141–150 of 309 posts
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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.
> Imagine the JavaScript cool kid mindset but with guns. A more terrifying sentence than this has rarely been written.
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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-…
I don't get why the branches in which very few folks are likely to need camo (basically anyone other than the army, then, and some sub-divisions of other branches like the marine corp) don't go with old-school olive drab or navy or something. Those single-color uniforms with a slightly dressy cut looked damn slick. I'd think that'd be better for recruiting or improving morale or whatever than the camo uniforms (which…
Simple, effective, dare I say elegant.
Today's camo is so much better than the red coats the British were wearing in the 18th century. chuckle
The British red coats were a kind of dazzle camouflage, making it hard to see individuals within the group. People weren't stupid back then - they just had different design goals to what we have now.
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> 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 Not everything the military does is about effectiveness. Sometimes senior NCOs want the enlisted to "look military", not just…
It was a diagnostic test. Like how a loss of fuel efficiency is a sign that something is wrong with an engine, if someone can’t meet the standard something has gone wrong. Which is why it was treated as a pure pass fail.
This makes variations by age and sex concessions to that goal, rather than design elements.
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 des…
It is 21st century. Flex OLEDs displaying pattern depending on your background is your camo. Your tank is covered with 80inch displays too.
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> What advantage would it provide to make it harder to distinguish individual soldiers? Distinguishing individual soldiers is an important step in counting the size of a line. Accepting "red coats blend together" as truth, that would make it more difficult for an opposing general to determine which parts of a battle line were stronger or weaker, thus making it more difficult to preposition forces to exploit weak sect…
When determining weaker sections visually, wouldn't you go by "mass" of soldiers? I don't think anybody would count individual soldiers. In any case, given the technology of the time, if you were beyond engagement range, I don't think you would have been able to pick out individual soldiers by sight regardless of which uniforms they were wearing... My theory is that vibrant color uniforms were chosen simply to make i…
Figuring out how many where there was harder than it may seem.
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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 des…
What was worse, CADPAT or UCP? I couldn't find it in the article. Instinct is that CADPAT was worse, but UCP was just that style without the contrast thus negating one of it's features (disrupting the human shape with high contrast).
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What was worse, CADPAT or UCP? I couldn't find it in the article. Instinct is that CADPAT was worse, but UCP was just that style without the contrast thus negating one of it's features (disrupting the human shape with high contrast).
CADPAT is the basis for MARPAT. It's the most effective generic pattern that has been produced (according to the article.)
Edit: looks like the wore the forest green stuff to Afghanistan. The only articles I can find suggests they did it on purpose, to stand out for peace keeping reasons, but that could easily be damage control. Anyone know the real story? GP suggests they just didn't have an arid design at the time (which I would believe).
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This thing is in service, so conventional wisdom about how long it takes to do stuff before that is irrelevant. From the introduction of my original link: Despite more than 20 years and approximately $62.5 billion spent so far on research and development alone, program officials still haven’t been able to deliver an aircraft that can fly as often as needed or to demonstrate its ability to perform in combat, which pla…
Your first comment was about suspended development, implying you think the system should be part of a continuous R&D cycle. Yet this comment implies you think the system should be outside of development. It's hard to tell what you're criticizing when your points are inconsistent. I question some of the critiques in your link. For example, they claim the JSFs 61% availability rates are far below the standard of 75-80%…
It's a commonplace that we spend more on the military than the next ten nations put together, most of whom are our allies. That obscures the more amazing fact that over a third of the military spending in the world is spent by USA. Obviously the Pentagon budget should be halved if not quartered, as we were promised before the Saudis dropped the WTC. In such a context, there would be no room for a plane that offers the prospect of more expense instead of more capability. Northrop lobbyists and their employees at think tanks and in the media might be able to dry-lab some "rates" and "figures" to distract from the obvious state of the F35 program. The scale of the disaster cannot be hidden from unbiased investigators. Even if it never makes the evening war media news, those who care to know can consult experts like POGO.
However, if you insist on a criticism in the proper jargon, F35 will never, ever, regardless of how much is spent, be as capable at close air support as the vastly less expensive A10 "Warthog". You can ask any American serviceman who has served on the ground in the last two decades. This isn't the only important role for a military aircraft, but it is an important role.
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