> it was decided that the design should work in all terrains to be more cost-effective.
I'm not sure they know what "camouflage" means, because that sounds like it should be impossible.
I'm not sure they know what "camouflage" means, because that sounds like it should be impossible.
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?
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.
What they get is "works in no terrain equally badly".
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...
Camouflage 101 is adapt to surroundings. That by definition excludes one solution for all scenarios.
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?!
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.
Harder to analyse crew numbers from satellite or aerial imagery?
https://www.stripes.com/news/us/navy-announces-end-of-blue-c...
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.
They also have different camouflage, which was never blue.