May 1968, Newi date forward operating base. A highranking US colonel unlocks a reinforced transport case to reveal the Pentagon’s newest secret weapon to his allies. Inside sits the XM2, a chemical detector worth millions of dollars. A miracle of engineering designed to smell the enemy from the sky.
The Americans called it the future of warfare. The US officers expected awe. Instead, a dirty, exhausted Australian SAS corporal, fresh from a 10-day silent patrol, stared at the buzzing machine, looked the colonel dead in the eye, and delivered a warning that silenced the entire command tent. “Sir, if your men take that thing into my jungle, I will shoot it myself before it gets us all killed.
” Why did the most lethal jungle fighters in Vietnam believe American technology was a death sentence? How is it possible that a billion-dollar sensor network monitored by supercomputers in Thailand was defeated by a plastic bucket of buffalo urine? While the US Army relied on lights and sirens, the Australians were doing something the Pentagon called impossible, hunting the Vietkong using nothing but their ears, their noses, and a pair of cheap tennis shoes.
This is the untold story of the high-tech humiliation. the story of why the SAS threw American gadgets into the mud to survive. But to understand how the primitive defeated the advanced, we have to go back to the very first joint patrol where the machine said safe but the jungle said run. The question that echoed through that command tent in May of 1968 would haunt Pentagon analysts for the next four decades.
How could a barefoot corporal with no electronic equipment whatsoever outperform a $3.7 million machine designed by the brightest minds at MIT? The answer would humiliate the most powerful military on Earth and remain classified for 40 years. The XM2 personnel detector represented the absolute pinnacle of American military engineering in the late 1960s.
Its development had consumed seven years of research, employed over 200 scientists and engineers from the most prestigious laboratories in the United States, and produced a device that could theoretically detect human presence from the chemical signatures left by sweat, urine, and metabolic processes. The Pentagon believed they had created the ultimate hunter.
What they had actually created was the ultimate liability that would become a running joke among enemy commanders. American soldiers called it the people sniffer with a mixture of pride and dark humor. The device worked by drawing air through a series of chemical filters that could detect ammonia compounds in concentrations as low as three parts per billion.
On paper, this extraordinary sensitivity seemed like a decisive advantage. in the humid jungles of Vietnam. It became a catastrophic flaw that would cost American taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars and accomplish absolutely nothing except revealing patrol positions to the very enemy it was supposed to detect. But the people sniffer disaster was just the appetizer.
The main course would cost $1 billion and fail even more spectacularly. The Australian SAS operators who witnessed American reliance on electronic detection systems had developed a completely different philosophy of jungle warfare. Their approach was based on something they called the smell doctrine, a systematic method of using human senses that predated electronic sensors by approximately 200,000 years of human evolution.
While American patrols carried detection devices that weighed over 15 pounds and required constant battery changes, Australian operators carried nothing but their own finely tuned nervous systems and noses trained to detect what no machine could identify. The smell doctrine began with a counterintuitive requirement that horrified American hygiene officers when they first learned about it.
Three days before any patrol into enemy territory, Australian SAS operators stopped using soap, deodorant, toothpaste, or any product containing artificial fragrances of any kind. They began eating Vietnamese food, particularly the pungent fermented fish sauce called Newok Mom, that formed the basis of the local diet.
The smell was so overwhelming to anyone accustomed to Western hygiene standards, that American soldiers often refused to share helicopters with Australian patrols, complaining that the odor made them physically ill. What those American soldiers did not understand was that this deliberate and uncomfortable transformation served two critical purposes that no electronic device could ever replicate.
No matter how many millions the Pentagon invested in research and development, the science behind Australian methods was about to make American technology look like an expensive toy. First, by eliminating artificial scents and adopting local dietary patterns, Australian operators became alacally invisible to enemy trackers who had learned over years of conflict to identify Western soldiers by the distinctive smell of American soap, chemical insect repellent, and processed food that no Vietnamese peasant would ever consume. The Vietkong knew what
Americans smelled like, and they used that knowledge to hunt them. Australians who smelled like the local population could pass through areas where Americans would be detected within minutes. Second, by saturating their own senses with local odors over several days of preparation, Australian operators could detect the subtle scent variations that indicated enemy presence in ways that seemed almost supernatural to observers who had not undergone the training.
