Innovation: Who Made That Digital Camouflage?

What started on vehicles eventually moved onto clothing. In 2002, the Marines adopted a uniform inspired by the digital-

camouflage idea, with a pixel pattern that gave soldiers the look of video-game characters. O’Neill, who retired in 2001, found himself working on the project. “I helped the Marine Corps out,” he says, “particularly on the physical descriptions for patent rights.”

The fabric came in two color schemes — one for woodland terrain and one for the desert. In 2004, the U.S. Army announced that it would use digital camouflage on its uniforms as well. But O’Neill was dismayed when it issued the camouflage pattern in only one color meant to hide soldiers anywhere in the world, from sand dunes to jungles. “I had 10 cat fits and a dog fit,” he says, because he believed a so-called universal camouflage would be “useless everywhere.” After prodding by Representative John Murtha of Pennsylvania, the Army began to re-evaluate the pattern in 2009.

“Everybody suddenly wanted digital camouflage,” O’Neill says. The problem was that “everybody didn’t know how to do it.”

The Army has been field-testing new camouflage to replace the universal pattern and, in the interim, has issued an unpixelated fabric called MultiCam to some troops. The pattern uses seven colors.

INVISIBLE CITIES

Guy Cramer is the chief executive and president of the HyperStealth Biotechnology Corporation, which specializes in camouflage design.

Your company has been working on a “Harry Potter” cloak that you claim can render people invisible. How does it work? It bends light in the same way a fiber-optic cable bends light. So if a soldier was wearing this, it would work from every angle. Right now, research scientists have made objects disappear, but you have to be looking directly at the object, and it can be only a half-inch tall. But our company can do an entire building or a ship or a submarine.

You’ve reported that you have shown this to the U.S. and Canadian militaries, but some remain skeptical. Why won’t you demonstrate this to the general public? Do you want the North Koreans to have access to this? I’ve been bombarded by people who want to see the real thing and wonder how much it costs. But this is not a moneymaking scheme. This is about the safety of the troops.

What’s the next step? We have to put it into production. But how do we do that so that people who are on the production line don’t talk about how this thing works? We’re talking about using retired Special Forces people on the assembly line — retired Navy SEALs, for instance.