From: Steve Grammont (islander@midmaine.com)
Date: Mon Dec 20 2004 - 15:20:14 PST
Hello Aaron,
>What's been getting a lot of buzz at the airsoft milsim events is
>"Multicam". It's a uniform that was tested by the military and going into
>production rather soon (Maybe not under a military contract, but for the
>public certainly). It's a one uniform for all environments thing that
>actually changes color based on the surrounding light.
Not quite :-) The uniform doesn't change one iota, rather they chose a
pattern and color scheme that lends itself to blending in with a variety
of different environments. In other words, standard printing technology
using a "smarter" design. Digital patterns are another example of
"smarter" patterns. Its a concept that is as old as the idea of
camouflage uniforms themselves, but newer imaging and printing technology
has refined the ability to achieve this.
The ACU is supposed to work equally well in arid and temperate, but in
reality appears to be effective in neither. To borrow from an old
saying, "you can't blend well into all environments all the time. By
trying to you will likely find you blend well into none all the time".
In other words, the new uniform is trying to cover too great a range of
possible environments and will likely wind up not working well in any
single one. It would appear that over a year's worth of trials of more
than a dozen patterns was thrown out at the last minute because someone
thought a MARPAT ripoff pattern would be oh so much "cooler".
The MultiCam pattern is far superior to the digital coloring of the ACU,
and would have been a better pick IMHO, but is absolutely not well suited
to typical arid (i.e. Middle East) environments. This would have
required a two uniform approach, as is in place right now, but cost
cutting decisions apparently overrode the two uniform concept.
Until a high tech "chameleon suit" can be developed, the "one pattern,
all environments" uniform concept will remain a pipe dream.
Steve
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