From 1968 until 1973 , the US military spent about $ 1 billion a yr on a unexampled calculator - powered enterprise intended to end the warfare in Vietnam . It went by many names over the years — including Practice Nine , Muscle Shoals , Illinois City and Dye Marker . But today it ’s most normally sleep with as Operation Igloo White .
Despite being a high - price technological loser for the US military , Igloo White was the first existent - time , computer - drive surveillance operation program , set up during the Vietnam War .
The US military sought to progress a virtual fencing separate North and South Vietnam . And in the process they assist to excogitate the modern electronic field of honor , whose technologies total back to the US in the early 1970s , where they were rapidly deployed against drug cartels , runner , and anyone else endeavor to cross the border from Mexico . Igloo White also formed the bedrock of a border surveillance rotation that ’s on-going today . At the US - Mexico borderline , drones stalk the skies andelectronic sensorsalert Border Patrol agent to anyone trying to traverse into the United States .
What happened to Igloo White is not unlike the technical school transference from battlefield to border that we see today , as the machine used by American military force inAfghanistanand Iraq find their fashion to American streets . And as the refugee crisis continue across Europe , the Middle East , and the rest of the world , it ’d be a safe bet to say that we can expect more high - technical school practical fencing in the future tense .
To make sense of what ’s materialise on today ’s boundary line , though , we have to understand their history .
Cleaner War Through Technology
In the twenty - first century , Americans often recall the Vietnam War through the lens of the spunky moving picture that the difference of opinion leave in its wake . photographic film like Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket paint a picture of a dirty , waterlogged state of war , with troop crawl through clay and wading through Sir Tim Rice Mick . But there was another side to the warfare — one that we do n’t see in moving picture about the period . It ’s the high - tech side , with pristine white wall , computer terminals , and air conditioning . It was the office where the mussy war of yesteryear collided with the “ sporting , ” remotely - fought state of war of the future .
The US military machine ’s Infiltration Surveillance Center in Thailand with an IBM 360/65 computer circa 1970 ( Air Force Historical Research Agency )
That remotely - fight war in Vietnam had its base in Thailand , where state - of - the - art computers would interpret data point sent from M of sensors dropped across Vietnam and Laos . When the sensing element picked up rumble in the battlefield , electronic computer operators would have to determine whether they were pick up were North Vietnamese supplying truck or merely a random Vietnamese civilian going about their day . If it was the former , air rap would becalled in . If the latter , the military held off .
American military planners promise that the newfangled techniques being used with Igloo White mean we were n’t belong to get our men dirty in war anymore . “ iron heel on the undercoat ” were no longer necessary to win . Except that they were . Because no amount of electronic computer technology can make a warfare sporting . In fact , as Igloo White shows us , technical school has the potential to make warfare messier than ever .
Screenshot from the US military machine filmBugging the Battlefield
“ On the field of honor of the future tense , foeman power will be located , track , and targeted almost instantly through the consumption of information links , figurer assisted news evaluation , and automated fervor control condition , ” General William Westmoreland said in a 1969 lecture .
Battlefield of the Future
General Westmoreland was the brain of all US military operations in Vietnam from 1964 until 1968 , when he became Army Chief of Staff . And his prediction may seem obvious with the welfare of hindsight , but they really were windy when you look at how rude battlefield surveillance engineering was during the former 1960s .
“ I see battlefields under 24 - hour real or near - real time surveillance of all type , ” he proceed . “ I see field of honor on which we can destroy anything we can locate through instantaneous communications and almost instantaneous covering of highly deadly firepower . ”
General Westmoreland was sure enough prescient , but toparaphrase a quotefrom the inventor of the hologram , Dennis Gabor , it ’s also easier to foretell the time to come when you ’re helping to create it . And that ’s incisively what the US military establishment was doing in Vietnam — with a little assist from a secret radical of scientists and academics .
The Jasons
Igloo White was the brainchild of a secretive chemical group called the Jasons , and they were formed as a quasi - independent think army tank in 1960 fund by ARPA ( now DARPA ) , the Defense Department ’s bleeding edge technology arm .
The Jason Division ( named after Jason and the Argonauts by the wife of one phallus ) was comprised of about 45 scientist from America ’s top universities . Mostly physicists in the early days , they would convene for 6 weeks every summertime in La Jolla , California , just northerly of San Diego . The Jasons were all license geniuses . But as a mathematical group they were also incredibly arrogant . And that arrogance would have an unerasable impact on the future of not only the state of war in Vietnam , but nearly every American military legal action that was to fall .
