Camofucked

In the Armed Forces, you're trained to think and act like a group, and uniform means more than just the clothes you wear.  Except when it makes you stand out.

The Army is changing it's clothes, and no, blood is not the new black.  Over the next year, the pixelated "Universal Camouflage Pattern" design that debuted in 2004 at a cost of $5 billion is being phased out, eliminating one of the largest mistakes they'e made (sorry, clothes only - not land wars in Asia).  Soldiers have roundly criticized the gray-green uniform for standing out almost everywhere it’s been worn and called the pattern a fiasco.

To eliminate the problem caused by , textile technologists (that's a real job?) at the Army research center in Natick, MA are testing new armed forces camouflage patterns are made. Currently, four patterns are going through a rigorous battery of tests to give soldiers patterns suitable for different environments, plus a single neutral pattern.  These will eventually make it's way beyond uniforms and onto body armor and other gear, and the selection will involve hundreds of computer trials as well on-the-ground testing at half a dozen locations around the world. Until then, soldiers are using a greenish, blended replacement called MultiCam as a temporary fix.

The Army’s camouflage researchers (wow, that's also a job?) say UPC pattern’s origins begins when they helped develop a similarly pixilated camouflage now worn by the Marine Corps called MARPAT in 2002.  At that time, the Army was looking for a new camouflage pattern that would solve the problem in Iraq on not having enough desert-specific gear to go around.  The plan was to spend two years testing patterns and color schemes from different angles and distances and in different environments, including a precursor design of Multi-Cam. The results and best design never made it onto the battlefield, due in part to the Program Executive Office Soldier - a branch of the Army in charge of equipping soldiers with gear, who made the camouflage team to pick a pattern long before trials were finished.

They ordered the researchers to take the winning colors and “basically put it in the Marine Corps pattern."   The brigadier general ultimately responsible for the decision, James Moran, who retired from the Army after leaving Program Executive Office Soldier, has not publicly  responded regarding the decision.  Though many folks want the truth about the camo choice, it is believed they can't handle the truth...