(photo: Department of Defense)

The American M60A1 tank pictured above may appear to be sporting a very modern digital camouflage scheme, but it was actually photographed in 1985 in West Germany. This tank’s paint was a late refinement to an experimental program in camouflage design aborted by NATO color standardization in the 1980s.

While contemporary pixel camouflages might seem the essence of modernity, they actually originate from 1970s research. Modern digital camouflage was first introduced in the late 1990s with the Canadian Disruptive Pattern (CADPAT) and a similar design was later adopted by the United States in this decade (MARPAT by the Marines and UCP for the Army).

But the distinctive pixelated look of these schemes was almost entirely derivative of work originally pioneered by US Army Lieutenant Colonel Timothy R. O’Neill, professor of engineering psychology at the US Military Academy. O’Neil designed the Dual Texture Camouflage (Dual-Tex) system. A camo scheme that was actually adopted and put into field use in 1978 by the Army’s 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment, then stationed on the West German-Czechoslovakian border.

But why did this advanced and effective camouflage system get passed over in the 1980s? Guy Cramer says the explanation is purely socio-psychological:

Trying to convince a layman that squares work better in nature can be a difficult sell, it goes against what people think they perceive in natural settings.
(United Dynamics)

Here I have replicated the camo pattern depicted on the 1985 tank in a tiling file:

Files:
Small JPEG - 72dpi (34kb)
Large JPEG - 1000dpi (64kb)