At Strategy Page, a quick look at the US Army’s latest change in camouflage clothing and equipment:
The U.S. Army has begun issuing its new combat uniforms featuring a new and improved camouflage pattern. This is yet another effort to deal with troop complaints about the shortcomings of earlier camouflage patterns. Back in 2012 the army has decided to scrap its current digital pattern camouflage combat uniforms and replace them with the more effective (according to the troops), but more expensive, MultiCam. Actually, MultiCam itself was not used but a pattern selected for the new uniforms, but one based on MultiCam. This variant is called Scorpion W2 and the army gave it another, official, name; Operational Camouflage Pattern (OCP). So if you hear someone talking about the new uniform being Scorpion W2 or MultiCam they are not entirely wrong. But the final, official term is OCP.
Since 2001 both the army and marines adopted new, digital camouflage pattern field uniforms. But in Afghanistan U.S. soldiers noted that the marine digital uniforms (called MARPAT, for Marine Pattern) were superior to the army UCP (Universal Camouflage Pattern). Both UCP and MARPAT were introduced at the same time (2002). From the beginning there was growing dissatisfaction with UCP, and it became a major issue because all the infantry have access to the Internet, where the constant clamor for something better than UCP eventually forced the army to do something.
This is ironic because UCP itself was another variant of MARPAT but a poor one, at least according to soldiers in UCP who encountered marines wearing MARPAT. Even more ironic is that MARPAT is based on research originally done by the army. Thus some of the resistance to copying MARPAT is admitting the marines took the same research on digital camouflage and produced a superior pattern for combat uniforms.
