ago

I prefer Ad Nauseum since it effectively generates garbage data on the ad platforms while giving the content creators the clicks they want.

https://adnauseam.io/

saagarjha• 7 years ago

Ghostery isn't great: it sends a lot of analytics data back and injects its own ads.

encypruon2• 7 years ago

This article got me thinking. Would it make sense to train a GAN to generate camouflage? With the generator generating textures for the objects you want to hide and the discriminator trying to spot them in scenes rendered with a differentiable renderer like "neural renderer" [1]? The 2D-to-3D style transfer examples almost look like camouflage already.

[1] http://hiroharu-kato.com/projects_en/neural_renderer.html

all23• 7 years ago

How good would this be for a 'general' solution to the problem?

Specifically, a good uniform must function across a wide variety of environments; see the USMC uniforms for a good example.

If we had 'active' camouflage that was updated on the fly, this might make some sense?

arethuza2• 7 years ago

You do get what are effectively very large inkjet printers that can print patterns on materials - might be easier to "print" custom camouflage for a particular environment?

encypruon2• 7 years ago

Asked the other way around: Why should it result in less 'general' solutions compared to other methods?

Now that I thought about it some more, building a generator might be problematic because unless you want to hide toroids, there wont be a continuous mapping with reasonable amounts of distortion from the surface of the object in question to the 2D plane. That would mean that CNNs can't really be used.

logfromblammo4• 7 years ago

You can buy civilian camouflage that takes actual photographs from the area you will be hunting in, replaces a range of greens in it with hunter's orange, and prints it on field-appropriate clothing. As long as you launder it correctly (no UV whiteners), it is near-perfect camouflage versus dichromat prey animals, while still standing out to the trichromat animals [with the guns].

If you skip the green-to-orange replacement step, it's already great military camouflage for the exact spot shown in the source photograph. So if you trained a GAN on many photographs from the same area, I imagine it could make camouflage that functions like a printable ghillie suit.

Then you could also take the output images, wrap them around a human model, pose the model randomly in front of a real terrain background, and penalize any camouflage image that cannot prevent an object classifier from detecting the camouflaged human model, in any pose, in front of any background image in the terrain corpus.

Though I'd expect that the more variety you have in the terrain image corpus, the less effective the camouflage is against the object classifier.

yazan94• 7 years ago

That is super interesting! Could you share the app/website for such a service?

wongarsu• 7 years ago

I guess that should work. You could generate universal camo that way if you run the discriminator multiple times each round on the camouflage rendered on soldiers in different environments and either average the discriminator results (to get camo that's good on average) or pick the one from the environment where the discriminator performed best (to get camo that's never terrible). It might be interesting to see which of those two choices performs better.

Edit: on second thought, the maximum version is continious but not differentiable, so you would want the version taking averages.

larrik• 7 years ago

it was decided that the design should work in all terrains to be more cost-effective.

I'm not sure they know what "camouflage" means, because that sounds like it should be impossible.

elliekelly2• 7 years ago

I also to have to wonder about the cost difference in dollars of specialized camouflage vs all terrain. Saving (what I would I guess is) at most a few dollars per uniform in production is hardly justified when the trade-off is a risk to human life.

C1sc0cat2• 7 years ago

Especially when compared to the cost of a full set of body armour

chrisseaton4• 7 years ago

Saving (what I would I guess is) at most a few dollars per uniform

It really doesn't make a material difference to your point, but just to note that it isn't just a few dollars per uniform. A soldier's webbing, bergen and day sacks (all their battle load carrying equipment) is highly personalised, takes a lot of time to break-in, and takes up a lot of space. Maintaining three or four sets of that in different patterns for different environments would be a huge hassle.

A single pattern effective almost everywhere makes more sense than in just simple money.

