Comments on: Operation Igloo White

Operation Igloo White

rolypolyman — Mon, 22 May 2006 22:37:17 -0800

"We wired the Ho Chi Minh Trail like a drugstore pinball machine and plugged into it every night." From 1965 to 1975, telemetry from thousands of microphones hidden in remote Vietnam jungles were fed to a massive data processing center in Thailand, where an IBM System/360 [wiki] mapped real-time Vietcong movements to display terminals. The details of Project Igloo White remained compartmentalized and highly classified until only several years ago.

By: bouncebounce

bouncebounce — Mon, 22 May 2006 22:46:11 -0800

Wow, I'm glad all that gold-plating worked out so well for ya.

By: cenoxo

cenoxo — Mon, 22 May 2006 22:47:04 -0800

April 29, 1975 — In the end, all that extra intelligence data didn't seem to help very much...

By: Operation Afterglow

Operation Afterglow — Mon, 22 May 2006 22:49:23 -0800

"We didn't lose Vietnam, it was a TIE!"

By: freebird

freebird — Mon, 22 May 2006 22:52:15 -0800

One such notion was to train pigeons to carry munitions, land on North Vietnamese trucks, and explode on touchdown. Among other difficulties, the pigeons couldn't tell a communist truck from a noncommunist one. Hah!

By: fake

fake — Mon, 22 May 2006 23:19:59 -0800

Awesome post, thanks rolypolyman.

By: hattifattener

hattifattener — Mon, 22 May 2006 23:20:24 -0800

That's pretty interesting. (I also wonder what the "Black Crow" device was. Detecting ignition RFI?)

By: John of Michigan

John of Michigan — Mon, 22 May 2006 23:31:25 -0800

By: Paris Hilton

Paris Hilton — Tue, 23 May 2006 00:07:57 -0800

Well, that's an intresting idea. But I guess it didn't work out all that well.

By: juv3nal

juv3nal — Tue, 23 May 2006 00:54:01 -0800

I think this underscores the fact--lost time and again by invading superior armies--that all the technology and know-how in the world is usually not enough to defeat a committed (though militarily weaker) insurgency. Not so sure about that. Usually insurgencies have a significant advantage from familiarity with indigenous terrain and the experience employing optimal tactics for said terrain. Invading armies typically don't have all the know how in the world: sure you may have drilled in altitude/climate/terrain/whatever, but the guys on the other side were born there.

By: antifuse

antifuse — Tue, 23 May 2006 02:00:06 -0800

The details of Project Igloo White remained compartmentalized and highly classified until only several years ago. This sentence just bugs me. "[U]ntil only several years ago" sounds like it's trying to say it was only recently declassified, except for the "several years ago" part. umm... sorry. /derail

By: the cuban

the cuban — Tue, 23 May 2006 02:13:07 -0800

Great post, thanks.

By: pracowity

pracowity — Tue, 23 May 2006 03:20:54 -0800

all the technology and know-how in the world is usually not enough to defeat a committed (though militarily weaker) insurgency. It wasn't just that.

The campaign was a "measured and limited air action" to signal US "determination and commitment" to Hanoi. Administration officials did not want to provoke "a wider war." They feared that stronger use of force might lead to a confrontation with the Soviet Union or China.

So the Americans were also fighting the technology of Russia and China, who obviously had all the technology they needed to scare the Americans. It is the reluctance of superior forces to wage absolute war, for whatever reason, that usually saves insurgents. If a technologically superior force decided to destroy an enemy society -- kill everyone (including all noncombatants), burn and pave over everything, annex the country, and move in -- an insurgency would not last long, not unless an outside force helped them.

By: rxrfrx

rxrfrx — Tue, 23 May 2006 03:54:03 -0800

If a technologically superior force decided to destroy an enemy society -- kill everyone How is that even the least bit relevant? Yeah, we could've just nuked all of SE Asia. Then we would've won!!!

By: PenDevil

PenDevil — Tue, 23 May 2006 03:56:22 -0800

I saw a documentary on the Ho Chi Minh trail on Discovery which talked about this. They mentioned that the Viet Cong managed to make parts of it useless by finding the microphones and sensors and either moving them off the trails or leaving old motors running for hours at differeing points which would feed garbage data into the system.

By: Thorzdad

Thorzdad — Tue, 23 May 2006 04:20:01 -0800

Administration officials did not want to provoke "a wider war." Ah. So that Cambodia thing must've been a few bad apples, huh?

