Environmental Analogs, Color Atlases, and the U.S. Army’s Cold War Environmental Inquiry

• In Event: Environmental Extractivism, Speculation, and Impacts in Battle and Beyond

Abstract

At the dawn of the Cold War and the United States’ commitment to deterring communism across the globe, U.S. Army leaders confronted a new environmental dilemma: they needed to create a globally effective rapid deployment force. Leaders could only do so by preparing their soldiers to fight in every global environment (including any season in these environments). Scientists and experts employed by the army tried to enhance this global efficacy by simplifying and generalizing world environments, and then making those simplifications useful across all scales, from the intensely local tactical scale to the strategic scale of the entire globe.
Two speculative projects illustrate the U.S. Army’s environmental dilemma and the nature of the institution’s environmental understanding: a study of environmental analogy across the world, comparing areas of the world to the army’s field-testing areas, and an atlas of the prevailing colors of world environments. For these programs army leaders turned to environmental experts including Paul Siple—a famed polar explorer who co-invented the measurement of the wind-chill index—among other explorers and scientists. Siple and his peers created the specific way the U.S. Army studied and speculated about world environments, which emphasized the similarities of the deserts, tropics, and cold weather areas. But this category-based approach often ran into problems of scale and utility in practice, as they could rarely strike a balance of a useful scale between broad strategic use or smaller areas giving tactical advantage. The analogs project and color atlas show how the U.S. Army’s understandings of the environment mattered beyond the effects of climate and terrain on an individual battle or campaign to how it prepared for global deployment, spent national funding, and how effectively the military protected the nation.

Author

• Paul Landsberg, US Air Force