Vietkong soldiers who had recently eaten their distinctive diet, smoked the harsh local tobacco called thualk lao, or simply sweated in their jungle hiding positions produced chemical signatures that trained Australian noses could detect from distances of 50 to 100 meters depending on wind conditions and humidity levels.
The contrast with American methods could not have been more stark or more embarrassing for Pentagon planners who had staked their careers on technological solutions. While American contractors worked around the clock to increase the sensitivity of electronic ammonia detectors, Australian instructors at their jungle warfare training center taught their operators to identify seven distinct categories of jungle smell that indicated human activity, all without spending a single dollar on equipment.
Fresh tobacco smoke from the local Vietnamese variety could be detected at 200 meters under favorable wind conditions. Cooked rice produced a distinctive starch odor detectable at 150 m. Human waste improperly buried could betray a position from 300 meters away. Weapons cleaning oil had a sharp metallic signature that cut through jungle decay at 100 m.
None of these capabilities required batteries, maintenance contracts, or supply chains stretching back to factories in Connecticut. They required only weeks of training and the willingness to transform oneself into something that smelled like the enemy. And then came the moment that should have ended the people sniffer program forever.
Instead, the Pentagon classified the report and kept spending money. The people sniffer failures in actual field conditions became apparent within weeks of its deployment to combat units in Vietnam. The device was so exquisitly sensitive that it could not distinguish between enemy soldiers and the water buffalo that Vietnamese farmers used throughout the countryside.
It could not tell the difference between Vietkong camps and the colonies of monkeys that inhabited every patch of jungle. It registered human urine with the same alarm as the ammoniarich decay of jungle vegetation that covered thousands of square kilometers of operational terrain. American helicopter crews flying People sniffer missions would return to base with hundreds of positive readings from a single flight.
Each one potentially indicating enemy presence and triggering the massive American response apparatus. Artillery strikes were called on coordinates that contained nothing but confused wildlife and empty forest. Air raids dropped tons of ordinance on positions where the only casualties were trees and unlucky animals.
The Vietkong figured out the people sniffer’s operating principles within months of its deployment, and their response demonstrated a level of tactical creativity and dark humor that Pentagon analysts had systematically underestimated throughout the war. What happened next made the American military look like fools who had paid $3.7 million for the privilege of being trolled.
Enemy commanders began collecting buffalo urine and ordinary plastic buckets and hanging these simple decoys throughout areas they wanted Americans to waste resources bombing. The cost of a single bucket filled with animal waste was approximately zero. The cost of the bombs, napalm canisters, and artillery shells that American forces expended on these false targets ran into millions of dollars per month, month after month, while actual enemy units operated freely in areas.
The people sniffer had cleared a safe. In one documented incident from October of 1968 that became legendary among intelligence analysts, a people sniffer equipped helicopter identified what appeared to be a major enemy concentration approximately 15 kilometers northwest of Saigon. The readings indicated at least 200 personnel in a concentrated area, suggesting a regimenal headquarters with substantial resources to destroy.
American commanders ordered a massive response. Two flights of F4 Phantom jets dropped napalm and high explosive ordinance on the coordinates. Artillery bombardment from three separate fire bases followed. The total expenditure of munitions exceeded $300,000. When ground troops reached the target area 2 days later, they found 47 plastic buckets containing buffalo urine hanging from trees. Nothing else.
No bodies, no equipment, no evidence that any human being had been within kilometers of the position. The Vietkong had spent approximately $20 to trigger $300,000 in American ordinance. But the financial waste was not even the worst part. The massive response had revealed American air assets, artillery positions, and command patterns to enemy observers watching from safe distances.
$20 worth of Buffalo urine had purchased intelligence worth millions. But here is what the Pentagon never wanted American taxpayers to know. The people sniffer was not their most expensive failure. Not even close. Australian commanders had rejected offers to integrate people sniffer technology into their operations from the very beginning, citing what they diplomatically called fundamental doctrinal incompatibility.
And this careful language concealed a much blunter assessment that Australian operators expressed freely in their own conversations. The device was worse than useless because it encouraged exactly the kind of behavior that got soldiers sent home in body bags. It made noise that could be heard in the quiet jungle environment.
It required attention that should be focused on the surrounding terrain. It created false confidence in readings that meant nothing. And most critically, it could not tell operators the one thing that actually mattered in jungle warfare, whether the enemy already knew they were there. The Australian approach to enemy detection relied on completely different assumptions about how jungle warfare functioned.