Just as many average Americans had grown stock of the escalating war in Vietnam , the majority of Jasons did n’t like the bombings in Southeast Asia . And they were not diffident about saying as much to the top military brass .
“ The Jasons were , and I do n’t mean to be insulting to them , but get ’s just say peaceniks , ” Steve Lukasik tells me over the phone . Lukasik was the deputy manager and later conductor of DARPA from 1967 until 1974 . DARPA funded the Jasons , but for Igloo White the group had a direct dividing line to the Department of Defense .
“ You have to understand that the Jasons had a lot of prestigiousness , a lot of ego - admiration , a bunch of ego , and they sincerely believed that they had some full theme , ” Lukasik says . One approximation in particular was very interesting indeed .
That approximation was to interrupt Viet Cong supply route running from north to due south in Vietnam . Trucks brought those supplies along the Ho Chi Minh Trail , the system of rules of roads used by the North Vietnamese . If the US could just stop enough trucks , the Jasons thought , then the Viet Cong would n’t be able to fight . The continued bombing of the Johnson presidential term had attain nearly nothing . So why not simply disrupt supply routes , and force Ho Chi Minh to the bargaining table ?
Defense Secretary Robert McNamara think that a physical fencing would be the best way to stopping the current of weapons , the great unwashed and supplies from due north to Confederacy . But the Jasons had a much more futuristic idea . They advise a practical fence , made out of a distributed sensor web .
And in the summer of 1966 , during their annual meeting in La Jolla , the Jasons came up with a program to build it . By August of that twelvemonth theyproduced a reportthat promised a practical fence could be the death to the conflict that everybody had daydream of .
If only it were that simple .
Control board at the Infiltration Surveillance Center in Thailand circa 1970 ( Air Force Historical Research Agency )
In his2005 memoir , Vietnam War pilot film John T. Halliday recounted his arriver at the Nakhon Phanom Air Base in Thailand , HQ for the Jasons ’ dreaming fencing . It was a in high spirits - technical school wonderland that had all the luxuries of home , like strain conditioning . And it was a peep into the future .
War Played Like a Pinball Machine
“ Step out of the hobo camp and inside the construction , you step back into America — but an America fifteen long time from now … possibly 1984 , ” Halliday ’s carbon monoxide - pilot Duke Wiley told him . Wiley continued :
Remember those huge electronic boards from the movie Dr. Strangelove that showed Russian Italian sandwich headed for the U.S. ? Well , Task Force Alpha is a caboodle like that except with literal - time display in full color , three stories tall … it ’s the whole goddamned Ho Chi Minh Trail in full , living color . [ The place is make full with ] a whole bunch of civilian who count like IBM guys running around in three - piece suits all wear glasses … it ’s Geek Central .
Nakhon Phanom Air Basein Thailand housed a raw United States Department of State - of - the - artwork facility called the Infiltration Surveillance Center from which the US war machine would acquit their electronic war . At about 200,000 square feet , it was said to be the magnanimous construction in Southeast Asia at the time . It had to be Brobdingnagian — the Defense Communications Planning Group had packed it with enormous IBM 360 computers and IBM 2260 monitor .
proctor at the Infiltration Surveillance Center in Thailand circa 1970 ( Air Force Historical Research Agency )
The Defense Communications Planning Group is a pretty boring name for a closelipped group tax with building one of the most high - technical school war surveillance systems ever devise — and that ’s no accident . The name , DCPG for unforesightful , was intentionally deadening to prevent North Vietnamese forcefulness from contract too suspicious should they get wind about it .
Still , the group was n’t exclusively secretive . After the construction of the Nakhon Phanom Air Base ISC mastery center in 1967 , the Air Force was proud to show it off . Senator Barry Goldwater visited in 1970 , declare the mellow - tech setup to be future of state of war : “ I personally recollect it has the possibility of being one of the great steps forward in war since powder . ” And Goldwater was n’t wrong .
The command center in Thailand gave soldier a kind of distance from the fighting . Today , many pundits say it ’s like playing a venomous video biz when US effect conduct drone airstrikes from halfway around the world . Back in the former seventies , the comparison made by airmen was to pinball car . One Air Force policeman explained in a 1971 issue of the Armed Forces Journal : “ We wired the Ho Chi Minh Trail like a drugstore pinball simple machine and we stop up it in every dark . ”
But there were plenty of hiccough , owe to the system ’s comparatively primitive capabilities . “ The only communication radio link between the sensing element on the terra firma and Thailand was 7 by 24 aircraft , ” Lukasik tells me . Which is to say that unless planes were in the sky , the sensors could n’t communicate information back to the command centre .
sensor now sit in a museum via theUS Air Force
The Jasons had opine that the sensor could be off - the - shelf , meaning that they would n’t have to be produced alone for Igloo White . And indeed the first lot were largely sono - buoy already used by the Navy to detect enemy sub . The sonar ingredient were just replaced with microphones and other sensors as require .
