When many people hear the name DARPA which stands for the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, most think of secret military development work, the sort of place it would come up with a Terminator-style robot and the Skynet control system that would allow it to try and take over the world.
But DARPA has been responsible not only for changing the face of a military but also bringing about technology that has changed every single one of our lives over last 60 plus years and one project called Igloo white would prove to be pivotal to the connected world of today and how the military works.
DARPA was created in 1958 in response to the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union. The US government was so taken aback by the technological leap that the Soviets had made with rocket technology that a new government department which would be affiliated to the Department of Defence was created to come up with far-fetched ideas and technologies that would be at the edge of our technological capabilities and sometimes beyond it for years to come.
The US had already been caught out by the Soviet Union with the atomic bomb, thinking that they would have the lead for many years to come when in reality the Soviets exploded their first nuclear device just four years after the end of World War 2.
Although little did the US know at the time that much of their secret atomic work of the Manhattan Project had been smuggled out to the Soviet Union through a spy network, the joke in Moscow was that Stalin knew more about the American atomic bomb than Roosevelt.
This was a constant game of cat and mouse with one side creating an advantage and the other trying to catch up as fast as possible.
The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), the D for defence was added in 1972, then taken away in 1993 and then added again to finally become DARPA in 1996.
ARPA was suggested to US President Dwight D Eisenhower by the President’s Scientific Advisory Committee to research and develope of science and technology that would reach far beyond the immediate military requirements, to create weapons and defence systems that might be used 10, 15 or 25 years down the line.
ARPA’s first directors would be Roy Johnson, from of General Electric and Herbert York from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who would be his scientific assistant.
Johnson and Harper we’re keen on space projects but after the formation of NASA in 1958 all the space projects were transferred there.
New directors came and ARPA pivoted towards “high-risk”, “high-gain”, “far out” R&D Which was embraced by the nations scientists and research universities, Many of the scientists and researchers that would go on to run and be highly placed in ARPA had worked on the Manhattan Project and other top programs. The very brightest and cleverest people were brought on board to work on top secret programmes with blue sky thinking and nothing seemingly off the table.
The Vietnam War would prove to be pivotal for ARPA and the research that went on during that time would change the world that we live in now.
ARPA would be the overall Project leader and provide funding and would work with many other areas of the defence industry, leading universities and think tanks.
One of those groups would be Jason, an independent group of top scientists that would advise the US government on science and technology issues that we’re of a sensitive nature.
In 1966, the US defence department we’re desperately seeking ways to win the Vietnam war. The Jasons we’re studying whether or not the Pentagon should use tactical nuclear weapons to cut off the Ho Chi Minh trail that was funnelling men, materials and weapons for the Vietcong, that idea was eventually dismissed as too dangerous and might bring the Soviet Union and China into a new WW3.
Carpet bombing had been ineffective, weather warfare had not worked and other projects had little to no effect in stemming the flow.
The problem was that although they knew where the Ho Chi Minh trail was it, was a network of paths and unmade roads and because of the tree coverage they couldn’t easily see what was being transported and when, especially when most of it was done under the cover of darkness.
So they came up with an idea of an electronic fence, a method of using thousands of sensors in a network that would be dropped from aircraft and be disguised to look like tree branches sticking out of the ground but would have audio, thermal, electromagnetic and even chemical sensors and these would transmit information to aircraft flying above the forest to pinpoint where people and materials we’re moving in realtime.
This information would then be sent to a central computer based in Thailand that will be able to build up a picture of the enemies’ movements and provide targeting information for aircraft to attack.
The idea was that they would be able to remotely monitor the battle field in near realtime with less reliance on soldiers having to go out on dangerous scout missions and direct fire support to where it was needed most.
Although some of the Army top brass had pretty low expectations of the project which became known as igloo white, ARPA and Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara really needed it to work.
The project was so secret, that the US troops on the ground and those dropping the three-foot-long sensor pods from aircraft didn’t know what they were.