Where American doctrine emphasized finding the enemy through technological means, Australian doctrine emphasized not being found while finding the enemy through human senses. This subtle distinction produced methods that appeared primitive to American observers, but achieved results that Pentagon analysts would eventually classify as secret rather than attempt to explain.
The nose doctrine required soldiers to develop capabilities that seemed almost supernatural to those who had not undergone the intensive training program. Senior Australian operators claimed to smell the difference between a camp occupied within the last 6 hours and one abandoned for more than a day. They could detect whether enemy soldiers had bathed recently, indicating proximity to a water source.
They could even identify whether enemy forces had recently received supplies from North Vietnam based on subtle differences in tobacco smoke. These claims seemed impossible to American liaison officers until they witnessed the system in operation. In one documented joint patrol, an Australian corporal stopped his entire team approximately 300 meters from a position that American electronic sensors had cleared as unoccupied just 30 minutes earlier.
The corporal reported smelling fresh tobacco smoke and cooked rice carried on a light afternoon breeze. The Americans checked their people sniffer readings and found nothing unusual. The patrol altered course based solely on the Australians nose. They eventually located an enemy platoon of approximately 30 soldiers in a concealed position that they would have walked directly into if they had continued on their original route.
The people sniffer had detected nothing because wind direction carried ammonia signatures away from the sensors intake path. The Australian corporal had cost the Pentagon $0. The people sniffer had cost 3.7 million. The corporal found 30 enemy soldiers. The machine found buffalo urine. The people sniffer cost millions.
Project Igloo White cost a billion. And it failed even harder. Project Igloo White represented perhaps the most ambitious sensor program in military history up to that point. Beginning in 1967, the United States Air Force began seeding the Ho Chi Min Trail with thousands of air delivered sensors designed to detect enemy movement through dense vegetation.
The program would eventually cost over $1 billion and accomplish almost nothing that could not have been achieved by trained human observers at a fraction of the cost. The air delivered seismic intrusion detector designated ADSID formed the backbone of the igloo white network. These devices looked like oversized metal darts and were dropped from aircraft in patterns designed to cover major trail networks.
When a sensor struck the ground, its tail section remained above the surface as a transmission antenna while the body buried itself in the soil. A sensitive seismograph inside detected ground vibrations transmitting data to a massive IBM computer center at Nakan Phenom Air Base in Thailand. The system was supposed to provide realtime intelligence on enemy movement.
In theory, computers in Thailand could track individual enemy units and time air attacks to catch them in the open. In practice, the system produced an overwhelming flood of false positives that made meaningful analysis impossible. The jungle is never still, and the billion-dollar sensors could not tell the difference between an enemy soldier and a raindrop.
Every rainstorm triggered hundreds of sensors simultaneously. Falling branches produced signatures indistinguishable from footsteps. Animal movement created constant background noise that operators struggled desperately to filter. The computers could not solve a fundamental problem. The sensors detected vibration, not intent.
And the jungle vibrated constantly. The result was a billion-doll network that could detect elephants but missed enemy battalions. Australian SAS operators developed a technique called ghost stepping that made the entire system worthless against properly trained opponents. Instead of stepping forward and down normally, operators placed the foot forward while bearing weight on the rear leg, then slowly rolled their weight onto the forward foot over approximately 3 seconds.
This eliminated the impact spike that seismic sensors were designed to detect. Moving one kilometer took over 4 hours instead of 30 minutes. The physical strain was exhausting, but Australian patrols moved through sensor seated terrain and showed nothing on monitors in Thailand. Operators assumed equipment malfunction.
The reality was simpler. The Australians had defeated a billion-dollar network with a walking technique that cost nothing. But American boots were betraying patrols in another way that no sensor could fix. The American Jungle Boot featured the Panama soul, developed specifically for tropical warfare, with deep, aggressive treads designed to provide traction while allowing debris to fall away.
What American designers had not considered was that these treads left perfect impressions in soft ground that any tracker could read like a book. The pattern was distinctive, unmistakably American, and revealed not only direction of travel, but also the number of soldiers in a patrol, their formation, and their approximate speed.
An experienced Vietkong tracker could examine a jungle bootprint, and determine whether the soldier was heavily loaded, tired, or injured. The boot that was supposed to protect American soldiers instead betrayed them at every step. Australian SAS operators identified this problem within weeks and developed a solution that horrified American supply officers.