The Sensor Network
The first sensing element were incredibly expensive at about $ 2,000 a tonic ( over $ 14,000 in inflation - align dollar mark ) and did n’t work very well . The batteries lasted just two weeks . And the engineers quick learned that off - the - shelf sensor were n’t resilient enough to be thrown out of plane , which is how the legal age were deport to their positions on the ground . An embarrassingly high numeral break on landing place .
Above , a soldier toss a detector out of a woodworking plane for Igloo White . The pointed final stage is supposed to swallow itself in the ground , leaving the false leaf on the other ending sticking out .
Dozens of dissimilar types of sensors were developed and deployed in Vietnam . Most were mask , as you could see in the photo above , to be camouflaged and face like botany on top , while the bottom of the sensor would be buried in the ground .
There were acoustic sensors which would heed in on the field of honor , seismic sensing element which were used to detect the rumblings of vehicle , alloy detecting sensing element for determining whether guns were in the area , and RF sensors for picking up radio signals . There were even chemical sensing element , most notably the “ masses sniffer ” which was designed to detect human lather and urine .
Each of these sensors posed its own problem . When a alloy detecting sensor is entail to be collecting data on soldier edge with heavy weapon , who ’s to say that it ’s not actually reading the metal from a civilian with a power shovel ? And what of the rumble of motortruck down the Ho Chi Minh Trail ? Was every exclusive vehicle take for an enemy vehicle ? How do you tell the difference between booster and foe ? That , of course , was a bigger question for the US military in Vietnam that had to be asked again and again of more than just the sensors .
And then there was the knowing “ spoofing ” of the sensor by the foeman . Most infamously , North Vietnamese fighters learned to divert the American forces by leaving buckets of urine near sensors in non - essential orbit . When the detector find a large grouping ’s Charles Frederick Worth of weewee , US airstrikes would set out to a great extent bombing no one in fussy .
Illustration of an acoustic sensor circa 1970
Igloo White sensor were make grow by some of America ’s most prominent electronics companies , including Texas Instruments , Magnavox , General Electric , Western Electric ( under their Sandia Corporation research branch ) and Hazeltine Corporation of Little Neck , New York . This was trim down - boundary electronics work in the 1960s — totally undiscovered territory .
All of the companies came up against a major expert vault that will sound familiar : electric battery life . atomic number 28 Cadmium assault and battery were used at first ( the kind you ’ll belike detect in your wireless computer mouse or TV remote ) , but they ’d only last for about two week . Other sensing element were developed that could be sour on and off remotely as need , hypothetically conserving power . But the existent solution came when companies developed atomic number 3 batteries , which extended the life of the sensing element forup to two month . But still , the detector were undependable even when they did “ sour , ” often giving Air Force commanders a false impression of what was bump on the soil .
It was n’t just sensors that were being strike down . To help oneself their acoustic sensors take heed drift in the hobo camp , the military started dropping “ acoustical mines . ” These made a loud noise when somebody pace on them , though they were harmless . But as long as the US military was dropping acoustic mine , they may as well drop venomous mines too , veracious ? That ’s why another variety of special mine was tossed out of plane along with the sensors and acoustic mines .
“ They were roguish little mines , ” Lukasik says . “ They were mine you maltreat on [ … ] and they had this whole compass of what we would now call clump bomb . Except they were n’t cluster bomb , they were cluster mines . ”
Those cluster mine “ by rights get a very bad name , ” Lukasik says , and they really were n’t a “ small ” affair . Their impact is still being felt today in Vietnam , where thousands of unexploded landmines dot the landscape . It ’s estimated that over 42,000 Vietnamese have been killed by leftover mine since American forces left in 1975 . An additional 62,000 have been seriously maim or injured .
Did It All “Work”?
If Igloo White demonstrated anything , it was the limits of outside war . Despite being “ automated , ” there was a luck of guesswork involved in the scheme . As one Air Force reportfrom 1968explained :
By noting how long each of the sensing element was activate , he could estimate the number of vehicle in the mathematical group moving through a string . This gave him enough confidence to identify this activating pattern as a likely target , and he approximate that target to be five trucks propel north at 17 klick per minute . He then transmitted this fair game sequence to the ISC mathematical operation room for recording and relay race to the ABCCC for possible visual investigating by a FAC and possible strike action , if confirmed .
