U.S. Army Camouflage Improvement Explained (2013)
hyperstealth.com
hyperstealth.com
I find it bizarre that this is all done by private companies, competing in public competitions, with royalties to be paid for the chosen design. And I'm quite surprised that some designs were found wanting because they don't work under IR (e.g. the soldier shines against the background). That sounds like they're using the wrong dyes; surely a decent design methodology would lead to such problems being remedied by incremental improvement?
> Now we can address the Micropattern - digital pixels. These are required to add background noise and texture matching with the background and this is designed to fool with the focal area of the eye - when you are looking directly at or close to the target to make it more difficult to recognize what you are looking at.
As jcranmer says, there's more details on the reasons it works somewhere down in this page, https://www.hyperstealth.com/US4CES-ALPHA/index.html
In combat, camouflage is really the VERY last line of defense possible, and a fairly weak one at that. If the difference between staying alive and being dead is the pattern of your clothing, a lot of things have already gone seriously wrong and your chances of survival are not great.
In the grand scheme of things, camo relatively high-hanging fruit. Money and time have mostly been spent on building superior weapons, armor, and of course training. Camo is a very small optimization in comparison and when the Army and Air Force decided to change up their BDU patterns, it was viewed by me and my fellow service members as largely a public image stunt. ("Look everyone, we're modern!")
Edit: to be clear, I'm only referring to uniforms... snipers and such use camouflage netting for example that is tailored to their exact location and can be extremely effective at "hiding in plain sight."
It's very 'low hanging fruit'. It's ridiculous that that a 20 Trillion dollar Army has 'camouflage' that is very clearly crap next to better camo.
These tests could have literally been run in a day, even back in the 1950s.
Some soldiers, some screens, a few cameras, some changes in lighting and it would have been evident.
Moreover, it's reasonable to be suspect in whether an organization that can't handle such a basic R&D task is going to be able to handle the more complicated things.
The first is that the criteria that appears to have been most important was performance in near-IR (i.e., night vision). Humans can't see in NIR themselves, so it's not readily apparent that the UCP is actually pretty good camo in NIR conditions. It's pretty atrocious in visible light, though.
The second is the requirement that the camo pattern be good in all environments. And "standard" woodland patterns to be utterly horrendous in sandy desert environments, while desert patterns do similarly bad in woodland environments. And you can see how something like the UCP might score well--while it's not a good camo pattern for any visible pattern, it sticks out less than a standard woodland in desert or vice versa. Of course, there were other patterns at that time that performed strictly better than UCP in all environments (save NIR).
The main kicker, though, is that the winning pattern seems to have been constructed out of elements of all the participating patterns... with no follow-up work done to make sure that the resulting combination actually worked. As you say, this is where some tests would have saved an awful lot of embarrassment, and my suspicion is these tests were not run for either time or money reasons. (And yes, this is a false economy here, but it's one that I can really believe bureaucracies pursuing).
There is historical precedence for this kind of short-sightedness however: the Mark 14 Torpedo, the main torpedo the US used in WW2. Which didn't work, and the Navy's Board of Ordnance took a couple years (and ultimately an unsanctioned live-fire test demonstrating that it didn't work) to be convinced that they actually didn't work rather than the submariners being packs of incompetent morons.
The way rifles work with recoils driving the expulsion of a shell after firing and using that force to load the next round to chamber (the famous AK47 design)
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Would there be a method of attaching a compressed water bottle with valve with a donut nozzle with vents out at angles to the optimal suppression of the muzzle flash.
The idea being that, like a paintball gun, the machine's trigger pull, also has a tangential trig that pulls an outburst a micro second from the rifle, in a ring mist of water/(some more expensive, toxic military fire-suppressant (ironic) to reduce the muzzle flash on shot...
May it reduce the muzzle flare? or is it too weak? Should it launch behind muzzle, after muzzle?
The bullet down the barrel triggers the valve when it hits 50% of barrel length. Once that induction occurs, it triggers the valve, and the flame suppressant cloud is spit out micro seconds prior to bullet breach...
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I am convinced that we can use Davincis micro fluidics... turbulence drawings.
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So let talk about next gen firing
The barrel release could be routed to drive the exhaust through channels which drive micro-turbine motors that slurp back through the external of barrel and infuse with water.
Working on this in Solid
With all the urban combat, there's a push toward shorter and maneuverable. In something short like the 10.5" M4A1 CQBR, flash becomes a much bigger problem (especially in dark rooms where it can be positively blinding to the shooter).
A suppressor helps with this issue, but it also starts adding back length to the gun (somewhat defeating the purpose).
300 blackout supposedly helps the problem (I've never shot it from a SBR) and also has better short-range (esp subsonic) ballistics compared to 5.56, but it too has muzzle flash.
The newly selected Army XM5 rifle and cartridge were designed for super-high pressures and achieving high speeds in a short barrel likely causing even more muzzle flash. Thankfully, this rifle is going to be suppressed for everyone by default. Unfortunately, it's super heavy (and that's without the super-heavy optics), has less ammo per magazine, and despite the goal, is still going to be blocked by higher-level body armor, and is still 36" in a SBR configuration (for comparison, the Israeli CTAR-21 is 30% shorter at just 25" providing rifle firepower in a SMG package).
Separately, using the force of the round (either via a gas tube or via direct rearward motion) to propel the action of the firearm isn’t really an AK47 thing, it’s common to all semi automatic rifles and predates the AK47 by quite a while.
