Those who beat their swords into plowshares will plow for those who do not.-Ben Franklin
there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.-Samwise Gamgee
SSD did a long series on camo a few years back (when the Army was downselecting to OCP). It was a good series.
The short version was this:
1. Army decides it wants to replace woodland/DCU with something else. It runs a series of tests, two of the products are Crye's "Scorpion" and something called "All over brush"
2. Marines take the opportunity to develop their own pattern based on the Canadian CADPAT, but using their own four colors.
3. Everyone else really likes MARPAT and wants to use it, Marines say no.
4. Army decides they still want digital pixelation. They takes MARPAT, reduces it to three colors instead of 4, use the colors from the "All Over Brush" test pattern, and calls it UCP.
5. Air Force sees what everyone else did and says they want their own. The original digitized tiger stripe had blue in it, but they eventually settle for using the same colors as UCP.
6. Army/Air Force realize their patterns suck in theater and look to the market to fill the gap. Since the competition, Crye had taken the Scorpion pattern, modified it slightly, and started selling it back to the government as Multicam.
7. Army starts another camo competition, Crye's Multicam wins. Crye doesn't agree to give up the rights to the pattern for what the government offered. Army realizes they still hold rights to the original Scorpion pattern. Army decides to make uniforms in Scorpion, and calls it OCP.
Last edited by BrigandTwoFour; 05-16-18 at 20:45.
No argument. But Multicam/Scorpion/OCP-yeah-you-know-me is pretty good for the current environments. If we ever end up fighting in a tropical rainforest (again), or in an arctic/mountain area, I imagine different patterns will be fielded. Probably just in time for us to declare victory, leave, and watch the ensuing collapse on CNN.
There are desert and tropical/verdant flavors of the major camo families that work better in the unique environments based on testing. But really suck outside of those. The testing was pretty interesting, and regular multicam/ocp does pretty well in it's standard and environmental flavors.
Scorpion does not have some of the vertical metapatterns that multicam does, so not clear to me that it's quite as effective.
The Seabee camo did quite well, forget what it's called. (U4CES?)
I use some A-TACS for hunting to avoid OCP wannabee looks, but it's hard to argue with multicam effectiveness.
To me, that’s all madness. What a waste of money! I know my time has passed (although I am a retired LEO) but I do have two young-us serving active duty Army (10+ years) so I do care. I’ve thought for the longest time that fatigue uniforms ought to be theater-specific, regardless of branch and if anything, the old OD Green fatigues we wore would serve just fine in CONUS. Get rid of those hideous velcro name tags and sew on the embroidered name tags (& rank & branch insignia on the collar for Officers). Sure would be a hulluva lot more practical than those “pinks and greens” they want to push on the troops. Just sayin...
For the Israelis, plain green seems to be OK for them in every environment from urban to desert.
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