Claim: DARPA distributed a report on Forest Fire as a Military Weapon

It is true - the US Dept of Agriculture did this report in 1970 and DARPA distributed it to US gov't agencies and their contractors in 1983.

It is true that the US Dept of Agriculture composed a report entitled Forest Fire as a Military Weapon in 1970 and DARPA unclassified it and distributed it to US gov't agencies and their contractors in 1983.

The report is available on the open internet.

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/AD0509724.pdf

It was originally classified Secret. Secret is between Top Secret and Confidential. Top Secret is applied to information that could reasonably be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security if disclosed. But Secret is applied to information that could reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to the national security if disclosed to unauthorized sources, and needs to be reinvestigated every 10 years.

The context of this report needs to be considered. It was made in the era of the Vietnam War, during which the US military did indeed engage in setting forest fires using Napalm, a practice which became very unpopular when the New York Times published a picture of a young Vietnamese girl, Phan Thi Kim Phúc, running along the road after being burned by Napalm, on the front page of their newspaper, in 1972; a photograph that eventually won a Pulitzer Prize. Those were the days when the New York Times was a real newspaper, willing to publish stories that might be unpopular with the government.

The Vietnamese jungle was a place where foreign troops could hide, and this report was perhaps aimed at justifying the already widespread use of napalm in the US military efforts.

The overwhelmingly important result of forest fires from a military point of view is visibility enhancement and cover denial. Despite the use of an array of sophisticated sensors for improving aerial intelligence capability, an analysis of tactical air strikes in South Vietnam during fall of 1966 showed that there were 35 strikes on "suspected" troop locations for every strike on a "known" troop location. Equally revealing is an analysis of Australian/UK ground engagements in Borneo. Malaya. and Vietnam which showed that over 75 percent of all enemy targets were encountered in forest cover regardless of whether the attack was initiated by enemy or friendly forces.

Between 1963 and 1973, 388,000 tons of napalm were used in Vietnam. Napalm was invented around 1942-43 and 16,500 tons was used in the Pacific. It was also used in the Korean war (32,357 tons) and was pronounced as the weapon that won the war.

It was initially used in flamethrowers in Vietnam by the US Army and their allies to clear out trenches, foxholes and bunkers. Even if the flames could not reach all the way into a bunker, the use of napalm would cause suffocation. In 1963 the first napalm bomb was used, by 1966 napalm was a core element in the bombing strategy.

The report Forest Fire as a Military Weapon, however, is more concerned with forest fires as a weapon; napalm apparently is not sufficiently incendiary to create a forest fire.

They look into forest fires the US military caused during their campaign in Vietnam and how effective they were at clearing the forest.

There does indeed seem to be something treacherous about destroying a whole forest in order to ferret out the enemy soldiers. But this is old news: how cowardly warfare seems today, where many of the combatants sit comfortably in rooms thousands of miles away, controlling drones.

In any case, apparently warfare against trees is not new. The Bible contains the following instructions in Deuteronomy 20:19, for the Israelite armies making warfare against the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites in the time of Joshua:

When you lay siege to a city for an extended time while fighting against it to capture it, you must not destroy its trees by putting an axe to them, because you can eat their fruit. You must not cut them down. Are the trees of the field human, that you should besiege them? Deuteronomy 20:19

However the trees that did not produce fruit were allowed to be destroyed.