By: caddis

caddis — Tue, 23 May 2006 05:10:21 -0800

dministration officials did not want to provoke "a wider war." Ah. So that Cambodia thing must've been a few bad apples, huh? posted by Thorzdad at 7:20 AM EST on May 23 [+fave] [!] I don't think they were talking about Cambodia.

By: Thorzdad

Thorzdad — Tue, 23 May 2006 05:38:41 -0800

Perhaps not. However, the silliness of their statement stands. If you aren't wanting to provoke a wider war, you certainly don't go into neighboring countries either. Provocation is provocation.

By: basicchannel

basicchannel — Tue, 23 May 2006 05:46:19 -0800

"If DCPG said it needed 10,000 chocolate cream pies from the Army by noon the next day, it would get them and without any questions," said a project member quoted by Paul Dickson in The Electronic Battlefield. Hilarious. Glad to see things have changed since that time.

By: the cuban

the cuban — Tue, 23 May 2006 06:53:08 -0800

Perhaps not. However, the silliness of their statement stands. If you aren't wanting to provoke a wider war, you certainly don't go into neighboring countries either. Provocation is provocation. I think you're confused over the chronology of the Indo China Wars. The article refers to the US position in Spring '66 - three years and an administration change before Kissinger and Nixon expanded the war into Cambodia.

By: cenoxo

cenoxo — Tue, 23 May 2006 07:15:04 -0800

The Use and Abuse of Technology In Insurgent Warfare:

Despite the many analyses of the Vietnam war produced by the military, none has adequately considered the fundamental question of how the U.S. could so completely dominate the battlefield and yet lose the war. ... A clue to understanding the Vietnam paradox lies in the term "military science." No one can doubt the importance of military science to the success of military operations in today's world. The firepower provided by today's weapons dominates the modern battlefield. The procurement of those same systems is a complex science in itself. However, successful military operations are a combination of the application of military science and military art. ... Successful military campaigns are the result of some sort of balance between the two. The balance may, in fact, depend on the status of the opposing forces--their equality. Reasonable equality may not exist between opposing forces. The weaker side must then depend on superior military art to achieve victory. The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were forced to depend on the use of military art because of the overwhelming resources and superior technology of the U.S. The Communist confused the Americans with a package of political, psychological, economic and military warfare.

There's a profound difference between making tools and knowing how to skillfully use them. Has the turnover rate of science and technology become so rapid that we never really learn what to do with it, and must resort to continuous reinvention to overcome its shortcomings?

By: bhouston

bhouston — Tue, 23 May 2006 07:49:10 -0800

Interesting comment towards the end of the article (sorry for the big excerpt, I tried to cut it down as much as possible):

It is politically incorrect in academic circles - and not much acceptable elsewhere - to recognize or acknowledge the benefit derived by millions of people strongly employed and heavily invested here. Like it or not, our wealth derives from the blood of others. No nation is imune from this, and none can point fingers with impunity. Warfare and Commerce are brother and sister to our house, and whether or not the human prediliction to warfare is natural or unnatural is a philosophical discussion best left to others. [...] Commerce has historically developed out of a perceived need for war-fighting technology, and once declassified, transfers to the marketplace. [...] The schizophrenia in academic thinking between the immense cultural and financial benefits derived from Government-funded research and development versus the dire warnings of a burgeoning Big Brother atmosphere must be considered either unreasoning paranoia or pure Kant: publishing polemics by poorly-researched academics looking for tenure. If there is a misuse of power, it will develop due to efforts on the part of Little Brother - the commercial marketplace itself. Viewed from either perspective, the historical facts do not seem to square with the recrudecence of neo-Luddite behaviour and it's doctrine of Political Correctness, which commands obeyance - not analysis - in the finest of didactic traditions. Eric Blair (George Orwell) would have loved it.

By: afu

afu — Tue, 23 May 2006 08:05:35 -0800

It is possible to beat an insurgency militarily, you just have to be really brutal about it. The French had largely defeated the Algerian insurgents in the Algerian war for independence using tactics much worse than what the US did in Vietnam (e.g. intentional bombing of purely civilian targets, setting up concentration camps, reprisal killings). However, "war is the continuation of politics by other means," so even though the French were successful militarily, the politics of the situation were against them and Algeria still gained it's independence a few years after it looked like the French had won militarily.

