Army Camouflage That Failed to Hide Its Soldiers
warhistoryonline.com
warhistoryonline.com
I'm not sure they know what "camouflage" means, because that sounds like it should be impossible.
It really doesn't make a material difference to your point, but just to note that it isn't just a few dollars per uniform. A soldier's webbing, bergen and day sacks (all their battle load carrying equipment) is highly personalised, takes a lot of time to break-in, and takes up a lot of space. Maintaining three or four sets of that in different patterns for different environments would be a huge hassle.
A single pattern effective almost everywhere makes more sense than in just simple money.
A pretty normal year for a regular, non special-forces, soldier could be an exercise in the bush in Kenya, in the artic circle in Norway, in the jungle in Belize, in European temperate mountains, in the desert in Oman...
The one that gets me is how the Navy insisted on getting a digital pattern too. What's the point of wearing cammo on a freaking giant ship?!
The idea that this was a gift to clothing manufacturers is pretty much the only logical explanation for the Navy's uniform...uh...situation.
There are three different color patterns for the NWU, soon to be reduced to two because the blue one is being eliminated.
> It's not typically worn much on ships
The blue NWU was intended for ships (it was the first of the three, and the name “Naval Working Uniform” is indicative of it's intended role); it proved poor in that role because of the lack of flame resistance, which is why it became rarely used and is scheduled to be eliminated.
Harder to analyse crew numbers from satellite or aerial imagery?
Navy personnel don't serve exclusively on ships, and people on the decks of ships can be individual targets when the ship is within smallarms range of land or another vessel.
https://www.stripes.com/news/us/navy-announces-end-of-blue-c...
They also have different camouflage, which was never blue.
So... kickbacks were probably involved in the original UCP contract.
It was just a sign of the times. Knowing the military for what it is, there’s just this incapacity to parse what’s appealing, and a push to grab the interest of young recruits. It’s pretty obvious that the digital pixel pattern fed into any marketing campaign involving buzzwordy digital cyber information superhighway bullshit, and that gave it the advantage.
It definitely felt like the kind of groupthink decision that falls out of focus groups. Just boring enough to not completely suck, but still reek obvious pandering to the core of a particular target audience.
The fundamental question being:
Would a high school student
be caught dead in this?
What they get is "works in no terrain equally badly".
My reading is that they found camouflage clothing isn't sufficient, and they wanted a pattern that could be applied to all equipment, which is where the cost of multiple patterns would go up.
Camouflage 101 is adapt to surroundings. That by definition excludes one solution for all scenarios.
[1] http://hiroharu-kato.com/projects_en/neural_renderer.html
Specifically, a good uniform must function across a wide variety of environments; see the USMC uniforms for a good example.
If we had 'active' camouflage that was updated on the fly, this might make some sense?
As for uniforms; I'm not sure any military regular with clout would be willing to do something as practical as custom uniforms based on deployment environment. Too much change, too much innovation.
Now that I thought about it some more, building a generator might be problematic because unless you want to hide toroids, there wont be a continuous mapping with reasonable amounts of distortion from the surface of the object in question to the 2D plane. That would mean that CNNs can't really be used.
If you skip the green-to-orange replacement step, it's already great military camouflage for the exact spot shown in the source photograph. So if you trained a GAN on many photographs from the same area, I imagine it could make camouflage that functions like a printable ghillie suit.
Then you could also take the output images, wrap them around a human model, pose the model randomly in front of a real terrain background, and penalize any camouflage image that cannot prevent an object classifier from detecting the camouflaged human model, in any pose, in front of any background image in the terrain corpus.
Though I'd expect that the more variety you have in the terrain image corpus, the less effective the camouflage is against the object classifier.
So I guess you could go to a Bass Pro Shop or Cabela's or Gander Mtn. (if yours is still open), and look near the hunting gear? I'm not sure that it made a viable business, but it sure looked cool when I saw it.
Edit: on second thought, the maximum version is continious but not differentiable, so you would want the version taking averages.
They did the best they could given that the only colors available were the crayons that nobody had eaten.
The Marines are picky eaters, that's why they got better camo.
[0] https://www.funker530.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/ACU-cou...
> With these problems, the pattern should never have been chosen. However, there was no testing of the design before it was implemented. Research found that there were no studies done on the effectiveness of the camouflage in combat zones.
I'd be willing to bet their users could have quickly pointed them in the right direction if anyone had bothered to ask but the military has a strong preference for information to flow top-down rather than bottom-up.
The conceit of adding starch back in later to make something look new is already funny; to do it routinely is absurd.
Of course anyone who has been in the military of any country knows "absurd" is a pretty frequent factor.
I'm not certain that "absurd" is a strong enough word for it.
I was frequently reminded of Tevye the milkman singing "TRADITION!" at the top of his lungs. The only thing worse than participating in absurd and obsolete traditions as an insider is to be forced as an outsider to completely ruin an otherwise rational workflow in order to accommodate them.
If you have ever taken calipers to a software-generated printout, in order to compare it to a paper form that was last revised in 1980, and printed in bulk ever since, you deserve to wear starched underwear.
True absurdity in the military is an orthogonal axis and runs from, indeed, vestigial rules such as you imply, all the way up to ordering enormous weapons systems the military doesn't even want simply for political reasons.
But we'd also have viable gunblades and dozens of rare uniform crafting recipes, and our military would be well prepared to repel zombie pandemics, space-alien invasions, and goblin sieges, as well as to defeat S-class daikaiju.
...So there is something to be said for letting experienced professional soldiers run the military. They might know what they're doing behind the facade of repetitive busywork, like Mr. Miyagi teaching Daniel-san karate. Or they might not. It's hard to tell from where I sit. A lot of the budget is not freely auditable by the public, and I have certainly seen firsthand a very small portion of it totally wasted on absolute nonsense.
that said, I did see that Avengers End Game got the 70's fatigues right. And also the hideous baseball cap we had to wear.
Well, you were going to be fighting in western Europe and living in NBCW suits all the time anyway....
I'm skeptical that there's much utility there, but maybe someone better informed than me can chime in.
Velcro pockets, though... those were terrible. Both in durability (their "grip" would weaken over time) and noise.
Otherwise, the Army could have used the same patterns developed by the Marine Corp.
The only environment where it possesses some applicability is complex urban terrain.
We face exactly the same problem in NZ with our MCU pattern.
Jack of all trade, master of none.
Seeing US ACP/ACU and NZ MCU in forestry/jungle, especially in low light, is like seeing a person wearing a white sheet over their head. Ineffective.
Multicam is the most flexible cam pattern I’ve seen as a one size fits all.
US Marine Corps’ and Canadian Army’s two types(each) of digital cam for desert and temperate climates are pretty effective.
Blue navy camouflage I’ve seen worn by US and Australian Navy personnel make no sense.
You don’t want to be camouflaged if you’re ships crew, you want to be seen/found. Should be hi-viz.
I would hope spec-ops in the field aren't just wearing standard issue ACUs but rather are highly adapted to the specific terrain they are working in.
The refs came to me mid game and told me to get a normal woodland camouflage because everyone could see me from a mile away...
I often complain about a lack of test coverage in code, but I cannot fathom how testing was COMPLETELY skipped on a $5 BILLION dollar project that directly impacts lives.
Disclaimer: 4 year USAF veteran
You can almost replace UCP with F-35 and have an accurate article.
Infantry and vehicles move too much to make background-matching practical, so the primary purpose of their camouflage is to break up identifiable outlines.
I think Firefox Focus has ad blocking built-in.
the one I use is dns.adguard.com