EpicEng3• 7 years ago

Play carriers, mag pouches, and all other wearables tend to match.

craftinator2• 7 years ago

You don't know all that much about the US military I'm guessing? I've attended mission planning sessions that included the net cost of replacement for warfighters lost in regards to cost minimization. The fact is, people will die at times (due to both training and combat), and they have to factor that in to their budget. It's cold and calculating, which is EXACTLY what our military does. It makes it a great military, but a very bad employer.

jasonwatkinspdx• 7 years ago

The cynical answer is they didn't care because it was a good contract to throw to friendly companies.

The one that gets me is how the Navy insisted on getting a digital pattern too. What's the point of wearing cammo on a freaking giant ship?!

jschwartzi• 7 years ago

The navy has land troops as well.

pbhjpbhj• 7 years ago

What's the point of wearing cammo on a freaking giant ship?! //

Harder to analyse crew numbers from satellite or aerial imagery?

SaintGhurka• 7 years ago

Grease stains don't show so badly.

dogsgobork• 7 years ago

Make you harder to see if you fall overboard.

dragonwriter3• 7 years ago

What's the point of wearing cammo on a freaking giant ship?!

Navy personnel don't serve exclusively on ships, and people on the decks of ships can be individual targets when the ship is within smallarms range of land or another vessel.

jcranmer3• 7 years ago

From what I've heard, the Navy's camo pattern does a really good job of hiding the various kinds of dirt and grime you get from being in a manual labor job, especially compared to the older uniforms.

EpicEng3• 7 years ago

My wife was in the Navy, served a year I'm Iraq outside Baghdad. The Navy doesn't exclusively operate on ships.

jimnotgym• 7 years ago

Because Marines are in the Navy

chrisseaton4• 7 years ago

The new Multicam, MTP, and equivalents, do genuinely seem to be pretty good in all terrains. It's extraordinary. I think it's party because it's lighter so it picks up local dust or mud and adapts. Artic is probably the only exception - doesn't work well there so people were a white overlayer. But you need layers anyway in the artic so it's fine.

jcranmer3• 7 years ago

For a long time, I could see how the UCP pattern could be the "best" overall, mostly on the basis of being horrible nowhere. (It's actually pretty decent in the arid/semi-arid environments where there's minimal greenery--basically Iraq/Afghanistan, where it's probably better than the old desert camo). But the UCP wasn't even the best universal pattern in its original tests: the Scorpion pattern (which eventually became Multicam) was better on a universal basis.

So... kickbacks were probably involved in the original UCP contract.

not-corrupt• 7 years ago

I remember when it came out, and I sincerely doubt that there were bribes to get this design through.

It was just a sign of the times. Knowing the military for what it is, there’s just this incapacity to parse what’s appealing, and a push to grab the interest of young recruits. It’s pretty obvious that the digital pixel pattern fed into any marketing campaign involving buzzwordy digital cyber information superhighway bullshit, and that gave it the advantage.

It definitely felt like the kind of groupthink decision that falls out of focus groups. Just boring enough to not completely suck, but still reek obvious pandering to the core of a particular target audience.

The fundamental question being:

  Would a high school student 
  be caught dead in this?

Which is to say, what can we ask recruiters to wear in public school gymnasiums and auditoriums that will provide an opening so they feel like they’ll be able to connect and sell to the kind of kid that we can get to sign up? Digital, pixels, information technology, cybercommand. Gentlemen, take a look at the future.

rwj• 7 years ago

Hanlon's razor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor)

michaelcampbell• 7 years ago

work in all terrains

What they get is "works in no terrain equally badly".

ianbicking• 7 years ago

"[...] deployed troops were given desert camouflage. While this concealed the soldier, their additional equipment made them more noticeable as it was darker than the camouflage."

My reading is that they found camouflage clothing isn't sufficient, and they wanted a pattern that could be applied to all equipment, which is where the cost of multiple patterns would go up.

Havoc• 7 years ago

I read that too and my first reaction was thinking of the "oh no it's retarded" meme

Camouflage 101 is adapt to surroundings. That by definition excludes one solution for all scenarios.

presidentender• 7 years ago

UCP looked great as the background of recruiting ads. That was its greatest utility until people realized how stupid it was in practice.