By: Chuckles

Chuckles — Tue, 23 May 2006 08:41:20 -0800

Great article. Reveals how serious the divisions over Vietnam still are, in US military circles. Trying to prove the effectiveness of one tool or another 30 years too late.. And, as I read it, always minimizing the accomplishment of the North Vietnamese (am I wrong here?). afu, I know virtually nothing about Algeria, but from wikipedia:

The French army shifted its tactics at the end of 1958 from dependence on quadrillage to the use of mobile forces deployed on massive search-and-destroy missions against ALN strongholds. Within the next year, Salan's successor, General Maurice Challe, appeared to have suppressed major rebel resistance. But political developments had already overtaken the French army's successes.

The new tactic worked, as new tactics often do. Nobody knows what would have happened if the enemy had a thorough opportunity to respond to it. Sounds like a classic strategy to me - declare victory and go home!

By: NationalKato

NationalKato — Tue, 23 May 2006 09:52:10 -0800

Sounds like a classic strategy to me - declare victory and go home! My father does this occasionally when he beats me at darts.

By: LarryC

LarryC — Tue, 23 May 2006 09:57:44 -0800

Good article, though not news. James William Gibson's excellent The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam covers the same ground. As I recall, none of the technology proved very effective, it either broke down too quickly, or required the intelligence to be processed at such length it was no longer relevent when the results came in, or the Vietnamese learned how to game it. But the technological hubris of the Americans was huge. Gibson has a quote from Kissinger where he says that technology has removed all limits from the excercise of American power. Damn, we didn't learn a thing, did we?

By: A189Nut

A189Nut — Tue, 23 May 2006 11:24:50 -0800

Much of this was reported in the mid 1980s. I have a couple of popular encylopedias of the war that go into detail

By: srboisvert

srboisvert — Tue, 23 May 2006 13:46:09 -0800

The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were forced to depend on the use of military art because of the overwhelming resources and superior technology of the U.S. The Communist confused the Americans with a package of political, psychological, economic and military warfare. It's in block quotes so must be some really special type of pooh. There's a profound difference between making tools and knowing how to skillfully use them. Not how. Why and when.

By: Grimgrin

Grimgrin — Tue, 23 May 2006 13:55:51 -0800

LarryC, a great many people learned a great many things from Vietnam. It's just that the lessons were deliberately forgotten in the mean time.

By: rolypolyman

rolypolyman — Tue, 23 May 2006 16:14:17 -0800

A189 nut: The actual method by which the United States and its Allies accomplished that is however, less detailed because of its previously highly Classified status. Thirty years after the fact, this material is now being declassified. Just sayin'. I saw bits of it too in the 80s.

By: homunculus

homunculus — Tue, 23 May 2006 20:34:31 -0800

The Pulitzer-winning reporters who exposed the U.S. Tiger Force's atrocities in Vietnam discuss why the case was whitewashed -- and its scary parallels to Iraq.

By: taosbat

taosbat — Tue, 23 May 2006 21:33:55 -0800

Weren't the Brits confident that their superior military (technologically and every other way), despite their long supply lines and the fact that the insurgency had greater familiarity with the terrain...weren't they confident of defeating the Colonist Rabble? What goes around comes around...

By: cobra libre

cobra libre — Thu, 25 May 2006 12:20:39 -0800

afu: It is possible to beat an insurgency militarily, you just have to be really brutal about it. The French had largely defeated the Algerian insurgents in the Algerian war for independence using tactics much worse than what the US did in Vietnam (e.g. intentional bombing of purely civilian targets, setting up concentration camps, reprisal killings). I am no expert in either conflict, and I don't doubt for a moment the general notion of significant differences between the two, but this particular statement is at least arguable. I would cite the strategic hamlet program and Project Phoenix as examples of similar tactics practiced by the U.S. in Vietnam. I'm also a bit astonished by the implication that the U.S.'s counterinsurgency efforts weren't "really brutal."

By: overanxious ducksqueezer

overanxious ducksqueezer — Thu, 25 May 2006 12:31:06 -0800

I seemed to remember absorbing the fact that the French still tend to feel a sense of shame in connection with the Algerian war, which this research project seems to substantiate: Repression stems from the official reluctance to recognise the war, which has lent substance to the notion of a sale guerre, of French guilt and a sense that this period is one of French shame over which a veil must be drawn. There's no point in defeating an insurgency if you're going to view it as a national embarrassment.