"propel the action of the firearm isn’t really an AK47 thing, it’s common to all semi automatic rifles and predates the AK47 by quite a while. "
Kalashnikov invented the easiest way to manufacture this behavior... This is the reason its the most heinous of weapons.
I am talking about something different. And thats OK.
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I am talking about a specific method of funneling muzzle output to funnel through your suppression...
I am talkingabout a hydro-enahnaced flash press which does a certain thing. Please talk about what that certain thing is.
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The most environmentally way to reduce muzzle flash. Cloud of water vapor as an expulsion of the muzzle such that it interacts with the blast easily enough to expel the right amount of water vapor through the expulsion chamber as the expression continues through the valve, (barrel) and its in-flame-ant mitigated by the entrenchment water vapor cloud to expel the munition, but still keep other perams in check?
(pdf) heading 9: https://assets.surefire.com/uploads/2019/07/SF-BSD-manuals.p...
I’ll skip over lubed suppressor concept as I don’t know more than Google tells us :p
(We'll see how widely the new system and everything actually gets deployed but it was an important part of the whole program at least)
> In addition to the flash suppression, the end can quickly cut barbed wire by pushing the muzzle onto a strand of wire and firing a round.
What an interesting feature!
The reason:
Davinciy was cabable of documenting the vortices of variues pulses of fluidicsbut the vortices expecticed creates the fluid dynamics
Hopw the fuck in 400 years have these guys come NOT up with better?
I dont trust a single structural eng.
Adding water to the equation? Rust, mud, weight, boiling ... you would need some radical improvements to justify such added complexity.
I remember reading about importance of a newfangled barrel free-floating construction on carbines, soon after the Afghan war started. The examples used at that time were kludgy top-rail secured things supposedly used by mysterious SEALs guys. Later I saw Crane stock for the pair of chemical lights.
Today, those are slim M-LOK with rail on top and secured to the barrel nut, HEL-STARs, and MOE SL stocks. Oh and Russian Army standard infantry rifles are now cheap AKs with f*’ng buffer tubes, and G36 now has short aluminum mounts to avoid floppy carrying handle issues(“polymer degradation” fiasco).
What caused all those changes were clearly the wars.
Does everyone on a battlefield have thermal imaging? Even if there's a technology X that can defeat Y, if X can't be deployed widely, then X can still be useful.
In Ukraine, it's one of the things that are often crowdfunded by either side, along with NVDs and drones. Of course, when they are in short supply, they usually go to the units that can use the most effectively, such as recon & sabotage groups (диверсионно-разведывательная группа; not sure what's the proper English term for that, but it's basically guys who work behind enemy lines). So even if not everybody has them, the guys who are the most likely to mess you up probably do.
The most famous from the USA are Navy Seals, followed by Army Rangers, but every branch of the military has its own special forces. And other countries militaries do as well.
The one whose official remit probably looks most like the group that you describe are Air Force Special Reconnaissance (SR). It is their mission to deploy deep behind enemy lines, figure out enemy operations, and work with other units in any area of the military to take out high value targets. (For example by calling in air strikes or artillery.)
A sniper lies prone for a long time, with really heavy cammo (think netting, foliage, etc). Staying put is a big deal.
Regular soldiers constantly move about, which means their cammo has to be more practical and lightweight, and is also less effective due to said movement.
Current military member here. It is also the first line of defense against fratricide. It means your friends can tell you from the not-friends. A distinct pattern, unique to your organization, is what stops aircraft from dropping on you. So as current patterns trickle out into private hands, eventually every military organization needs to update its look.
Doesn't it go: 'don't be seen, if you're seen don't be acquired, if you're acquired don't be hit, if you're hit don't be penetrated, if you're penetrated don't be killed'? Camouflage ('don't be seen') is the first layer on the onion, not the last!
Think - positioning rather than magic fabric. That's my interpretation anyway.
Your last line of defence is not being killed if you've been penetrated - your medical kit!
Speaking of, is traditional garb at all effective from a tactical standpoint?
Thankfully rationality eventually prevailed, but not before wasting 100's of millions, a portion of which was out of pocket for sailors.
Waffen-SS used dotted camouflage in the late 1930s (Platanenmuster), so depending on what you mean by “earlier” the idea of camouflage without “large blobs” isn't that modern.
The Erbsenmuster from 1944 is an even better example of this type of camouflage.
Plus, like another commenter said camouflage is a last to second to last line of defense. Most units aren't moving stealthily in close proximity to their enemy and those that do adopt better camouflage techniques like ghillie suits or using terrain to hide while staying still (eg: waiting to ambush another group).
I do think that the Finnish M05 woodland camo [1] is one of the best in the world =)
Finland also has some interesting doctrine in anti-tank which leads to fun images like [0] of people absolutely COVERED in anti-tank mines or launchers. Part of being next to a much larger country I guess.
[0] https://twitter.com/jmkorhonen/status/1504016338204905474
These particular photos look like comic relief.
Those yellow anti-tank mines are 10 kg each, which means that dude would be hauling at least 160 kg = 353 lbs extra weight. Doable perhaps but definitely not used in combat.
Max loadout is more like 4 of those anti-tank mines hanging off your gear and carrying 4 in your hands, and that will guaranteed wipe you out. Hauling 4 total any longer distance is the usual amount.
Max loadout of the APILAS anti-tank rocket launcher thing is usually two on your back, and that'll practically immobilize you in Finnish terrain.
You can scale invariance and fractals with squares, triangles, or whatever shape you want.
From the biological perspective, the same phenomenon should happen with dots or triangular shapes
If you used dots you have irregular spaces between them. This may or may not be a good thing, but it is certainly going to be different to the dots themselves.
