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U.S. Army Camouflage Improvement Explained (2013)

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Re: U.S. Army Camouflage Improvement Explained (2013)

#91

Post by ARandomerDude »

guessbest wrote: post #85
denton-scratch wrote: post #37

I was hoping to learn why the pixelated designs started appearing. Author says they work; but what led anyone to think that those designs might work? Why did they try them in the first place? And actually, why do they work? I find it bizarre that this is all done by private companies, competing in public competitions, with royalties to be paid for the chosen design. And I'm quite surprised that some designs were foun…

I personally find the who camouflage switch to every branch of service, including the navy to be bizarre. Who thought it was good idea for navy seamen to be camouflaged in the water? With that line of reasoning why didn't the airforce get their own camouflage to look like a flight line? hah > After six years in the fleet and some controversy, the blue-and-gray cammies could be headed for Davy Jones' seabag. https://w…

Much of this is service pride, politics, and recruiting. If the other services switch and you don't, your service looks dated, boring, and irrelevant.

Imagine the JavaScript cool kid mindset but with guns.

Re: U.S. Army Camouflage Improvement Explained (2013)

#92

Post by hinkley »

denton-scratch wrote: post #37

I was hoping to learn why the pixelated designs started appearing. Author says they work; but what led anyone to think that those designs might work? Why did they try them in the first place? And actually, why do they work? I find it bizarre that this is all done by private companies, competing in public competitions, with royalties to be paid for the chosen design. And I'm quite surprised that some designs were foun…

During the I-for-get-which war, the army hired color-blind spotters because the enemy camo turned out to be fooling fully sighted people but was less effective with red-green color blindness. I don't recall if it was texture or contrast issues but they stood out against the trees and shrubbery enough to locate.

So we not only have to worry about invisible spectra, but some filters on visible light may reveal the target as well.

Re: U.S. Army Camouflage Improvement Explained (2013)

#93

Post by kodah »

denton-scratch wrote: post #37

I was hoping to learn why the pixelated designs started appearing. Author says they work; but what led anyone to think that those designs might work? Why did they try them in the first place? And actually, why do they work? I find it bizarre that this is all done by private companies, competing in public competitions, with royalties to be paid for the chosen design. And I'm quite surprised that some designs were foun…

MARPAT is a very well documented case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARPAT In its case, it was chosen because the blocks actually blend very well into environments when viewed from a distance.

Re: U.S. Army Camouflage Improvement Explained (2013)

#94

Post by mensetmanusman »

alexb_ wrote: post #24
jcranmer wrote: post #17

If I'm reading this correctly, the decision process that resulted in the horribly-ineffective UCP pattern amounts to: "We want one pattern. So let's pick one color from the best camo patterns in every environment [the only one that has good NIR performance], and the result will somehow work well!" Which is... yowzers. (For what it's worth, the Multicam pattern, which is slightly modified to the OCP pattern now in use…

I'm in the Air force, and while not relevant to actual camouflage ability, I can personally say that OCPs look much nicer than the uniforms before. A lot of the old camo patterns looked painfully ugly. And the ability to camouflage isn't too relevant for me anyways, unless I'm trying to blend into chairs/desks.

It would be funny to have chairs and desks with the same pattern so you would actually blend in…

Re: U.S. Army Camouflage Improvement Explained (2013)

#95

Post by jabl »

_petronius wrote: post #72
retSava wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An interesting macro-variant is the Berlin brigade tank camo pattern, which is surprisingly cool! No idea where that comes into uniform camo pattern history nor how efficient it is, but who cares. It's cool beans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Infantry_Brigade#/media...

Maybe it is related to dazzle camoflauge used on ships? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage There the goal is less to avoid detection and more to make it hard to determine direction/orientation.

My guess would be that the thinking behind it was that in urban environments you have more straight vertical/horizontal lines (houses, roads etc.) and thus wavy camouflage patterns would stand out more from the background.

Re: U.S. Army Camouflage Improvement Explained (2013)

#96

Post by the_af »

esaym wrote: post #77
the_af wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What advantage would it provide to make it harder to distinguish individual soldiers? Wouldn't their enemies just volley fire into the mass of red coats, instead of picking and choosing?

I don't know, maybe ask a zebra.

It's funny because zebra stripes don't make them harder to be seen by lions. There was an article about this on HN, showing the low-res vision of lions cannot tell stripes or no stripes at a distance.

Apparently zebra stripes have more to do with reducing fly bites, among other things.

