It doesn’t, hence the return to the 2002 design.
No, it was designed to help blend in with digital noise from night vision sensors as well as help during the day.
In the end it turns out to be more smoke and mirrors than they were told. That and the typical guerrilla fighters don’t have enough NVG to make it work well.
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A better solution more typically used is to literally grab some local leaves and branches and stick them in your helmet/ALICE gear. Saves a lot of time trying to find an outlet and making sure the heating bed is level.
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From what I’ve heard, frequently laundering can diminish the effectiveness of camouflage. The inks have to resist fade.
Funny you should say that. I read somewhere that when Picasso saw soldiers wearing camouflage he turned to Braque and said, “We invented that.”
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It’s certainly possible. A quick google search finds that this quotation is definitely attributed to Picasso, although I can’t seem to find an actual citation anywhere.
Picaso had a notorious personality and pride, and I suspect would have taken any chance he could to claim credit for something - especially if that something could be used to suggest that art was stronger than weapons. He was staunchly anti-war and remained unabashedly neutral in every major conflict he lived through. The fact that the early French “camoufleurs” of the first World War, and their counterparts from other nations during the second, almost invariably came from backgrounds as professional artists of one kind or another, would certainly have appealed to his sensibilities.
Thus the quote certainly fits the man, even if it may have just been a witty joke between colleagues.
i wonder if they do some battles/wars in retro outfit too.
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If he did say it, he was probably talking about Dazzle camouflage, which isn’t quite the same thing - it’s not meant to hide that there’s something out there, but instead to make it hard to judge how many ships you’re seeing and which direction/speed they’re going.
Oh, and kamouflage.net seems to be the best resource for looking up international/historical camo patterns. (Ignore the slightly odd vibes from the people that contributed to the German 1935-45 section.)
Eastern Europe?
Me and three tabs of very good acid once spent a loooong night staring at a couch exactly like that one.
I’m assuming - and hoping - that those in the Army will get some sort of uniform allowance to make the change. They’ve changed several times over the last 30 years or so, just about the length of a full-term military career. That could get expensive fast.
It’s my understanding that MARPAT works perfectly well. The Army was jealous of the new toy and rushed UCP through development without properly testing the pattern and coloration and ending up with something that looked cool but didn’t perform.
On-site manufacturing will be problematic. Conventional kinds of 3d printing don’t work well for fabrics. However, on-site camo printing on sewn-elsewhere single-color uniforms is a potential way. Kind of like stocking up with blank t-shirts and then silkscreening or painting whatever you need for a given occasion.
An interesting aspect of camouflages is their multispectral performance. Near-infrared will be crucial for night vision gear, emissivity/reflectivity in thermal IR for thermal imagers. The former can be played with (to a degree) with a camera with IR-pass filter added (and optionally IR-block filter removed if present and not sucking). The latter is difficult due to lack of affordable thermal imagers, and some of the data are considered secret or at least difficult to get to, but a lot of public data about thermal radiation performance of materials is available in the field of energy management of e.g. buildings. The same coating (and other methods) that prevents a building from radiating heat has a good chance to help with reducing a person’s or a vehicle’s thermal signature.
What about urban warfare?
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