Hexagons could work though.
But judging by the linked site and some Googling, I'm going to say no one knows for sure because no one has tested it.
More modern (and expensive) patterns like Multicam or A-TACS do the same thing without pixels, e.g.: https://www.camopedia.org/index.php/File:Multicam.jpg
I have never seen non-printed camo patterns. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flecktarn is printed too.
It does sound as if there's not much methodology in this business, beyond empirical testing. Like, is there a science of 'camouflagology'? [oops, when inventing words, never mix latin and greek]
It just seems like it's basically lore, gathered from talking to fgillies and field experience, augmented by tests (which may be omitted, or the results ignored). Anyway, it might be fun to take a minor in camouflagology.
I don't know if there's a more specific term or not, but camouflage is studied (along with other things) under the general subject of "Crypsis".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypsis
Note that this seems to be more particularly about natural forms of camouflage / etc., as opposed to military camouflage used by humans. But the two areas are clearly related.
Regardless of what you call it, it does appear that there is some science that goes into at least some aspects of this. See, for example:
https://phys.org/news/2021-01-camouflage-arbitrary-environme...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flecktarn
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Uniforme_militar,_ej%C3%A...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Infantry_Brigade#/media...
There the goal is less to avoid detection and more to make it hard to determine direction/orientation.
V2 rockets used in anger all used "ordinary" camouflage to hide their location prior to launch.
With no knowledge what so ever my gut reaction is to simply point to nature. Leaves get eaten/bitten/broken/ripped, a branch might be in front of another adding depth with similar patterns, rocks and sand in a desert can vary sharply at different focal depths, urban environments can have dozens of materials in use along with random detritus and objects at various focal depths.
Pixilation was probably a logical step towards recreating these varied environments. Look at a ghillie suit that has leaves incorporated, they'll have a pixilated appearance - example: https://static5.gunfire.com/eng_pl_Ghillie-Suit-camouflage-s...
Actually, that's what's bugging me most about this camo made from regular square blocks: it looks really easy for a recogniser to spot. No AI <spit>, an old-fashioned neural network would be enough to recognise edges, and then spot squares on a grid.
[Edit] Yeah, I get that your average stag deer doesn't have access to thermal imaging and neural networks. But this is military camo, not deerstalking camo.
The average grunt doesn't have access to thermal imaging or neural networks either, they might have a crappy Vietnam-era flashlight, their weapon system, and a reasonable compromise between number of rounds and weight as spare mags. Especially when that grunt is a "third world" fighter. Pixelated camo like ARPAT saw the bulk of its current use in Afghanistan and Iraq where the most sophisticated thing the enemy might have is a pair of binoculars and a cellphone.
The pixilation, to the human eye, is much more natural than large splotches of a few colors because terrain/vegetation/buildings in natural light have all sorts of depth and shadow variation, the pixilation is much harder to pick out than fairly large blotches of random color.
The purpose was to disrupt primitive Soviet-era night vision. The grid pattern was intended to interfere with the generated grid used by these devices for targeting.
Even after plenty of research I could find no cases of this pattern ever disrupting anything. By the early 90’s, night vision technology had progressed greatly and this green grid was completely ineffective. There is even some anecdotal evidence it made detection easier!
https://guide.sportsmansguide.com/gulf-war-desert-night-camo...
> After six years in the fleet and some controversy, the blue-and-gray cammies could be headed for Davy Jones' seabag.
https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2016/04/23/the-navy...
Not everything the military does is about effectiveness. Sometimes senior NCOs want the enlisted to "look military", not just be effective.
Here's another example: why is the military PT (physical training) test varied by sex and age? If it was only about combat effectiveness, presumably there'd be 1 set of values that determine if someone had sufficient fitness relative to the rigors of combat (or whatever their job requires).
This makes variations by age and sex concessions to that goal, rather than design elements.
Meanwhile the Army would sometimes retain people incapable of passing the old age and gender standard. As an extreme example people with missing limbs could be retained.
Imagine the JavaScript cool kid mindset but with guns.
A more terrifying sentence than this has rarely been written.
.... the USans will also come back in 20 years to make a film about how invading your country and blowing you into a pink mist in front of your parents made their solders feel sad.
In fact, it's not just their own camouflage pattern, the ABU actually had a distinctive blouse and pants that are different from the BDU that came before, or the ACU that the Army had adopted. Then they took the sage-green fleece from ECWCS Gen III (what the Army was wearing), and added the APECS Goretex parka that the Marine Corps was wearing, only in the ABU tiger-stripe rather than MARPAT.
Most of the actual battlefield airmen (i.e. the people who might reasonably expect to find themselves in combat conditions where camouflage could help like combat controller, TACP, PJ) didn't wear it anyway.
As pointed out elsewhere, this is very largely about esprit-de-corps in the context of a military organization, even if your job is actually avionics maintenance or personnel.
It does seem like a huge waste for all the services to have their own completely distinctive utility uniforms though - the pendulum is swinging back the other way now with the Army, Air Force and Space Force all back in the redesigned ACU/OCP with stitching color (black/spice-brown/blue) as the service-distinctive element.
Then again, maybe those old styles only looked good when they were made with nice materials, like wool and heavy waxed canvas, and would look bad with cheap modern synthetics.
Simple, effective, dare I say elegant.
With regards to looking good, I don't think it's necessarily that the look good with appropriate materials, but more that they look good only when they are properly starched and the like to maintain crisp lines.
This seems good in some situations and very bad in others?
I think you'll find they're pretty appealing to a lot of the people who want to be in the military.
