As I mentioned briefly last week, the US Army is abandoning their most recent camouflage patterned combat uniforms:
The United States military is abandoning its recently-adopted pixelated camouflage uniforms, according to articles this week in The Daily as well as Stars and Stripes.
The drab grey digital pattern, known as the Universal Camouflage Pattern (UCP), will be discarded after only eight years following mounting evidence that the colour scheme makes soldiers more visible, not less.
The articles pull few punches in their appraisal of the move to adopt the pattern in 2004.
“Army brass interfered in the selection process, choosing looks and politics over science,” reports Stars and Stripes, the official newspaper of the United States armed forces.
And while the Pentagon spent $5 Billion on the much-heralded uniforms, some of the earliest attempts to conceal soldiers on the battlefield were considerably less expensive.
The This is War blog has a discussion of the development of camouflage over the last century and a half.