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 7 years ago

I bet after fiascos such as this, if we had some of the contractors and their Pentagon collaborators executed for treason for endangering our soldiers, the situation with procurement would rapidly improve.

panzagl• 7 years ago

If by 'rapidly improve' you mean 'become even more mired in regulation, over-analysis and responsibility-shedding behavior' then sure, I guess.

Rebelgecko• 7 years ago

If we executed every developer that committed code that introduced new bugs, do you think software quality would be better or worse in the long run? Would there be any tradeoffs?

ben509• 7 years ago

Fucking up is not treason, though. But demotions and loss of benefits would dispell the air of untouchability and lack of accountability that pervades the military bureaucracy.

pnw_hazor3• 7 years ago

The article doesn't mention that USMC included their logo in their new and effective camo so other services couldn't/wouldn't use it.

Otherwise, the Army could have used the same patterns developed by the Marine Corp.

mi100hael• 7 years ago

UCP camo blends in well in some areas... https://i.redd.it/68lxwxjrbe001.jpg

pmarreck• 7 years ago

Why is using United States citizens as live test subjects with their lives at stake, "cost-effective"?

I often complain about a lack of test coverage in code, but I cannot fathom how testing was COMPLETELY skipped on a $5 BILLION dollar project that directly impacts lives.

Disclaimer: 4 year USAF veteran

MisterTea• 7 years ago

I called it internet camo and told my friends who were in the military at the time that the USA was preparing to invade cyberspace.

chriselles• 7 years ago

UCP/ACU is the definition of a horrible compromise.

The only environment where it possesses some applicability is complex urban terrain.

We face exactly the same problem in NZ with our MCU pattern.

Jack of all trade, master of none.

Seeing US ACP/ACU and NZ MCU in forestry/jungle, especially in low light, is like seeing a person wearing a white sheet over their head. Ineffective.

Multicam is the most flexible cam pattern I’ve seen as a one size fits all.

US Marine Corps’ and Canadian Army’s two types(each) of digital cam for desert and temperate climates are pretty effective.

Blue navy camouflage I’ve seen worn by US and Australian Navy personnel make no sense.

You don’t want to be camouflaged if you’re ships crew, you want to be seen/found. Should be hi-viz.

huffmsa• 7 years ago

Military dumps billions into magic multirole capability. It falls and billions need to be dumped into it's single function replacements

You can almost replace UCP with F-35 and have an accurate article.

jsiepkes• 7 years ago

So me andere my friends went airsofting ons time, just for fun. Everyone got issued woodland camouflage and I got the "cool" US camouflage (ie. The camouflage of the article). Wooohooo! ....or so I thought.

The refs came to me mid game and told me to get a normal woodland camouflage because everyone could see me from a mile away...

stvswn• 7 years ago

I wore this everyday for 5 years, including in Iraq, and I always felt that it was horrible at actually camoflauging anything. One main reason was that it would get brighter and brighter over time, as the colors tended to fade -- a well worn was incredbily light-looking that Soldiers would pop out at you against a darker background. We were told eventually that you can't use regular detergent on it because it has brighteners, that you should use Woolite. It was also supposed to be a benefit to have velcro for nametapes, rank, and unit insignia so that soldiers didn't need to pay to get things sewn on, but it made for very noisy and inconvenient examples of people sticking to each other in close quarters.

mimixco• 7 years ago

An episode of Shark Tank recently featured a camo design made out of real photographs of natural backgrounds. Does the military not know about this option?

dingaling• 7 years ago

Only a small percentage of camouflaged deployments are about blending in with the background; observation, snipers and static roles like that.

Infantry and vehicles move too much to make background-matching practical, so the primary purpose of their camouflage is to break up identifiable outlines.

Army Camouflage That Failed to Hide Its Soldiers

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