The reality? Some politician or admiral wanted to leave their mark.
ftfy
So we not only have to worry about invisible spectra, but some filters on visible light may reveal the target as well.
I have lots of other stories about the wierd things color blind people see and don't see. (My sisters are color blind, none of my family sees colors exactly the same, makes for some weird situations)
Just a fun aside: when Canada invaded Afghanistan, there was a lack of the arid variant of CADPAT. It left soldiers to land in the brown and tan desert wearing vivid green camouflage designed for summer in the Canadian rain forests.
>I find it bizarre that this is all done by private companies, competing in public competitions, with royalties to be paid for the chosen design. And I'm quite surprised that some designs were found wanting because they don't work under IR (e.g. the soldier shines against the background). That sounds like they're using the wrong dyes; surely a decent design methodology would lead to such problems being remedied by incremental improvement?
It was fixed AFAIK. IIRC issued CADPAT clothing were controlled items in 2000's because they had the the treatments designed to work against near infrared. Civilian CADPAT lacked those treatments so companies like Tru Spec[1] could sell it on the open market. There were other teething issues I am aware of; the dyes bleeding into splotches instead of the digital pattern as called for, as well as fading issues after laundering. Fixed of course but it took some iterations.
[1] I just double checked, Tru Spec never sold it. There were some smaller outfits in Canada that produced CADPAT available on the civilian market for short time; Drop Zone Tactical out of Edmonton for sure was one. Rumor mill is that it was material made by Consoltex under military contract that failed to meet the military's specifications and sold off to licensed DND manufactures to recoup costs.
This is a (kinda funny) plotline in Generation Kill.
Edit: looks like the wore the forest green stuff to Afghanistan. The only articles I can find suggests they did it on purpose, to stand out for peace keeping reasons, but that could easily be damage control. Anyone know the real story? GP suggests they just didn't have an arid design at the time (which I would believe).
For years afterwards whenever there was a discussion about equipment and supporting troops, it was brought up as an argument in favour of more purchases.
(1) https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canadian-troops-not-green-wit... https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jan-19-mn-23667...
That reminds me of a story I heard about the "chocolate chip" US desert camo used in Desert Storm in 1991. Basically, the US designed their "desert camo to be effective in the desert of the American Southwest. But we ended up actually fighting in the Iraq/Saudi/Kuwaiti border region instead of the American Southwest, and it turns out that the deserts are different enough that the camo was not particularly effective.
That reminds me of the times we chose to wear snow pants but not jackets, because there was snow on the ground but not much elsewhere.
- Shape
- Shine
- Shadow
- Speed
- Surface
- Silhouette
- Spacing
- Smell
- Sound
(For what it's worth, the Multicam pattern, which is slightly modified to the OCP pattern now in use by the US Army/Air Force, manages to do a better job than the UCP pattern at actually being universal camo, and it's not even the best of the tests.)
The NIR requirements means you can almost see how the decision might be justifiable... but that no one actually tested the resulting pattern as a check? I mean, one of the most salient facts about human color processing is that we evaluate colors based on their surrounding context, so even if individual colors work well, you would need to check their performance in their context to make sure they still work well.
https://soldiersystems.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/img_64...
> the decision process that resulted in the horribly-ineffective UCP
> pattern amounts to: "We want one pattern
The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program appears to be in a state of suspended development, with little progress made in 2021 toward improving its lackluster performance. The latest report by the Pentagon’s Director, Operational Test & Evaluation (DOT&E) reveals stagnation and even backsliding in some fleet reliability measures.
And that’s just the public DOT&E report.
In an unprecedented move, DOT&E is concealing many of the key details of the F-35’s poor performance. For the first time ever, the testing office created a non-public “controlled unclassified information” version of its report, and although there is much overlap between the two versions, the meaningful details about the ever-troubled program are only included in the non-public one.
https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2022/03/f-35-program-stagnated...
This turkey was designed in the 1990s. The contract was awarded in 2001. The first f35 flew in 2006. When will this "technology" no longer be "new"? Presumably it will be some time, since the entire fleet was grounded again last week due to safety concerns.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-29/f-35-flee...
Despite more than 20 years and approximately $62.5 billion spent so far on research and development alone, program officials still haven’t been able to deliver an aircraft that can fly as often as needed or to demonstrate its ability to perform in combat, which places military personnel in jeopardy.
I would have said the "R&D decade" was the 1990s since JAST began in 1993 and developmental contracts were awarded in 1996, but POGO are conservative in their judgments.
I question some of the critiques in your link. For example, they claim the JSFs 61% availability rates are far below the standard of 75-80%. But if you look at published numbers, none of the legacy aircraft F15/F16/F18 variants (which have had decades to work out reliability issues) are above a 60% availability.[1]
What, specifically, are you critical of in terms of the JSF capability? Is that criticism due to what you perceived as mismanaged development or mismanaged priorities (e.g., the tradeoffs of a single platform)? And what is the base rate for comparison?
It's a commonplace that we spend more on the military than the next ten nations put together, most of whom are our allies. That obscures the more amazing fact that over a third of the military spending in the world is spent by USA. Obviously the Pentagon budget should be halved if not quartered, as we were promised before the Saudis dropped the WTC. In such a context, there would be no room for a plane that offers the prospect of more expense instead of more capability. Northrop lobbyists and their employees at think tanks and in the media might be able to dry-lab some "rates" and "figures" to distract from the obvious state of the F35 program. The scale of the disaster cannot be hidden from unbiased investigators. Even if it never makes the evening war media news, those who care to know can consult experts like POGO.
