Color me confused, but I was under the impression that in most war-zones, you don’t bother dismantling explosives, you simply clear the area and detonate them.
Also, do we have any sort of hard numbers regarding how often bomb disposal personnel are actually shot at? I’d imagine that any time you’re bothering to dismantle a bomb instead of just destroying it, the area is already under lockdown. You don’t try to defuse explosives in an area where there is liable to be shooting, yeah?
If you’re a grunt in the field dealing with a roadside IED, you aren’t gonna have fancy bomb disposal kits or suits, you’re gonna either simply flag the threat and clear the area until someone else can come handle it, or you’re going to purposefully set it off from a safe distance somehow. And if you’re a Minesweeper with specialized equipment, are the guys calling the shots really gonna send you into a live-fire situation where you can be targetted? You don’t expose your highly trained specialists to needless risks, you keep them as safe as you can manage.
And if the usage of olive drag actually is to reduce visibility and keep the EOD personnel from being targetted, why not go ahead and use actual camouflage?
Is there some other sort of reasoning at work here? Maybe material limitations? Maybe the stuff they use to make this suit blast and heat resistant also makes it hard to produce in other colors, or with patterns for camouflage?
