From TheBestLinks.com
Operation Igloo White was an expensive military operation run by the United States Air Force from 1967 to 1972 using computers and sensors to automate bombing of North Vietnamese convoys on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in southern Laos.
Operation Igloo White was based out of Infiltration Surveillance Center (ISC) at Nakhom Phanom in Thailand, at the time the largest building in Southeast Asia. At the ISC, technicians analyzed banks of video displays which were controlled by IBM 360/65 computers connected to thousands of sensors hidden along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos. Disguised as twigs, plants, and animal droppings, the sensors were designed to detect various forms of human activity: body heat, truck engines, motion, even scent.
When the sensors detected a human presence, it was represented as a moving white "worm" on a map grid at the ISC. The computers at the ISC would then calculate the "worm"'s direction and speed, and radio the coordinates to Phantom F-4 jets which were patrolling the area. The navigation system on the planes would allow the ISC computers to guide them to the map grid square to be attacked (the "box"), and the ISC computers could even control the release of the bombs without the pilot's involvement. Most of the time no Air Force personnel even saw the target, the system was primarily used at night.
The system cost around $1 billion per year to operate, but was justified by the military as being responsible for massive blows to the North Vietnamese forces. Officials claimed that Igloo White destroyed 35,000 North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao trucks, with each carrying 10,000 pounds of supplies meant for the Communist insurgency in South Vietnam.
However it is unlikely that the official estimates were reflective of actual war success. In 1971 a United States Senate subcommittee report noted that the the "truck kills claimed by the Air Force [in Igloo White] last year greatly exceeds the number of trucks believed by the Embassy to be in all of North Vietnam." Reconnaissance flights flown by day almost always failed to locate the supposedly destroyed vehicles. In response, the military claimed that perhaps the Vietcong were to have "dragged" the destroyed trucks into the jungle during the night.
The more realistic answer is that the Vietnamese soldiers had simply learned to confuse the sensors using decoys, provoking countless tons of bombs released onto empty jungle, which they could then cross safely as the bombings would destroy the sensors until they were replaced. In 1972, despite four years of computer-controlled bombing of their supply lines, the North Vietnamese were able to field a major tank and artillery offensive inside South Vietnam. Despite these obvious shortcomings, the military establishment continued to regard Igloo White as a success, claiming it had destroyed up to 90% of the equipment transported along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
The historian of technology Paul N. Edwards has argued that Operation Igloo White
- "resembles a microcosmic version of the whole United States approach to the Vietnam War. Under Robert McNamara, the Department of Defense completed a process of centralization begun by President Truman, making the service secretaries responsible to the Secretary of Defense in practice as well as in principle."
Edwards links Operation Igloo White to a process of automation and internationalization of military conflict which became predominant in the Cold War, by which the minutiae wars became managed less by field commanders as by the Pentagon, using high technology to augment or replace human action.
Further reading
- Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
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