However, if you insist on a criticism in the proper jargon, F35 will never, ever, regardless of how much is spent, be as capable at close air support as the vastly less expensive A10 "Warthog". You can ask any American serviceman who has served on the ground in the last two decades. This isn't the only important role for a military aircraft, but it is an important role.
[0] https://www.povertycenter.columbia.edu/news-internal/monthly...
I would like to see us spend less in the military if it goes to better use instead. Particularly when commanders are advocating getting rid of programs and Congress keeps them anyway. The US is effectively subsidizing NATOs military capability and mitigating the blowback requires more thoughtful analysis than just slashing the budget. I'm not convinced yet that POGO are the experts worth listening to because they seem a bit out of touch (see my last comment about what they claim the availability should be vs. the parity that matters).
As one of those service members who was supported by the A10 overseas, you're right. Grunts on the ground love the sound of that cannon overhead when close air support is needed. But you are comparing the one very specialized thing the A10 was designed to do. I don’t think it’s a slight to a decathlete to point out there’s faster, specialized sprinters at the Olympics. Stray in any direction away from that and it loses the comparison miserably. Compare avionics, speed, maneuverability and munitions capability etc. (really, anything outside of the cannon) and the JSF is just far superior. In other words, if I was only allowed to have one plane in theater, it wouldn't be the A10.
My objections are not limited to the plane's capabilities. No capabilities would justify especially egregious costs. A sure-to-be-revised-upward $1.7T is probably egregious enough. Similar criticism applies to the military overall.
...if I was only allowed to have one plane in theater...
This seems an unrealistic limitation. Very few aircraft (or ground craft) can protect themselves from all threats. Perhaps the B2 can, because at night it's apparently invisible? Certainly the Warthog is vulnerable to many fighter jets. (Although in several recent wars, fighter jets have not been a threat?) I assume that even the best 4G fighters are vulnerable to the latest AA weapons. However, I think you have helped me answer your first question. At this time it's clear that no command staff would contemplate operating in a particular "theater" with only F35s as combat aircraft. We would have to consider F35s as capable in some sense, if any forward airbase or carrier group would host them without also hosting F15s, F16s, F18s, F22s, etc. That will never happen, but if it does many people will have to eat crow.
...spend less in the military if it goes to better use instead.
Here is our real disagreement. We should spend less, full stop. Nothing justifies a nation with 5% of the world's population spending 36% of the world's military expenditures. The fact that most of us believe there are such justifications indicates deeper problems. We are constantly gaslit by commercial news media, politicians, academics, movies, etc. that the world is very dangerous for us, that we should fear people who live far way, and that we should probably have special operators and deathdrones terrorizing them on a regular basis just to be safe. Most Americans haven't admitted to themselves that not only do we never enter a war for the reasons cited at the time, not only do we kill and impoverish far more innocent people than ever appear on the news, but having entered those wars we never win, and never accomplish any beneficial military objectives. That isn't to even mention the many wars we fight without admitting them, which of course have had worse results. That isn't to even mention the terrible boomerang effects that all our horrible stupid wars have had on our own society.
Everyone else in the world, who aren't constantly subject to the mixture of news and entertainment that never considers whether we should spend less money killing innocent humans, knows this secret that very few Americans can publicly admit. What drives this flood of misinformation? Adults only get one guess... money! USA cable news industry has almost $6B/year in revenue. USA military spending is over 100 times as much. Few are foolish enough to invoke "Hanlon's Razor" here. We all know that greater spending on political campaign "donations" is firmly in the interest of interested industries. Obviously hiring and editorial decisions in media, as well, can be influenced by advertising and access when resources are so far out of balance. On top of that, the three-week ratings bonanza whenever a new TV war starts are enough to make a network profitable for the whole year.
Start by remembering the unanimous push in the war media to get Saddam's WMDs. Then remember that ObL left Afghanistan entirely less than a month after we invaded. Recall that Qaddafi had outlawed both polygamy and slave markets, which have returned to Libya since his violent overthrow. If our military had fewer resources, it would menace the world less, and regular Americans would be safer.
I would like you to consider that we likely don’t disagree. I never said that money should be spent on the military or even by the government for that matter. The fact that was how you interpreted that comment before going on that long and apparently pre-chambered rant might be a good reason to give one some pause about your worldview.
Either you agree, or you don't. If I can't figure it out, I can't care about it.
We probably have the same qualms with the MIC. I just don't think the evidence you use to support your claim is particularly valid, and tends to point towards ignorance on the subject. Combined with the circular logic presented and an inability to state what it would take to change your mind, it makes your position more dogmatic than rational. It’s not just a binary “we agree or don’t”, but the thought process that led it because that’s what will ultimately make me rethink my position. My issue isn't the conclusion, it's the way you came to it.
You see it happen all the time. That's part of the broken incentive structure that led to the F35 in the first place. Politicians cancelled or curtailed the B-1, B-2, F-22, A-12, and V-22 just to name a handful off the top of my head. The B-1 and V-22 got uncancelled, and the B-2 and F-22 programs produced significantly fewer aircraft than they originally intended to (thus making these programs more expensive on a per-unit basis since the R&D couldn't be amortized effectively).
Therefore the F35 was intended to fit the requirements of three separate services (protecting it from interservice rivalry and more broadly amortizing the R&D expense) as well as exported to several allies (in order to further amortize R&D and make it safer politically). If there was the political capital necessary for a Harrier successor to be funded on its own, it wouldn't have been rolled into the F35.