Re: U.S. Army Camouflage Improvement Explained (2013)

#97

Post by somerandomqaguy »

denton-scratch wrote: post #37

I was hoping to learn why the pixelated designs started appearing. Author says they work; but what led anyone to think that those designs might work? Why did they try them in the first place? And actually, why do they work? I find it bizarre that this is all done by private companies, competing in public competitions, with royalties to be paid for the chosen design. And I'm quite surprised that some designs were foun…

CADPAT works terrifyingly well in the temperate forests of Canada during spring/summer. I had a chance to go try and to spot people wearing CADPAT in the early 2000's and it was a royal pain to try and see them compared to the olive drab or even the US woodland patterns.

Just a fun aside: when Canada invaded Afghanistan, there was a lack of the arid variant of CADPAT. It left soldiers to land in the brown and tan desert wearing vivid green camouflage designed for summer in the Canadian rain forests.

>I find it bizarre that this is all done by private companies, competing in public competitions, with royalties to be paid for the chosen design. And I'm quite surprised that some designs were found wanting because they don't work under IR (e.g. the soldier shines against the background). That sounds like they're using the wrong dyes; surely a decent design methodology would lead to such problems being remedied by incremental improvement?

It was fixed AFAIK. IIRC issued CADPAT clothing were controlled items in 2000's because they had the the treatments designed to work against near infrared. Civilian CADPAT lacked those treatments so companies like Tru Spec[1] could sell it on the open market. There were other teething issues I am aware of; the dyes bleeding into splotches instead of the digital pattern as called for, as well as fading issues after laundering. Fixed of course but it took some iterations.

[1] I just double checked, Tru Spec never sold it. There were some smaller outfits in Canada that produced CADPAT available on the civilian market for short time; Drop Zone Tactical out of Edmonton for sure was one. Rumor mill is that it was material made by Consoltex under military contract that failed to meet the military's specifications and sold off to licensed DND manufactures to recoup costs.

Re: U.S. Army Camouflage Improvement Explained (2013)

#98

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

guessbest wrote: post #85
denton-scratch wrote: post #37

I was hoping to learn why the pixelated designs started appearing. Author says they work; but what led anyone to think that those designs might work? Why did they try them in the first place? And actually, why do they work? I find it bizarre that this is all done by private companies, competing in public competitions, with royalties to be paid for the chosen design. And I'm quite surprised that some designs were foun…

I personally find the who camouflage switch to every branch of service, including the navy to be bizarre. Who thought it was good idea for navy seamen to be camouflaged in the water? With that line of reasoning why didn't the airforce get their own camouflage to look like a flight line? hah > After six years in the fleet and some controversy, the blue-and-gray cammies could be headed for Davy Jones' seabag. https://w…

The Air Force did get their own camo - the ABU (Airman Battle Uniform) digital tiger-stripe; based on a Vietnam-era tiger-stripe uniform but with a color palette similar to the UCP; only with more blue.

In fact, it's not just their own camouflage pattern, the ABU actually had a distinctive blouse and pants that are different from the BDU that came before, or the ACU that the Army had adopted. Then they took the sage-green fleece from ECWCS Gen III (what the Army was wearing), and added the APECS Goretex parka that the Marine Corps was wearing, only in the ABU tiger-stripe rather than MARPAT.

Most of the actual battlefield airmen (i.e. the people who might reasonably expect to find themselves in combat conditions where camouflage could help like combat controller, TACP, PJ) didn't wear it anyway.

As pointed out elsewhere, this is very largely about esprit-de-corps in the context of a military organization, even if your job is actually avionics maintenance or personnel.

It does seem like a huge waste for all the services to have their own completely distinctive utility uniforms though - the pendulum is swinging back the other way now with the Army, Air Force and Space Force all back in the redesigned ACU/OCP with stitching color (black/spice-brown/blue) as the service-distinctive element.

Re: U.S. Army Camouflage Improvement Explained (2013)

#99

Post by Sharlin »

danielvf wrote: post #58
denton-scratch wrote: post #37

I was hoping to learn why the pixelated designs started appearing. Author says they work; but what led anyone to think that those designs might work? Why did they try them in the first place? And actually, why do they work? I find it bizarre that this is all done by private companies, competing in public competitions, with royalties to be paid for the chosen design. And I'm quite surprised that some designs were foun…

It's not really so much about the pixels being square as the fractal-ish nature of mordern pixel camos that result in a "scale invariance" effect. There's details and contrast at the level of the small pixels, and there's details and contrasts are medium levels, and then again at large levels. Previous US army camo mostly had detail at only one scale level. As jcranmer says, there's more details on the reasons it wor…

Exactly. Very very few things in nature actually are made of large blobs of a single color (unless you're very shortsighted). Honestly, it baffles me why militaries didn't realize this earlier.
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