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Thread: USAF to adopt Army's OCP camo

  1. #21
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    Quote Originally Posted by SomeOtherGuy View Post
    That would be logical, and wouldn't generate make-work for an officer staff and some civilian hangers-on.



    This varies by region, but in mountain/desert areas you could be in three or more totally different color environments just by going up and down in elevation: gray granite at the top of mountains, evergreen forests high up the slopes, brighter green deciduous forests lower on the slopes, and various colors of desert (sage green, red/orange clay, or yellow sand) in the bottom of the valleys. I can see a benefit to having a single pattern that's adequate for all of those vs. having the ideal desert pattern and sticking out in the forest.
    I think you could have the best of both worlds, that is, an environment specific pattern, but with gradient colors that are effective in transition. There's already multicam patterns like that.
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  2. #22
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    Quote Originally Posted by HardToHandle View Post
    The uniform fiasco is mostly the Corps’ fault. They felt the need to always be special inside the post-WWII DOD, when the Depts of War and Navy were combined. Fast forward to 1980, when they need the Eagle, Globe and Anchor added onto the BDUs that every other service thought were fine.

    Fast forward another 20 years, 2000, and Uncle Sam’s Most Coddled think they need to look different than everyone else, even though there were several years of joint uniform improvement projects. The Corps runs their own project, incorporating their trademark EGA and demonstrates their respect for the concept of jointness. The Corps argument was the blob based DCU and woodland patterns had shortcomings under night vision (arguably some truth). In the end the Corps produced a pretty effective set of camouflage patterns in a decent uniform design, in a calculated manner to effectively waste taxpayer dollars. The rest of the services, led by the Army, doubled down on dumb, with service-specific patterns.

    Fast forward another 15 years and the Army bumbles into the Scorpion, intellectual property they have owned for years after finding it remarkably effective. Good decision by the Air Force to follow the Army lead in the OCP/Multicam/Scorpion uniforms, which are well vetted, well supported and well accepted by the Air Force at war. The good news is 15 years from now, the E-3 born in 2011 will be complaining about their outdated uniform.
    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.
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  3. #23
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    Quote Originally Posted by BoringGuy45 View Post
    I think you could have the best of both worlds, that is, an environment specific pattern, but with gradient colors that are effective in transition. There's already multicam patterns like that.
    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.

  4. #24
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    Quote Originally Posted by SomeOtherGuy View Post
    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.

  5. #25
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    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...

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    For the Israelis, plain green seems to be OK for them in every environment from urban to desert.

  7. #27
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    Quote Originally Posted by Slater View Post
    For the Israelis, plain green seems to be OK for them in every environment from urban to desert.
    I have heard that the IDF will (rarely) issue uniforms that have some camo, but only for operation-specific reasons. And, yeah, OD otherwise.

    Or, you could take the old SAS approach and roll around in some leaked out engine oil at the motor pool, then in the local dirt.
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  8. #28
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    Quote Originally Posted by Amicus View Post
    Or, you could take the old SAS approach and roll around in some leaked out engine oil at the motor pool, then in the local dirt.
    I wonder if they abandoned that practice once they started using flash-bangs. Burns suck.
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