Many simply stopped wearing jungle boots entirely. The preferred footwear became the Voli tennis shoe, a cheap Australian sneaker costing approximately $3 that had never been designed for military use. The Voli featured a smooth rubber sole that left vague prints easily mistaken for Vietnamese sandal marks.
It provided minimal protection against terrain hazards, but maximum protection against enemy trackers. In the first 6 months of Australian SAS operations, patrols using modified footwear reported enemy contact at rates approximately 40% lower than patrols using standard boots. Patrols that left American boot prints were found and attacked.
Patrols that left ambiguous prints frequently passed through enemy territory without detection. The $3 tennis shoe outperformed the $40 jungle boot because Australian commanders understood something American supply chains could not comprehend. In jungle warfare, the best equipment was often the equipment that left no evidence of its passage.
Everything described so far was theory and isolated incidents. The real test came in June of 1966 when 10 men walked into the jungle and only an Australian nose stood between them and 120 enemy soldiers waiting to end them. The first joint patrol between American special forces and Australian SAS operators occurred in the early monsoon season and would produce results that eventually reshaped American special operations doctrine.
But the Pentagon would spend years suppressing reports that revealed just how badly American methods had failed. The patrol consisted of six Australian SAS operators and four American Green Berets assigned as liaison observers. The mission was a 7-day reconnaissance of a suspected enemy supply depot approximately 25 km northwest of Newui Dat in terrain known to be heavily patrolled by Vietkong main force units.
The Australian patrol leader established rules that the Americans found difficult to accept. No voice communication except immediate emergency. All communication through hand signals and pre-arranged clicks transmitted by breaking squelch on radios. No movement during daylight hours. No American rations that produce foreign food smells, no smoking, no insect repellent, and absolutely no use of the people sniffer device that the Americans had been specifically ordered to field test.
The Americans agreed with visible reluctance, still convinced their technology would prove superior. Several privately believed the restrictions were paranoia bordering on unprofessional conduct. They were about to receive an education that no amount of technology could provide. By day three, the patrol had covered only 9 km of the projected 25, moving exclusively during the 4 hours after midnight.
The American observers were visibly frustrated by this pace, which they considered unnecessarily cautious and likely to compromise mission objectives. The Australian patrol leader flatly refused to accelerate, citing signs of enemy activity that the Americans could not detect. When pressed, he pointed to subtle indicators they had walked past without noticing a vine cut rather than broken naturally.
A slight depression and leaf litter, suggesting someone had knelt there recently. A faint residual odor of tobacco smoke. The Americans saw and smelled nothing. Their people sniffer registered only background readings. They were becoming convinced the Australian was either paranoid or showing off. On the morning of day four, everything changed in a way the Americans would never forget.
The Australian point man suddenly raised his closed fist in the universal signal for immediate halt. Then he slowly lowered himself to a crouch and remained completely motionless, not even turning his head to look back at the rest of the patrol. What followed would last 14 hours and test every man present to the absolute limits of human endurance.
The point man had detected the faint but unmistakable smell of tobacco smoke and cooking rice approximately 300 meters ahead carried on a light breeze from the northwest. The smoke was fresh, indicating active occupation. The cooking smell meant soldiers who felt secure enough to prepare hot food, suggesting either a large force or an established camp with good security.
The Americans immediately checked their people sniffer. The readings showed nothing unusual. The needle sat at baseline. According to the 3.7 million machine, there was nobody within detection range in any direction. The Australian patrol leader made an immediate decision based on his point man’s nose rather than American technology.
The patrol would not advance. They would not retreat. They would conceal themselves in the densest available undergrowth and wait for darkness. The men found positions in a thicket approximately 20 m from the trail and settled in for what the Australians warned would be a very long wait. The Americans did not understand what this meant until the first hour passed.
The temperature that day exceeded 40° C with humidity approaching saturation. There was no shade in the thicket, only filtered sunlight that raised the temperature even higher. Sweat soaked through every piece of clothing within minutes and continued flowing until the men were lying in pools of their own perspiration that could not evaporate.
The insects arrived within 30 minutes and never left. Mosquitoes found the concealed men with unairring accuracy. Drilling into every patch of exposed skin, ants discovered the warm bodies and began expeditions across arms, legs, faces, into ears, and nostrils. Something that looked like a centipede crawled across one American’s hand and continued up his arm while he remained frozen, unable to brush it away without making noise. No one could move.