Originally McNamara thought a real fence with guards would be better, but this would go on to act as a cover story for the US army so that if any information did come out about the electronic version they could say it was a bit of miscommunication.
The size of a project was on also another scale. The cost to build it was between $1bn and $1.7bn with an estimated $1 billion a year to run, about $14 billion a year in today’s money, so it really had to prove itself.
The problem was they were using 1960s technology which is nowhere near what we have now. Cheap off the shelf devices like microphones were found to be too fragile and the batteries had little in the way of runtime and would last only a couple of weeks instead of the months that would be required out in the field.
At first nickel cadmium batteries would be used but eventually the real solution to the problem came when lithium batteries were developed, something which we have come to depend upon today.
Sensors were also much more primitive than now in fact, the first acoustic detectors were sono-buoys already used by the Navy to detect enemy submarines with microphones replacing the sonar detectors.
To help the acoustic sensors work and detect people walking by, acoustic mines, tiny explosive capsules that made the sound of a firecracker when they were stepped on were dropped in huge quantities.
Metal detecting sensors could be fooled into thinking that civilians carrying shovels might be troops carrying guns and larger items might be trucks. By the end of the war the Air Force claimed that 75,000 trucks had been destroyed as a result of the sensor network but according to the CIA there were only about 6000 trucks in the whole of North Vietnam.
Radio frequency sensors would pick up transmissions from radio backpacks and chemical sensors would act as people sniffers looking for the smell of sweat and urine.
The North Vietnamese eventually found some of these “people sniffer” sensors and worked out what they were for. They would leave buckets of urine nearby and this would trigger the sensors to indicate there were concentrations of troops in the area or on the move nearby which the US would then go and bomb, but of course, there was nothing in the area because it was just a setup.
What ARPA was doing with the igloo white was creating the first electronic battlefield using sensors to work out where your enemies were and keeping your own soldiers away from danger. This is something which is at the absolute basis of the modern military today but then it was right at the cutting edge and sometimes that edge wasn’t very sharp.
To get the information back from the sensors aircraft would have to be circulating in the area waiting to pick up signals, this information would then have to be sent back to be processed by a huge computer system based in Thailand.
The state-of-the-art facility called the Infiltration Surveillance Centre was built at Nakhon Phanom Air Base and covered 200,000 sq feet it was though to be the largest single building in southeast Asia at the time and filled with IBM 360 computers and IBM 2260 monitors and a civilian workforce of IBM contractors.
The problem was that the sensors could not talk directly to the computer centre, if the relay aircraft were not in range or not available there would be no signals to process.
It also took time and the lag between the sensor data being picked up and someone being able to interpret it and make a decision on whether to make an attack was often too long which frustrated the army trying to make real time decisions.
SO, the scientists at ARPA thought about the situation and in bold move flipped the the whole thing on its head and created a whole new way of looking at the battlefield.
Instead of having lots of cheap and not very reliable sensors on the ground with planes acting as a signal relay, why not put really good sensors on aircraft and make them remotely controlled with the ability to loiter in the area for long periods without endangering any crews and send the data directly to the computer centre. What they did in essence, created the modern surveillance drone or UAP and the electronic battle field of today.
Back in 1969 General William Westmoreland, commander of United States forces during the Vietnam War from 1964 to 1968 stated the following in a speech
“On the battlefield of the future, enemy forces will be located, tracked, and targeted almost instantaneously through the use of data links, computer assisted intelligence evaluation, and automated fire control,”
What DARPA did with Project Igloo white was to create the basic battlefield of the future and in the process speed up the development of technology which we all take for granted with things like the sensors in our smartphones and the high speed networks that link us together with the internet.
This was just one area where DARPA changed the world into the 24/7/365 always on, always watching, always listening and always working world we live in now, whether you think it was for the better is for you to decide.
So thanks for watching and I’ll see you in the next video.