Nobody in the US military require to let in that their $ 1 billion per year system was n’t getting results . The Air Force claimed that 75,000 trucks had been destroyed as a result of their sensor electronic web . The only problem ? By the CIA ’s estimates , there were only about 6,000 motortruck in all of North Vietnam .
The lag prison term and uncertainty of the Igloo White system in the early 1970s was unsustainable . At ARPA , Lukasik close that “ you do n’t put in a issue of flash sensor [ on the background ] and then maintain them . ” Instead , you grow a more compact platform that does n’t swear on so many electrical relay points .
The Lockheed Batcat EC-121R , which would relay the sensor ’s data to the control center
Lukasik thought the weakness of the Igloo White organization was that the sensors were on the dry land , and drones were merely relay machine between them and the data processor in Thailand .
“ So we said , take a really expert detector platform and fly it around , ” Lukasik said . “ It ’s a hell of a lot easier to bribe between 50 and 500 remotely piloted vehicle and that take out this horrible 24/7 airborne liaison . ”
These new drones had optical sensor , radiolocation sensors , infrared sensing element , among plenty of others . Suddenly these drones did n’t have to receive a message from an unreliable sensing element on the ground and relay it to the IRC anymore .
“ We call them in those days RPVs , ” recollect Lukasik . “ They ’re now visit autonomous remote-controlled vehicles . But they ’re not unmanned . Every one of them , there ’s a hombre sitting in Nevada or some other place , fly the affair . ”
Even here in the 21st C we have n’t gone full Skynet quite yet . Humans are still in the loop . There ’s no way of knowing whether their droning strike on military targets were any more “ in force ” since the measure of success in Vietnam is a muddy and horrifying thing to reckon . But some people find ease in knowing , especially here in the twelvemonth 2015 , that at least there were humans behind those triggers .
Professor Paul Edwards of the University of Michigan has written extensively about Operation Igloo White , most famously in his authoritative 1997 historyThe Closed earth : Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America . I foretell him at his agency in Michigan to talk about Igloo White . And unsurprisingly , he put Lukasik ’s plan for a mobile platform into a similar historical context .
Edwards allege :
What they were attempt to do then is what we do now , except a lot of those sensing element are fluid because they were on drones . But the canonic principle of remote control war where you get the soldier as far aside as struggle as possible and do it with planes if you’re able to or missile , that ’s been a steady theme in US military history from World War II powerful on up .
And if your finish is to protect your soldier , it ’s a sound idea . The problem , then as now , is that it ’s hard to discriminate civilians from military targets when you ’re very far off from them . And that continues to be an publication . We keep on killing civilian with our radio-controlled aircraft in Pakistan and places like that because we ’re not there on the footing to really identify the people we ’re going after .
IBM 2250 exhibit console table used to get across sensors in the late sixties ( Air Force Historical Research Agency )
Bringing the War Home
Some people were frankly excite by the prospect of these futurist battlefield conditions , as long as they did n’t include land mines on US ground . The February 14 , 1971 edition of the Sunday newspaper insertThe Family Weeklydescribed the tactics to come . As long as our boys in Vietnam were dumbfound high-pitched - technical school tools to kill people half - way around the public , that was good enough for them . But there were others who noticed that what goes around come around .
One of the few articulation of the 1970s to mark that all this engineering was being brought back to the United States was Robert Barkan .
In the June 15 , 1972 issue of New Scientist , Barkan write :
contrabandist on the US / Mexican border are treading softly these twenty-four hours , now that the US Border Patrol ( an arm of the Justice Department ) has adopted the same anti - infiltration barrier used by the military to discover flock and truck cause of the Ho Chi Minh Trail .
Remote stretch of the border have been seeded with sensors exchangeable to the Acousids and Minisids that detect sound and vibration from footsteps and vehicle in Vietnam .
Barkan explained that it was all come back to the North America — the radio-controlled aircraft , the sensing element , the computers . The only thing that was n’t coming were the bombs . Or at least we desire .
Beech QU-22B , National Museum of theUnited States Air Force
In the same New Scientist article , Barkan discover the Mexican edge of 1972 :
The US Air Force ’s QU-22B remote check pilotless aircraft — made surplus in Vietnam by the insertion of more sophisticated drones — have been returned to the US where they vanish over the moulding to monitor the sensor and relay datum to cardinal command points .