No one could speak. No one could swat the insects methodically, consuming them, or wipe the sweat dripping into their eyes. The Australian patrol leader had made clear through hand signals that any movement could result in detection and the end of everyone present. The Americans had trained for difficult conditions.
They had not trained for this. The hours crawled past with agonizing slowness. Men who had to urinate did so where they lay. Men who had to defecate held it through sheer willpower. Muscle cramps developed from enforced immobility and had to be endured without stretching. By hour eight, one American was trembling visibly from sustained stress.
An Australian operator slowly moved his hand to rest on the American’s arm in a gesture of reassurance and warning combined. The trembling gradually subsided as the American found some reserve of endurance he had not known he possessed. By hour 12, the light was fading and the temperature dropped from unbearable to merely miserable.
The insect activity actually increased as mosquitoes became more aggressive in the cooling air. By hour 14, full darkness had arrived and the Australian patrol leader finally gave the signal to prepare for movement. Shortly after midnight, the patrol began extracting from their concealment position. They traveled in the opposite direction from their objective, deliberately putting distance between themselves and whatever force had established the camp ahead.
At approximately 0200 hours, now day five, they reached a position that allowed observation of a trail junction approximately 400 m from where they had spent 14 hours motionless. What they saw validated every decision the Australian patrol leader had made. An enemy company of approximately 120 soldiers had established a temporary bivwack directly across the patrol’s original route.
Cooking fires carefully concealed from aerial observation glowed in multiple locations. Centuries patrolled a perimeter that extended across the exact path the patrol would have followed. Weapon stacks indicated a welle equipped main force unit. Through observation that continued until dawn, the Australians determined the enemy unit had been in position for approximately 36 hours.
They had been there throughout day three and were already established when the Americans wanted to accelerate through the area during daylight. If the Americans had gotten their way, 10 men would have walked directly into 120 enemy soldiers in prepared positions. The result would not have been a firefight. It would have been annihilation.
The Australian point man’s nose had detected cooking, smoke, and tobacco from 300 meters away when wind conditions briefly carried the scent toward the patrol. That single moment of detection, lasting perhaps 30 seconds before the wind shifted, had saved 10 lives. The people sniffer had detected nothing because wind carried ammonia signatures away from the sensor intake throughout the critical period.
The machine had pronounced the area safe while 120 enemy soldiers waited less than 400 meters away. A trained human nose had outperformed $3.7 million of American technology. And the patrol was not over yet. On day six, after circumnavigating the enemy bivwac through a route that added 12 km, the patrol finally reached their original objective, the suspected enemy supply depot.
What they found revealed something American intelligence had completely missed. Despite months of analysis and millions of dollars in collection assets, the depot was not buildings or bunkers that could be photographed from the air. The surface showed almost no evidence of human activity. The actual depo was a network of underground chambers connected by tunnels extending over 2 kilometers beneath the jungle floor.
The Vietkong had spent months constructing this facility, removing excavated soil in small quantities, concealing entrances beneath natural vegetation, creating infrastructure essentially invisible to every American detection method. The Australian patrol leader made a decision the Americans considered either brilliant or insane.
He proposed that two patrol members enter the tunnel system to document its extent and contents while the remaining eight establish security above ground. The Americans immediately objected, citing the extreme danger of tunnel operations and complete lack of specialized equipment. The Australian response was simple.
This was what they had been sent to find, and they would not leave without finding it. Two operators prepared for tunnel entry. They stripped to minimal equipment. A suppressed pistol, a fighting knife, a red filtered flashlight, and a miniature camera. They blackened exposed skin, removed their boots for quieter movement, and synchronized a time schedule with the security team.
If they were not back within 8 hours, they were not coming back, and the patrol should extract without them. Then they descended into darkness through an entrance concealed beneath a rotting log. The two operators spent 7 hours underground, moving through passages sometimes too narrow to crawl through without scraping both shoulders on earth walls.
They navigated by touch as much as sight, using the flashlight only when absolutely necessary. They controlled their breathing to minimize sound in an environment where any noise traveled through earth and could alert enemy personnel. They documented storage chambers containing tons of rice, enough to feed a regiment for months.
They found ammunition stockpiles, including mortar rounds and rocket propelled grenades in quantities, indicating the depot served as a major distribution point. They photographed medical supplies, including surgical instruments and antibiotics, suggesting treatment capabilities beyond simple first aid.
