I was hoping to learn why the pixelated designs started appearing. Author says they work; but what led anyone to think that those designs might work? Why did they try them in the first place? And actually, why do they work?
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's not really so much about the pixels being square as the fractal-ish nature of mordern pixel camos that result in a "scale invariance" effect. There's details and contrast at the level of the small pixels, and there's details and contrasts are medium levels, and then again at large levels. Previous US army camo mostly had detail at only one scale level.
Exactly. Very very few things in nature actually are made of large blobs of a single color (unless you're very shortsighted). Honestly, it baffles me why militaries didn't realize this earlier.
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.
So basically, "if I make them fractal they look like patterns in nature, and if I scale tiny pixel fractals on screen up to the width of a bolt of cloth they still look like fractal patterns in nature, and if I get it right the details end up about the same scale as details in nature, mostly" kind of thing?
CADPAT works terrifyingly well in the temperate forests of Canada during spring/summer. I had a chance to go try and to spot people wearing CADPAT in the early 2000's and it was a royal pain to try and see them compared to the olive drab or even the US woodland patterns.
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.
> 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.
This is a (kinda funny) plotline in Generation Kill.
> CADPAT works terrifyingly well in the temperate forests of Canada during spring/summer. I had a chance to go try and to spot people wearing CADPAT in the early 2000's and it was a royal pain to try and see them compared to the olive drab or even the US woodland patterns.
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.
> 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.
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.
What was worse, CADPAT or UCP? I couldn't find it in the article. Instinct is that CADPAT was worse, but UCP was just that style without the contrast thus negating one of it's features (disrupting the human shape with high contrast).
During the I-for-get-which war, the army hired color-blind spotters because the enemy camo turned out to be fooling fully sighted people but was less effective with red-green color blindness. I don't recall if it was texture or contrast issues but they stood out against the trees and shrubbery enough to locate.
So we not only have to worry about invisible spectra, but some filters on visible light may reveal the target as well.
That’s kind of like hunters who buy expensive camo and then their wife washes it with laundry detergent that contains brightening agents. To human eyes it still looks like camo, but to the deer you end up looking like Barney the Dinosaur.
This was used in Vietnam. My neighbor growing up had this condition and was a spotter in Vietnam. He'd be flown over areas of jungle in a helicopter and he would be able to easily spot camouflaged structures. He would then photograph them and mark up what he saw. He parlayed this experience into a successful career in photojournalism after he got out of the military.
Very real issue. My uncle used to be a big hunter (he died a couple years ago), and could never see other hunters wearing the required blaze orange, but when they were wearing camouflage he had no problem seeing them in the woods.
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)
The answers to your first paragraph is in another part of the series:
> 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.
The following text seems to be mostly talking about things that have nothing to do with square pixels, it just sounds like that's what was how the dude programmed his generating algorithm. To the best of my reading, the goals he achieved with the patterns don't interact with the squareness.
I personally find the who camouflage switch to every branch of service, including the navy to be bizarre. Who thought it was good idea for navy seamen to be camouflaged in the water? With that line of reasoning why didn't the airforce get their own camouflage to look like a flight line? hah
> After six years in the fleet and some controversy, the blue-and-gray cammies could be headed for Davy Jones' seabag.
The Air Force did get their own camo - the ABU (Airman Battle Uniform) digital tiger-stripe; based on a Vietnam-era tiger-stripe uniform but with a color palette similar to the UCP; only with more blue.
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.
> I personally find the who camouflage switch to every branch of service, including the navy to be bizarre. Who thought it was good idea for navy seamen to be camouflaged in the water? With that line of reasoning why didn't the airforce get their own camouflage to look like a flight line? hah
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).
Former US sailor here.
The “camouflage” blue is no longer in use, but when it was, we jokingly referred to each other as “ocean warriors”.
The reasoning for why this pattern was chosen for working use, was that it hid oil stains and fresh paint really well, letting you wear the uniform longer.
The reality? Some politician or admiral wanted to leave their mark.
In development since 1983, the camo saw no use in the field until it was deployed during the first Gulf War (1990-1991).
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!
An interesting macro-variant is the Berlin brigade tank camo pattern, which is surprisingly cool! No idea where that comes into uniform camo pattern history nor how efficient it is, but who cares. It's cool beans.
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.
Well, that ghillie suit doesn't look pixelated to me - it just looks like it has quite a few straight-sided polygons in it.
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.
