I’m not one of those bloggers that feels the need to play gotcha every time some big paper gets a story wrong. But yesterday’s article on page one (page one!) of the New York Times is lightweight, even for a breezy feature.
It’s all about the Army’s new-ish combat uniform — and how soldiers don’t like the velcro on the ensemble. Which is kind of interesting, I suppose. But you’d think the fact that the camos don’t actually hide soldiers in many environments would get a mention, at least. A lousy sentence. Especially since these Army Combat Uniforms, or ACUs, or supposed to be “universal camouflage.” And especially since the Army just decided to sink another $72 million into the new uniforms.
As one Defense Tech, ERV, reader noted the other day:
The ACU (as I have seen in both the woods of Georgia and the desert & urban areas of Iraq) is pretty much crap. Yes, I agree it works well if you are lying still in a gravel parking lot or next to a large moss covered live oak. Any other circumstance, though, you are truly “Ghost Recon”. I work at the Recon Surveillance Course 4th RTB at Benning, and teach camouflage here. The grey pattern sticks out like a white ghost. At nighttime it gets highly illuminated by the moon and stars. The ACU is pretty much the joke of the Army. Joke’s on you. Thank God I am a Marine!
Or check out this PowerPoint presentation, on how the camo pattern for the new uniforms was picked. What eventually became the ACU’s pattern (called “urban track”) comes in, at best, 3rd place out of 4. Yet just about every soldier is now wearing that also-ran. Trial after trial between competing patterns were held. And then, out of nowhere, the Army picked the pattern for the ACU — a pattern that hadn’t even been in the tests. That’s deserves, at minimum, a brief nod from the Times, no?
(Big ups: WT)
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It seems highly motivated (also highly paid) civies had done it again by ‘inventing’ something truly amazing that I could hardly see the soldier against the background. What an amazing feat! They really deserve our (the taxpayers) heartfelt applaud for a ‘mission accomplished’. Morons. We should get on the magic carpet and start raiding the central bank of Japan, China, Germany, Canada and all other countries for their (oops OUR) money to help pay for them and all the other ‘goodies’ this administration has requested in the 2008 budget.
Oh come on. We’ll be fighting in urban/desert environments forever, won’t we?
Perhaps Feldgrau would work better.
It’s the NY Times for damn sake!
They are a real estate company…. that prints some stuff in a paper. Don’t expect them to be accurate!
After all they printed that the Detroit Lions lost the world series.
I think it stinks of influenced decisions. Maybe there money paid, or maybe it’s just that the all-new pixel approach is technologically ‘sexy’, and brush patterns aren’t.
The germans in WW2 had these nice double-sided camo’s: with a dark and a light side (the Waffen-SS had them, and after the war the Austrians and East Germans used it too). One just had to turn the jacket and trousers inside out and put them back on. But i guess that approach is too tainted for the burocrats to handle.
I’ve seen that camo testing presentation before and it always raises a question in my mind: “Does the Army ever test the effectiveness of camo in motion?”
Its not like the Army plays “Red Light-Green Light” with insurgents or anything.
I thought for sure that the Army would have chosen the Crye Multicam pattern. If you haven’t seen it, it here is the link, http://www.cryeprecision.com. Anyway, that seems to be about as effective as “universal” patters go.
I hate to say it, but I truly believe that the Army saw the Marine Corps uniforms, and some desk jockey tried to one up the Marine uniforms by making them “universal”. Anyway, the ACU is more of a recruiting tool, than an effective combat uniform.
If you look at the Powerpoint referenced, it’s interesting to note that Multicam did very well in the woods but didn’t do as well as the others in desert or urban regions. Combine this with the fact that it’s more complex to produce and i’s a little easier to understand why MC was passed over.
What confuses me is that when I look at the Powerpoint, I can see the broken and dotted line that leads to the ACU. One of the best performers was a tan, grey, and black pattern called Urban Track, and it’s notable that only medium tan, black, and medium grey provided acceptable NIR perfromance.
But ACU doesn’t quite fit the data that leads up to it. It should’ve ended up medium grey and tan, accented with little dark spots, and I’m sure that would’ve worked quite well in many areas; and if said medium grey had a greenish tinge, the ACU could be scary-good.
So why is the ACU comprised of a cream color and pale greys? And where is the experimental data that tests and supports their “no black in nature” conclusion? That’s what confuses me.
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It seems highly motivated (also highly paid) civies had done it again by ‘inventing’ something truly amazing that I could hardly see the soldier against the background. What an amazing feat! They really deserve our (the taxpayers) heartfelt applaud for a ‘mission accomplished’. Morons. We should get on the magic carpet and start raiding the central bank of Japan, China, Germany, Canada and all other countries for their (oops OUR) money to help pay for them and all the other ‘goodies’ this administration has requested in the 2008 budget.
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They have other colors besides that light greenish uniform and tan uniforms. lol I see what you’re getting at though.