Sylvania Electronics , one of the company make the sensors for use in Vietnam , assure Congress in 1970 that a virtual fence would work well along the US - Mexico border because by its very nature nobody would mark it : “ The political logical implication of using surveillance equipment along a friendly foreign perimeter have been considered by selecting equipment that can be deploy without appeal attention and easily concealed . ”
It was n’t just the US - Mexico border , either . President Nixon ’s administration experimented with sensors at the White House and at his vacation home .
As Barkan explained in New Scientist :
War - tested sensors have been placed under the White House lawn and in the M of President Nixon ’s other homes in San Clemente , California , and Key Biscayne , Florida . This caused a problem in Florida , where Strategic Arms Limitation Talks spray from the nearby sea activated the sensing element ( the residential area reacted against a proposal to neuter the shoreline so the spray would n’t make the lawn ! ) .
But pace back , we have to realize Igloo White as a failed experimentation . Most firsts are .
“ It did n’t work , ” Lukasik says of the virtual rampart in Vietnam . “ Or I should say , it did n’t work as advertised . How do I fuck that ? Because we load everybody aboard eggbeater in ‘ 75 and got the hell out . ”
It may not have work in Vietnam . But it would radically shift the tenor voice on the US - Mexico molding for age to come .
We’re Building a Wall — It’s Just Virtual
The being of the Jasons , the close group of scientists who conceived Igloo White , would finally become known to Americans through the Pentagon Papers . And there was later on a debateamong academicsabout what sort of contribution scientists should be ready to the military establishment in a warfare like Vietnam .
Suddenly the physicists who had avail come through World War II were no longer seen by their peers as heroes . In a dispute like the Vietnam War , technologists resolve job for the military were view with suspicion . Especially as those technologies were bring back from Vietnam to the US - Mexico border .
2005 photo showing a Southern California border monitoring station via AP Photo / Lenny Ignelzi
Whether they infer it in the 1960s or not , the Jasons would come to get wind by the 1980s that the technologies they had held to devise for Vietnam were coming back to the US border .
“ We were working for Customs and Immigration , I pretend , ” legendary physicist and Jason , Freeman Dyson told Ann Finkbeiner for the 2006 bookThe Jason : The Secret History of Science ’s Postwar Elite . Dyson had been ask in to a stumble to the Mexico border in the 1980s to see how the virtual fence idea might work there at the behest of the military . “ We were trying to stop the drug dealings . Simply , we want to prepare ourselves about what was going on . ”
As Todd Miller explicate in his bookBorder Patrol Nation , in 2012 the US - Mexico border contain , “ 377 remote video surveillance systems , 195 local television surveillance systems , 305 large - scale nonintrusive inspections systems , 75 Z Backscatter vans , 261 Recon FLIRs , more than 12,000 sensors , and 41 mobile surveillance system trucks . ”
And the tech has only expanded and gotten more sophisticated . Shit , they ’re even hiding camerasin cactinow .
The applied science developed in wartime inescapably have an unerasable impact on the countries that manufacture them . World War II gave us computers andeven drone pipe . And the Vietnam War expanded the use of those applied science both in Southeast Asia and North America .
Slowly but for certain the playing field of battle would become precisely what General Westmoreland had foretell : 24 - hour monitored battlefields dominate by “ instant communications and almost instant software of highly deadly firepower . ”
What General Westmoreland and others did n’t severalise us was that the field always amount home .
Top illustration by Tara Jacoby
Sources : Air - Supported Anti - Infiltration Barrier Study S-255by the Jason Division ( 1966 ) ; The Jason : The underground History of Science ’s Postwar Elite by Ann Finkbeiner ( 2006);Unattended Ground Sensors and Precision Engagement(1998);Surveillance Technology , 1976 ; auditory sense before theElectronic Battlefield Subcommittee(1970 ) ; The Electronic Battlefield by Paul Dickson ( 1976 ) ; “ Bringing the toy Home From Vietnam , ” New Scientist ( June 15 , 1972 ) , “ They are learn you through walls , in the iniquity of night , while you walk around , and it comes from Vietnam , ” by Robert Barkan , Detroit Free Press(February 18 , 1972);Anti - Infiltration Barrier Technology and the Battle for Southeast Asia , 1966 - 1972(2000);What the Air Force Did in Vietnam and Why(1991);Project CHECO Southeast Asia report(1968 ) ; Sensors being dropped over Vietnam via USAF / Defence Today
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