Riding the Waves of Military Innovation

Beyond a love of the waves, surprisingly little unites the surfers of the world. Last year, when the International Olympic Committee unanimously approved surfing as a sport in the 2020 Tokyo Games, much of the debate that followed was predictable: Was surfing finally receiving the legitimacy it deserved, or was this yet another regrettable push toward the mainstreaming and watering down of a proud subculture? Variants of this argument have played out among surfers for over 100 years, having become something of a tedious cliche in the extreme sports era of the 21st century.

While new to the Olympic program, surfing is predated in human history only by the most ancient of competitions, such as wrestling and track and field. Even the sport's modern history stretches back over a thousand years in the Hawaiian Islands, still very much the spiritual home of surfing. The now-global sport was nearly eradicated in the early 19th century when Calvinist missionaries arrived en masse and promptly banned surfing as an affront to God's laws. Though Hawaiians never completely abandoned the waves, the sport experienced a steep decline throughout the 1800s, and it was all but dead by the time the 20th century approached.

Somewhat ironically, another generation of Westerners helped to revive the sport in the 1890s. American entrepreneurs embraced the novel activity as a form of beachside entertainment for tourists at nascent resorts in Waikiki and beyond. In short order, surfing's newfound popularity propelled it across the Pacific, first to California and then around the world. In 1907, Alexander Hume Ford, a South Carolina plantation heir and the head of a private interest called the Hawaiian Promotion Committee, sponsored Waikiki surfer George Freeth's travel to Los Angeles to drum up interest in the island lifestyle. Though Freeth's direct impact on Hawaiian tourism is tough to gauge, his presence inspired enough locals to take up the sport that California is known as the birthplace of surfing today.

By the second half of the 20th century, as incomes became disposable and air travel shrank the globe, Western surfers began conquering waves around the world. Because some of the best waves were located in politically unstable places, the international surfer's path to the beach wasn't always easy. Athletes often had to navigate tense geopolitical environments on the ground, such as apartheid in South Africa or civil war in Central America. Nor was surfing immune to the effects of the Cold War, as Scott Laderman argues in his excellent political history of surfing, Empire in Waves. Laderman's chronicle of Indonesia offers a compelling cast study: Australian and American surfers discovered the archipelago's phenomenal waves in the years before and after the nation's transition from a policy of non-alignment to an alliance with the United States under President Suharto. In no time, the Indonesian government was sponsoring surf contests and junkets to promote tourism abroad while brutally repressing broad swaths of its population at home.

"I've admired your nose-riding for years! I like your cutback, too." So says Robert Duvall's Lt. Col. William Kilgore to surfing serviceman Lance Johnson in Francis Ford Coppola's Vietnam War epic, "Apocalypse Now." It's a famously shocking scene: A village is summarily destroyed so that Kilgore can score a few excellent waves. Part of the shock is surely due to surfing's stereotypical ethos of peaceful communion with nature, which seems at odds with war. But if war was ever good for anything, it was surfing.

In The World in the Curl, Peter Westwick and Peter Neushul write,

"Surfing, that escapist pleasure, would seem to have little to do with warfare. But from surf forecasting to surfboard production to wetsuits, almost every surfer who paddles out today is using military technology."

World War II and its immediate aftermath were particularly fruitful for surfers the world over. Military-industrial complex advances in materials technology proved especially important for postwar surfboard makers who turned fiberglass, polyester resins and various foams into boards that were better and more accessible to consumers than ever before. These materials allowed for the creation of boards that were lighter than the heavy, wooden variants popular before the war, enabling women and children to ride the waves with ease. The gears of war also provided training and inspiration to intrepid surfboard designers, including the now-legendary Bob Simmons, an Army machinist during the conflict and a mathematician for Douglas Aircraft Co. after it. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Simmons combined a deep understanding of materials science and hydrodynamics to produce revolutionary board designs that are still championed for their speed and performance.

The technological relationship between the military and surfing has also worked in the other direction. Such was the case of the motorized "warboard," a military design that never made it into action. Westwick and Neushul write that the U.S. Navy had developed prototypes of the board in anticipation of a potential coastal assault on Japan. A less fanciful innovation came in the form of the wetsuit. Pioneered by University of California, Berkeley physicist Hugh Bradner in the early 1950s, the earliest wetsuits were envisioned for military applications; Bradner offered his own design to the U.S. Navy. At the time the Navy passed on Bradner's innovation, for fear that the gasses trapped in the suit's neoprene material would make divers and swimmers easily detectable by sonar. Unconcerned about sonar, surfers quickly embraced wetsuits as a solution to a cruel reality of the sport: The best waves often emerge in the dead of winter. Surfers Jack O'Neill (of the eponymous O'Neill brand) and the Meistrell brothers (of the renowned Body Glove brand) refined Bradner's design throughout the 1950s. Today, boardriders and frogmen alike wear their legacy in the water.

Given the innovative power of the world's militaries, the symbiotic technological relationship between war and surfing shouldn't be too jarring. Despite the sport's traditional emphasis on good vibes and hippie values, it has always been about pushing the limits of what's possible in the water. While the time for exploring motorized warboards is probably over, it seems likely that surfers and soldiers will continue to benefit from each other's cutting-edge designs and novel solutions. Somewhere at this very moment, there is a surfer lamenting the rise of artificial waves. But I imagine he has a counterpart in uniform, thinking that the same waves are the perfect laboratory for the next phase of naval innovation.

This article appeared originally at Stratfor Worldview.