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Slideshow: A visual history of military camouflage

Modern military camouflage traces its origins to World War I, when the French army gathered a cadre of artists in three top-secret workshops near the western front. The blotchy smocks they created sparked the popular imagination. Camouflage was not issued widely, though, because of the high cost and low production capacity: every yard of camouflage was a hand-painted work of art.

U.S. marines in the Pacific wore industrially manufactured camouflage during World War II, but its use was limited in Europe because German paratroopers were known for their camouflage uniforms, and American officials didn’t want confusion to cause fratricide. Camo uniforms were more widely issued to U.S. troops in the early 1970s, when jungle prints provided immediate advantages in Vietnam. Patterns and colors evolved during the ’80s and ’90s, but the basic look remained the same: green and brown—striped, swirled, and blobbed. Then in the late ’90s, the Canadians adopted the next generation of camouflage: they went digital. The Canadian Army’s pattern, called CADPAT (for “Canadian Disruptive Pattern”), replaced swirls with pixel-shaped blocks.

That’s when Guy Cramer got into the game. A former world-class paintball player, Cramer was then developing hyperbaric chambers and passive negative-ion generators for professional hockey players (a story for another day). He was also a Canadian taxpayer.

“I looked at the pattern and I thought, You’ve got to be kidding me. My tax dollars for this?” CADPAT looked unlike any natural background a soldier would encounter. Using a $100 computer-graphics program, he cooked up his own digital pattern in about three hours. He posted it on the Web and labeled it GUYPAT. As luck would have it, King Abdullah of Jordan was at that moment shopping for new uniforms. A Jordanian official spotted Cramer’s design and cold-called him. “We like what we see,” the caller said.

Cramer threw himself into the opportunity. Giving himself a crash course in the science of camouflage and eyesight, he discovered that digital camo made a lot of sense. The idea had been conceived by Lieutenant Colonel Timothy O’Neill, who founded the U.S. Military Academy’s engineering-psychology program. In 1976, O’Neill painted an armored personnel carrier in a crude block-print pattern he called “Dual-Tex.” The results were astounding. Spotters took significantly longer to find the Dual-Tex vehicle than one with a standard paint job.

The reason has to do with the way the eye and the brain interact. The eye has evolved to conduct two operations simultaneously. Focal vision involves our direct attention, as when the eye centers on words that we’re reading. Meanwhile, ambient vision is constantly processing visual information in our periphery. It’s trained to pick up cues of motion, color, and shape—as when, say, you spot a mouse scampering along the baseboard—and to ignore what it perceives as visual white noise.