FOOLING THE MIND'S EYE

What Soldiers and Fashion Designers Can Learn from the Cuttlefish

An air-shredding volley of bullets headed straight toward your soft, woefully under armored body can have a powerful clarifying effect on your most recent life choices. What's happening? Where are they shooting from? How can I hide?

Once might be bad timing, an unlucky brush with death. But when the bullets keep coming, on different days and in different places, the question changes: Why does this keep happening? You start to look a little further back for answers. Bad luck starts to look more like a bad pattern.

A bad pattern was exactly what kept getting soldiers in the U.S. Army nearly killed, according to Major Kevin "Kit" Parker. Parker is a professor of bioengineering and applied physics at Harvard University, but two decades ago he was just a Southern boy who'd decided to join the army partway through graduate school, completing basic training in 1992 and getting commissioned as an officer in 1994.

"Military service is a little bit more common in my family or in the neck of the woods where I'm from — so, you know, if you watch NASCAR and you're very susceptible to good advertising, you might find yourself in the army," Parker says, with a laugh.

After joining the Army Reserves, Parker ended up serving two tours of duty in Afghanistan, from 2002 to 2003 and in 2009, and twice in 2011 as part of a special science advisory mission called the gray team. The 2009 tour was particularly rough, a seven-month stretch when Parker's unit just couldn't seem to duck the militants. Wherever they went, their convoys kept getting pinned down by gunfire.

"It was a very rough combat tour; I was getting shot at quite a bit," Parker said. "One day I was out with some Afghan national police and we were on this kind of desert plain that was on the other side of a mountain. There was no vegetation, nothing — and I'm looking at my shirt, this ... bluish-green pixelated pattern, and I'm looking at the dirt around me and I thought, 'I stick out like a sore thumb here!'"

The problem was the camouflage on their uniforms. Known as Universal Camouflage Pattern, or UCP, it was rolled out in 2004 to the tune of $5 billion after several years of development. Blue, green, and pixelated, the design was meant to be an all-terrain garment that would eliminate the need for multiple uniforms. But instead of letting them blend in to all environments, this one-shade-fits-all suit made the army major and his fellow soldiers stand out against what was often a barren, rocky landscape.

"This was a budget-driven decision, rather than a science-driven decision," Parker said.

There was a combat cameraman on the day that Parker looked around his blue-suited body and had his horrible realization. The cameraman took a photo of Parker down on one knee — an image that would serve as inspiration when he arrived back home.

"All I had to do was kind of look back at my photographs from the war and I see that picture of me out on one knee out in the desert," Parker said. "It's like slightly less conspicuous than if I'd been holding a big sign over my head in Pashtun that said, 'Shoot me.'"

Parker wasn't the only one with this problem. The camouflage was making soldiers in Afghanistan easy targets — and in 2009 the issue finally reached the ears of now-deceased U.S. Rep. John Murtha (D, Pennsylvania), who reportedly heard from noncommissioned officer Rangers while on a visit to Fort Benning, Georgia. Study after study began to come out showing that UCP was a sub-par camouflage. One report in particular, conducted by U.S. Army Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center, showed that four other camouflage patterns performed 16 percent to 36 percent better than UCP across the test's woodland, desert, and urban settings. At least one of those, known as MultiCam, had been available since 2002 — which means a $5 billion expense on the research and development of these uniforms could have been avoided.

According to news reports, the issue wasn't just the colors, or the pixelation (a technique used by several more successful camouflage patterns). The problem was also the pattern's scale. It was too small, and suffered from a phenomenon known as "isoluminance," where a pattern's colors are so close together that they blend when seen from a distance and make the entire form stand out. In the case of UCP's light-toned colors, the soldiers' outlines became light-colored silhouettes, making them easy to see against the background. In other words, it could be making the soldiers more visible and thus, less safe.

In the wake of public and insider outcry over UCP, MultiCam was adopted as a temporary fill-in pattern for Afghanistan; a new pattern similar to MultiCam was reportedly debuted in 2015. But when it comes to developing new, effective military camouflage, Parker said, "We still aren't getting it right."

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There has to be a smarter way to approach camouflage than coming up with a one-size-fits-all pattern, Parker thought. The problem hung in the back of his mind after he returned from his second tour of duty. And then, in the fall of 2009, some two months after returning home, Parker got a call from Evelyn Hu, an optical physicist at Harvard, inviting him to work on a project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — DARPA, that defense department outfit that midwifed the Internet in the 1960s and 1970s and still funds cutting-edge, futuristic research today. Hu's project, however, was at least fifty million years old: the cuttlefish, an alien-looking sea creature that — at least in the United States — is less well-known than its close relatives the octopus and the squid.

While the cuttlefish may not be as recognized as its eight-armed cousins, it rivals them in a number of aspects, including its intelligence and its incredible shape-shifting, shade-shifting skin. The animal can change its coloration in about 300 milliseconds. Hu wanted to partner up with a marine biologist named Roger Hanlon, a researcher at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL)in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and a leading expert in cephalopod behavior (the group that includes cuttlefish, squid, octopuses, and nautiluses). And Parker...