> However, if you insist on a criticism in the proper jargon, F35 will never, ever, regardless of how much is spent, be as capable at close air support as the vastly less expensive A10 "Warthog".
This is not actually true. The A-10 is a death trap that is notorious for creating friendly fire casualties. The machine gun isn't effective against armored vehicles, and if you fly the plane low enough to use the machine gun, you're basically committing suicide against modern anti-aircraft weapons. Other than that, it's basically a missile truck, which lots of other planes can do with better accuracy and survivability. Even Ukraine doesn't want it.
The F-15 project was supposed to be a small and light fighter but feature creep" blew the project up into a massively expensive boondoggle. Some of this was due to the fear of the MIG-25; an aircraft we later learned wasn't so scary.
Yet today, the overpriced, chronic cost-overruning F-15 sits at an impressive 109:0 kill to loss ratio, making it the best performing aircraft in the United State's history.
But you would be correct in saying the F-35 is no F-15. It has a stealth coating that is expensive to maintain (this is true for all stealth aircraft). It also flies with a ton of electronics to function as a "sensor network in the sky".
But in many ways, this is similar to the complaints about the F-15 and its (For the time) dizzying array of modern technologies: An advanced lookdown/shootdown radar, support for BVR missiles, IFF, EW and ECM systems all linked to a central computer. Technically other aircraft had these technologies in the 1970s, but none until the F-15 had them all in the same aircraft. Fast-forward a few decades and that "feature creep" doesn't even quality as "bare bones" for any air superiority fighter.
Anyway, if you want a multi-role aircraft without the stealth or sensor network gizmos of the F-35 there's the Gripen E series. Its purchase price is greater than the F-35 but its operating costs are much less. If you don't envision your country's airforce performing too many SEAD missions this tradeoff might make sense... but there's no free lunch!
"Between 1982 and 1992, NASA launched 11 shuttle flights with classified payloads, honoring a deal that dated to 1969, when the National Reconnaissance Office—an organization so secret its name could not be published at the time—requested certain changes to the design of NASA’s new space transportation system."[1]
NASA has a long history of working with the military. The first astronauts were all military test pilots (Armstrong gave up his military commission so NASA wouldn’t appear overtly militarized).
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/secret-spa...
It was an embarrassment.
Literally no STS launches did. And they were so expensive, it would have been cheaper to build more Hubbles and launch them the regular way than to have done the repair missions.
The Space Shuttle was a disaster for US space presence. US ended up depending on Soyuz!
Now, the X-37 is proving another embarrassment. They can't find enough work for it, so leave it parked in orbit most of the time, pretending to be "on a mission".
Do you mean no STS launches were DoD payloads or do you mean no STS launches required DoD specs? I'm not saying the "cost effectiveness" promise of the Shuttle was met, but there appears to be evidence that neither of the above claims are accurate. For example, STS-38 was a classified DoD payload [1] and there are book chapters dedicated to fact that DoD specs drove the shuttle design [2]. The gist from [3] is
"the support and budget for space decreased, increasing the need for NASA to work closely with the DOD. Their partnership prompted many compromises that were made on the vehicle’s uses and design, which resulted in a broad set of requirements"
Those compromises were largely to accommodate the DoD payload and range requirements. Whether or not they were ultimately necessary we can't know because much of that is classified and unverifiable. But they still drove the design and eroded the cost benefits that NASA wanted.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-38
[2] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137438546_11
[3] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/296652080_Space_Shu...
The answers to all your questions are right there in the message you clicked "reply" on. I invite you read what it says there.
Because to a laymen, that's an unverifiable claim since those details appear to be classified. Meaning that opinion doesn't amount to much. It's plausible, but I'd need a little more than your opinion to believe it.
I may speculate that their requirements were such as to be able to loft the NSA equivalent of Hubble into a polar orbit, but that by the time STS was flying, they had retired that design and were using rather smaller birds.
People employed at NASA for decades, in a position to know and report even facts not published, that they have had no reason to lie about, say it is true. No one has come forward to say not.
But again, none of that matters unless you can verify your claim. We can just leave it as a known unknown and stop pretending it’s anything different.
If you really honestly think that whether NASA launched any of a certain specific sort of mission is a matter of opinion, I don't know what to say.
It's no different than if somebody on here said with certainty that there was a second gunman on the grassy knoll. Because, you know, they have a source at the CIA who said so. But we can't verify it because they classified the information. But trust them. They know a guy.
Of course in both cases there is truth that supersedes opinion. Whether or not anyone should believe one claim over another is a different story. Just because you say something with conviction doesn't make it true and just because you "know a guy" doesn't make it credible.
The fact remains that STS was massively expensive, and unnecessarily, and it ate up budget that could have been used for much better things, and probably would have.
Skylab really did fall out of the sky. The US really was for years dependent upon Russia to launch its astronauts. We really did get only just the one Hubble.
And we are doing it again, with SLS.
Not to mention Israeli history.
That one gets capitalized because it’s a proper noun (is that a confusion name? sure).
Luddite strictly should be capitalized as well, but there isn’t any confusion around that one and it isn’t the focus, so I can understand why it wasn’t capitalized. I wouldn’t’ve.
Spreyian detected, opinion discarded.
Because I'm at work and can't look through the full 372 page non-public report linked, can you provide some page numbers I could look at? I'm curious what the actual issues are in actual use.
Btw I'm not of the same mindset of the other guy, I'm not gonna call you a "Luddite Reformer" because I saw a YouTube video.
From when I know many of the issues are FUD, but obviously there is real issues and I'd like to better educate myself. But I am just a layman with limited research time.