MARPAT is a very well documented case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARPAT In its case, it was chosen because the blocks actually blend very well into environments when viewed from a distance.
I doubt they have to be pixelated. They have a higher resolution than the other patterns which introduces more noise, which is probably good. But I would guess that smooth patterns would work too. It just doesn't matter since it would look the same from longer distances.
If I'm reading this correctly, the decision process that resulted in the horribly-ineffective UCP pattern amounts to: "We want one pattern. So let's pick one color from the best camo patterns in every environment [the only one that has good NIR performance], and the result will somehow work well!" Which is... yowzers.
(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.
There is an argument out there that the UCP camo patterns were more to make US troops distinct from enemy forces and reduce friendly fire than to provide any advantage for camouflage purposes. That it made American troops extremely identifiable by the distinct look of UCP.
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
I'm in the Air force, and while not relevant to actual camouflage ability, I can personally say that OCPs look much nicer than the uniforms before. A lot of the old camo patterns looked painfully ugly. And the ability to camouflage isn't too relevant for me anyways, unless I'm trying to blend into chairs/desks.
> the decision process that resulted in the horribly-ineffective UCP
> pattern amounts to: "We want one pattern
Just wait until you read how the F-35 was procured. "We want one airplane for the Air Force, Navy, and Marines. Oh, and it had to include parts from almost all NATO allies, even those who we won't sell it to."
Wanting one pattern to work everywhere isn't necessarily a bad goal. The OCP pattern, for example, works decently in most environments, and is basically superior to the UCP pattern in virtually all environments (it's marginally weaker in NIR, though). So the real problem seems to be that the criteria for deciding the best pattern was chosen incompetently.
One thing I was surprised to learn about NIR requirements is that it apparently doesn't just mean "dark". I have some coyote brown NIR compliant gear (water carriers etc) and under NIR it has the same shade as grass (which is quite bright, relatively speaking).
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.
There was a ship moored on the Thames in London for a few years painted in a modern interpretation of Dazzle. Sadly it was only there for a few years, I used to love seeing it.
> 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.
Having worked (as a civilian contractor) for the military it's equally plausible that the decision was screwed up for other reasons. High up decision makers that "trust their gut" over what the data tells them or who arbitrarily decide that a certain pattern looks silly to them.
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.
Commanders have wide discretion and it's part of the decentralized command mindset. They can sometimes make such decisions on no more than "I think this pattern looks cooler than that pattern"
Seeing as UCP is owned by the US government, I'm very curious to hear who could have financially benefited from its selection. If anything, HyperStealth here is the one with the financial motivation seeing as their US4CES pattern was not selected.
Much more likely is that multiple entities just wanted something done quickly and didn't follow all the right procedures the way they should have been.
Snipers are supposed to augment their camo with local materials, even in the woods. Non-sniper camo is a bit different, you wouldn't want to run across the street in that.
I really wish Chrome for Android had a menu option for "Show Simplified View", rather than just guessing. Some of the worst sites won't trigger it, presumably because the HTML is so simple the algorithm assumes you don't need it.
Now I want to show up at our Zoom meetings in full camo. Doctors and soldiers get such cool uniforms, but us programmers are just business casual.
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.
I go for the classic 'Big Blue' look and wear a suit and tie. Helps me to mentally separate work and relaxation time, with the added benefit of getting better treatment from management.
> Doctors and soldiers get such cool uniforms, but us programmers are just business casual.
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.
"his colleagues, a gender-parity posse of young, smart-looking people, along with one graybeard (literally -- he had a Unix beard of great rattiness and gravitas) who had no fewer than seven devices on his belt, including a line tester and a GPS." -- Cory Doctorow
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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?
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
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flecktarn
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Uniforme_militar,_ej%C3%A...
You can scale invariance and fractals with squares, triangles, or whatever shape you want.
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.
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.
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)
> 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.
Deleted Comment
> 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...
Imagine the JavaScript cool kid mindset but with guns.
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.
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).
The reality? Some politician or admiral wanted to leave their mark.
ftfy
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...
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alister_MacKenzie
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage
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.
and https://www.flickr.com/photos/royreed/18228263075
That would be whoever benefitted financially from the decision to fuck our soldiers over.
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-...
If it works, of course, which it doesn't.
Don't presume malice when incompetence will do.
None of that information is available to you.
https://i.imgur.com/hhQDS9c.jpeg
document.querySelectorAll('p').forEach(elm => elm.style.width = "93vw")
Deleted Comment
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.