Most significantly, they discovered a field hospital with surgical facilities that American intelligence had never suspected existed. operating tables, lighting powered by concealed generators, sterilization equipment, and recovery wards indicated sophisticated medical infrastructure that could treat serious casualties without evacuation to North Vietnam.
The operators moved through approximately 1.3 km of tunnels without encountering any enemy personnel, a result they attributed to timing their entry for the period when underground activity was lowest. When they emerged after 7 hours, both were covered in clay and bleeding from dozens of abrasions. They were dehydrated, exhausted, and shaking from sustained stress.
But they carried intelligence that would reshape American understanding of enemy capabilities and enable operations that disrupted Vietkong logistics for 6 months. The American observers transmitted a report that was classified immediately upon receipt. The report documented something Pentagon analysts found difficult to process.
Australians had penetrated a major enemy installation using methods American doctrine considered impossible without massive firepower. They had not been detected during approach because they moved like ghosts. They had not been detected during the 14-hour halt because they could remain motionless beyond American conception.
They had not been detected during tunnel infiltration because they operated with minimum equipment and maximum human skill. They had succeeded because they operated like the enemy rather than like Americans. If the Australians were right, then much of what America had invested in Vietnam was not merely ineffective, but actively counterproductive.
The sensors revealed American positions. The radios announced American presence. The boots betrayed American patrols. The entire technological framework was failing and the evidence was being buried because too many careers depended on continued belief that American technology would eventually prevail. But the Australian methods came with costs that rarely appeared in official reports.
The men who returned from those patrols were not the same men who had departed. Living for days in complete silence, unable to speak even to companions within arms reach, created enforced isolation that affected operators in ways that would only become apparent years later. The transformation required to become an effective jungle operator involved abandoning much of what civilization had developed over thousands of years.
Personal hygiene sacrificed to eliminate scent. Regular meals replaced with irregular consumption of local food. Verbal communication eliminated for periods exceeding a week. The expectation of help suppressed because calling for assistance would compromise concealment. Veterans sometimes spoke of becoming something other than human during their patrols.
They described entering a mental state where normal thoughts simply disappeared, replaced by continuous environmental assessment below conscious awareness. They could not explain how they knew an area was dangerous, only that the knowledge was there when needed. This transformation extracted a psychological price Australian society was not prepared to pay.
Veterans returned with skills that had no civilian application and mental patterns that did not fit peaceime existence. The hyper awareness that kept them alive became hypervigilance that made normal life impossible. The emotional suppression that allowed them to function became numbness that destroyed relationships. The suicide rate among Australian Vietnam veterans would eventually exceed the combat casualty rate, revealing the true cost of the psychological transformation required for jungle warfare.
The men who had become ghosts found it extraordinarily difficult to become human again. But the techniques did not disappear with the end of Australian involvement. They resurfaced in ways Pentagon analysts had never anticipated. Colonel David Hackworth was among the first American officers to publicly acknowledge what the Australians had achieved.
His classified reports documented kill ratios that exceeded American rates by factors analysts found difficult to explain where American units achieved approximately four enemy casualties per one friendly casualty. Australian SAS units reported ratios exceeding 50 to1 in some operations. The difference was so extreme that American intelligence officers initially suspected the Australians of falsifying reports.
Investigation revealed the numbers were accurate. The Australians were simply operating in ways Americans had not considered possible. Hackworth’s attempts to implement Australian methods met with institutional resistance that revealed the depth of American commitment to technological solutions regardless of evidence.
Supply officers refused non-standard equipment. Training commands rejected curriculum changes emphasizing fieldcraft over firepower. Personnel systems could not accommodate the extended selection periods Australian programs required. The American military-industrial complex had invested billions in technological approaches and was not prepared to abandon that investment because uh a handful of Australians achieved better results through methods that could not be patented, contracted or manufactured in American factories. When American
special operations forces began operations in Afghanistan in 2001, observers noted striking similarities to Australian methods from Vietnam. Small teams operating independently, emphasis on concealment over firepower, use of local dress and equipment, integration of indigenous knowledge into tactical planning.
The methods David Hackworth had praised in 1969 had finally become American doctrine. The delay between evidence and adoption had lasted more than three decades. The methods that David Hackworth called revolutionary in 1969 finally became American doctrine in 2003, approximately 50,000 casualties too late.