You and me both! Given the wild swings in points-voting seen ITT, it seems perhaps MIC reptiles and other lovers of arcane jargon have more time on their hands than we mere subjects have. I linked the POGO report first as it seems most authoritative with respect to overall program cost and military effectiveness. With respect to the specific question of cost/plane (although I don't think we can just forget cost/hour), this Forbes article has the best explanation I've seen. [0] The beginning of the following selection acknowledges one accounting method that might support the idea that the unit cost is low. However, when more accurate methods are used, that idea makes less sense.
At $78 million the fifth-generation F-35A’s unit cost compares favorably to the latest non-stealth 4.5-generation Western fighter. The Rafale, Typhoon, Gripen-E and F-15EX are more expensive at $85 to $100 million apiece. The older F-16 and Super Hornet are modestly cheaper at $65 to $75 million each. But while these aircraft do have certain performance advantages over the F-35, all are vastly more vulnerable to long-range anti-aircraft missiles proliferating in militaries across the globe.
However, the F-35 unit price metric has the shortcoming of failing to reflect additional costs in spare parts, logistics facilities and so forth that come with F-35 purchases. When those are spread out across F-35A orders in 2021 they lead to a ‘Gross Weapon Unit Cost’ in budget documents of $110 million for 2021, higher than in preceding years due in part to decreased volume of orders.
Overall, though, a moderate increase in unit price arguably isn’t the main issue, because procurement costs account for less than a quarter of the $1.7 trillion projected lifetime cost of the F-35 program.
Instead, a report published by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on July 7 warns that its sustainment—currently expected to total $1.27 trillion in real dollars—which threatens to break the Pentagon budget.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/sebastienroblin/2021/07/31/f-35...
I'd point out that probably the majority of "MIC reptiles" would be opposed to the F35. After all, there are more defense contractors who build competitors to the F35 than there are defense contractors who build the F35. For instance, I distinctly remember watching a "report" on the F35 produces by a Canadian network--I think CBC but I'm not sure--which was a fairly obvious PR hit by Boeing, given that half of the report was basically a sales pitch by Boeing "experts" talking about how great the Super Hornet is.
I don't know if I believe it, but it makes a little sense. What would have made more sense is if they had allowed tinting it to different colors based on the region. There is an example here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WckhOUMfHk
Arguably the most famous golf course architect, Dr. Alister MacKenzie (Augusta National, Cypress Point, Pasatiempo, etc), was a civilian physician in WWI and became interested in camouflage design during the war. He made significant contributions to the British military camouflage during his tenure. He later based his golf course architecture, primarily the bunkering, from camouflage design principals he had learned.
> The expression was then always in the form of 'give someone the razzle-dazzle', that is, confuse them. The earliest use that I can find of that sense of 'razzle-dazzle' is the US newspaper The Saint Paul Globe, April 1885:
>> Sir: As you seem to be in earnest in your efforts to give someone the dazzle-dazzle... [I think that's a typo and the original source is indeed razzle-dazzle as being discussed!]
> The expression very quickly came to be used with a more positive intent, that is, where 'razzle-dazzle' was considered to be indicate enjoyment rather than deception. That's found in the Pennsylvania newspaper The Daily Republican, June 1887:
>> A meeting at City Hall resolved to celebrate the Fourth [of July] by a general old-time razzle-dazzle.
https://www.1418now.org.uk/commissions/dazzle-ship-london-2/
> The HMS President (1918), one of only three surviving Royal Navy warships from the First World War, was ‘dazzled’ by the German sculptor Tobias Rehberger. One of the most respected European artists of his generation, Rehberger is a German sculptor whose work blurs the boundaries between design, sculpture, furniture-making and installation.
That would be whoever benefitted financially from the decision to fuck our soldiers over.
Maybe in here somewhere, "Various statutes supplement the provisions of Chapter 37 to criminalize activities that jeopardize the national defense or national security."
IANAL ;)
I'm sure no one is trying to destroy US democracy either or stage insurrections, etc. oh wait...
If I had to guess, I'd say it was intentional and all about money. That could make it illegal. Even if they didn't intend to lose in combat, it still gave US soldiers a handycap.
Im not sure why you try to act like they all need to be tied together somehow?
Seem pretty defensive & weird.
None of that information is available to you.
It's absolutely not intuitive that the digital looking blocky camouflage patterns [1] are going to perform better than the blob style camo patterns they replaced.
1 - https://www.businessinsider.com/why-militaries-have-strange-...
Don't presume malice when incompetence will do.
If it works, of course, which it doesn't.
document.querySelectorAll('p').forEach(elm => elm.style.width = "93vw")
Plus then you could convince a few of your coworkers to show up in camo with you and make your manager nervous you’re about to do a hostile takeover of the company.
Programmers' uniforms are excessively-expensive hiking clothes, or selvedge jeans with flannel and full-grain leather boots, ideally in a work- or jump-boot style.
Arrrrgh.
If so: wouldn't knowing what to look for greatly increase the ability to automatically extract the pattern from image data? (Like how it is possible to extract signals from below the noise floor in LoRa communication?)
Now I imagine uniform fabric with adversarial patterns added, for those.
The Armenia-Azerbaijan war of 2020 and the Russia-Ukraine war of 2022 have both displayed the growing need to prioritise sensor camouflage.
The contemporary peer on peer battlefield runs 24/7, but humans require periodic quality rest.
The two most recent peer on peer conflicts display how stopping and harbouring up makes you an easier fixed target.
