Posted on 05/08/2013 9:45:42 PM PDT by Jet Jaguar
Hey, wearing Woodland camouflage in the desert is a tradition going back at least to Desert Storm. I didn’t get my desert uniform until I got back on the plane to go home (six-color desert aka “chocolate chip”), and the Army *still* owes me a pair of desert boots.
So the Army has the (horrible) ACU, and is now phasing in Multicam
The Marines have their Woodland and Desert digital
Air force has the ABU and some other pattern
The Navy has their own woodland (land-ops uniform) and their digital blues
Frankly, I don’t see this as a problem. The services have become highly-specialized, and therefore require patterns specific to the environments they have to function in. The only problem is that the DoD followed the *worst* possible path in developing and procuring the patterns. The Marines escape this because they did the job themselves and didn’t let Natick dick them around. The new Multicam pattern is a commercial pattern, and probably shouldn’t count in the procurement fiasco because Crye Precision did a lot of the work themselves.
I’d also point out that, in my opinion, AfriCom is going to be the next “big” thing, and Africa has an incredibly diverse range of environments. They’ll still have to use Desert patterns because of all the work they’ll be doing in Northern Mali, Sudan and other places, but they’re also going to need good Woodland again for all the sub-Saharan jungles, plus Multicam will work great in the Savannah regions. We’re also going to need a revamp of the venerable Jungle Boot, since those glued-sole desert sneakers they’ve been using are going to be worthless in the mud of the African Jungle.
When I was in the jungles of Viet Nam I was wearing my stateside fatigues and standard combat boots. I had a big white name tag over one pocket and a big black and yellow US Army over the other. Oh, and in case the Viet Cong needed it, a big white jump wings sewed on as well.
This was late 1965 and the Army had not yet figured out that jungle fatigues would be better then state side fatigues. At some point the fatigues rotted off me and I was issued jungle fatigues. For the record, they were not camouflage either.
Somebody needs to rein in the children, this is out of control and sounds like a SNL skit.
Navy camouflage?? If I had fallen overboard from my ship, I would have wanted to be wearing international orange.
my favorite is the Gillie suits!
I was working at a USN Weapons school when the USAF came out with their blue “cammies”. It was great for a chuckle from the pilots until the USN came out with their own blue version 6 months later.
I can see 6 of the 10 - the other 4 must be pretty good.
So the Marines are greedy bastards, the Army and Navy are stupid, and the Air Force is trying to win fashion contests.
That’s about what I would expect.
Are they? From what I've read, Multicam is a proprietary pattern, so the Army is spending gobs of money to develop their own patterns that they'll own the rights to.
Hah! Well said!
“Marines are greedy bastards”
They got that way because of chronic and historical under-financing.
The Marines have been developing “digitals” for years at great expense. What this story lacks, is that the Marines patented their digitals and no one wants to pay the Marines for the money they are due.
Call it greed or call it sick of being treated like bastards and having to beg for every dime.
If they had fatigues like these when I was in, I probably would’ve re enlisted for life. And NO, I am not attracted by bright shiny objects.
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