The conundrum of the modern battlefield is that if you stop, you die. But if you don’t stop, you face rapid cognitive decline and die.
Sensor camouflage could be an insurance policy that meets or exceeds minimum rest and recovery needs of soldiers as well as improving expensive asset survivability in a world looking increasingly like “SCUD the Disposable Assassin” where loitering munitions are getting cheap enough to target individual combatants.
[1]: https://www.baesystems.com/en/feature/adativ-cloak-of-invisi...
tl;dr: gray is a good camouflage color against clouds or haze, which is a fairly common background for aircraft operating at mid to high altitudes.
(The logic is fairly similar to what results in Navy ships being painted haze gray and not azure blue or whatever color the ocean happens to be today)
The particular case that you describe - automatically adjusting to ambient light - is handled adequately by analog circuits; this is called "auto-gating", and is pretty much standard nowadays.
Many big game animals are color-blind (or more specifically, see color differently than we do), so a camo pattern with orange can still hide one from a deer, while making you visible to humans.
https://www.rmef.org/elk-network/what-you-see-isnt-what-that...
But where does "deer with bows" come into that?
The issues with color in e-ink boil down to having to float more kinds of ink dot, making it slooooow. But instantly changing to match surroundings isn't ideal, because it's change, and change is what we notice.
Granted that if it could change instantly then that process could just be run slowly, but it seems like a lesser disadvantage compared to any user interface.
In my opinion Tigerstripe camouflage is one of the best patterns to be invented both for aesthetics and function.
Followed by British DPM in second place.
Furthermore, if they were trying to blend in with each other like one big homogeneous mass of infantry they wouldn't have given everyone hats in a contrasting color.
The goal of their uniforms wasn't to hide individuals within the environment, but to make it hard to discern individuals within the imposing mass of soldiers.
"Corporal, your job is to bang on that drum as we march, not complain about military fashion."
As I just said, the design consideration wasn't to not stick out.
'Shock action' is a modern military term, but that's partly what they were trying to achieve in those days through visual impact. 'Shatter the enemy's cohesion and will to fight' is something they were trying to achieve through visual impact.
As another example today, think about why the UN paint their vehicles white. It's because their visibility and presence on the battlefield provides a tactical effect.
> Tactical effect
Hehe. Last thing I want helping me are Peacekeepers.
The point is they turn up and show they're there to react if needed. You can see they're there because they're painted white.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Protection_Forc...
I think 60 or so British UN peacekeepers were killed there, for example.
In the same vein, modern militaries often attach IR strobes to personnel and vehicles to identify them at night. This will likely appear silly in a few years when night optics are pervasive (if that hasn't happened already).
Distinguishing individual soldiers is an important step in counting the size of a line. Accepting "red coats blend together" as truth, that would make it more difficult for an opposing general to determine which parts of a battle line were stronger or weaker, thus making it more difficult to preposition forces to exploit weak sections.
Once the battle was joined the camouflage effect would not have mattered as much, but before the deployment of radio it was also very, very difficult to change battle plans "on the fly."
In any case, given the technology of the time, if you were beyond engagement range, I don't think you would have been able to pick out individual soldiers by sight regardless of which uniforms they were wearing...
My theory is that vibrant color uniforms were chosen simply to make identification of different formations easier.
Also red was just an easy colour to get hold of and to dye with, and it hid blood.
The red mass of undistinguished soldiers created an imposing sight on the battlefield. It's not about wanting to hit individuals (why would you?) it's about the shock factor.
This is only infantry as well - where shock action was even more important - cavalry - and distinction didn't apply - you had less uniform more elaborate uniforms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_coat_(military_uniform):
> However, in the days of the musket (a weapon of limited range and accuracy) and black powder, battle field visibility was quickly obscured by clouds of smoke. Bright colours provided a means of distinguishing friend from foe without significantly adding risk. Furthermore, the vegetable dyes used until the 19th century would fade over time to a pink or ruddy-brown, so on a long campaign in a hot climate the colour was less conspicuous than the modern scarlet shade would be. As formal battles of the time commonly involved deployment in columns and lines, the individual soldier was not likely to be a target by himself.
and
> In his book British Military Uniforms (Hamylyn Publishing Group 1968), the military historian W. Y. Carman traces in considerable detail the slow evolution of red as the English soldier's colour, from the Tudors to the Stuarts. The reasons that emerge are a mixture of financial (cheaper red, russet or crimson dyes), cultural (a growing popular sense that red was the sign of an English soldier),[64] and simple chance (an order of 1594 is that coats "be of such colours as you can best provide").
There is no mention of "dazzle" camouflage or of confounding numbers at all.
Figuring out how many where there was harder than it may seem.
Apparently zebra stripes have more to do with reducing fly bites, among other things.
[1] https://d1w82usnq70pt2.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/202...
[2] https://www.goonhammer.com/goonhammer-historicals-firing-in-...
There's a long history of armies going into battle bedecked in attire calculated to test the enemy's resolve and bolster their own. Skyclad Celtic warriors and extravagantly feathered Eagle Warriors. Spartans with red chitons and Samurai with monstrous faceplates. My favourite example is the Parthian geneal Surena's flamboyant manoeuver at the Battle of Carrhae (in 53 BC):
The Parthians went to great lengths to intimidate the Romans. Firstly, they beat a great number of hollow drums and the Roman troops were unsettled by the loud and cacophonous noise. Surena then ordered his cataphracts to cover their armour in cloths and advance. When they were within sight of the Romans, they simultaneously dropped the cloths and revealed their shining armour. The sight was designed to intimidate the Romans.[24]