The US Army’s Universal Camouflage: A Terrible Mistake

this is good camouflage this is bad camouflage this is great camouflage what's that you don't see anything exactly from 2002 to 2004 the US military invested 5 billion dollars in over a decade of research developing this camouflage pattern and the design aptly named Universal camouflage pattern quickly became iconic anyone who sees it can instantly recognize it as U.S army camouflage which is well kind of the problem because it turns out that UCP should have stood for useless crappy pattern because while it looks great on hats and pants and this actual Amazon listing for Desert child soldiers it wasn't particularly great at you know hiding the adult soldiers from the people who wanted to kill them according to one Army specialist this camouflage pattern was a quote Universal uniform that universally failed in every environment like the United Nations peacekeepers in any International crisis which raises two questions how did we end up with such an ineffective design and why exactly doesn't it work for decades all military personnel had used this standard battle dress uniform which looks like this it worked fine and seemed to do the job but when Y2K hit so did the peak of art inspired military design that had been crescendoing for decades as early as World War II military designers had been experimenting with optical illusions like cubism to trick their enemies eyes more better the first pixelated or square based pattern used in camouflage was dual text which used individual squares rather than blotches of colors that could each blend into the environment at close range known as the suit's micro pattern while also making up a larger pattern that could blend into the background for longer distances or the suit's macro pattern in the late 1990s a military officer named Timothy O'Neill who some called the grandfather of modern camo and others called Tim developed camouflage on his computer using pixels it turns out that pixel based designs act as white noise to the brain basically because pixel camouflage looks less like nature the brain becomes Less fixated on it and thus ignores it as part of the background so when soldiers are wearing the camouflage they're more likely to blend in precisely because their camouflage stands out in the natural environment like a normal person walking through a New York City subway station after O'Neill's development a lot of military branches started to take notice as with most military strategies the Marines were first in last out in 2000 they wanted to duplicate this Canadian camouflage design known as cadpat because of its trendy pixelation and striped lapels but those greedy Canadians had copyrighted the pattern so the Marine leaders had to make their own different enough version that wouldn't get them sued after making a trip to Home Depot to look for paint swatches that's not a joke military officials actually went to Home Depot they landed on Ralph Lauren's coyote brown presumably in commemoration of the skin tone of the people they hope to bomb coyote brown became the centerpiece of two color palettes one for forests and one for deserts the overarching design coined marpat for marine pattern camouflage the thing is this pattern with four distinct colors that made up its camouflage pattern worked marpat had undergone a plethora of different prototypes testing and development to make sure that its pixelation actually did its job in a variety of environments before it was printed on thousands of uniforms it even became a standard part of the Marine Corps combat utility uniform that's still in use today along with rainbow toe socks meanwhile the army did a new camouflage design because they didn't have matching camouflage sets at the time so soldiers were basically walking Targets on the battlefield which sucks when you're trying to avoid getting killed by people trying to kill you the Army wanted something like the Marine's great marpat pattern but because the Marines didn't want the Army stealing their hard-earned survival rates the Marines had copyrighted their camouflage and instead of just paying the Marines to use it the Army decided to take some creative liberties with their own knockoff design known as the universal camouflage pattern but like any knockoff Dr wow prongles or Racha Towing it didn't work quite as well as the original during the process they made the decision to eliminate any blacks and Browns from the design arguing that these colors didn't exist in combat environments and opted for Desert Tan 500 as the camouflage's central color while desert tan 500 is really good at sounding cool as hell it turns out it was really bad at camouflaging soldiers especially compared to the Marine patented coyote brown which had been the key to making marpat so effective plus the Army's overpaid Consultants forgot to consider how Shadows would factor into the pattern's design and to top it off they didn't test the design before slapping it on thousands of spongy 19 year olds and shipping them to the desert to pay for college the pattern named Urban track was composed of tan gray and sage green and soon after it was approved in 2004 soldiers started to notice its flaws its macro pattern or the collective camouflage effect of the whole uniform didn't work the pixels made up distinct Blobs of color meant to disguise them the problem was these blobs were actually too small and created an effect known as isolunins which means the entire uniform appeared as a visible tan Mass rather than a blitz of colors difficult to separate from each other this effect made the camouflage appear flat in a three-dimensional environment so from nearly any distance the camouflage failed to do its job given how exposed the pattern made troops in the Middle East with its high levels of sand and similarly high levels of people trying to kill soldiers army officials had to go ask Mom to borrow her uniforms in this case mom being the Marines so the Army had to start a new search for a pixelated camouflage pattern from scratch by 2010 and the UCP design was soon phased out for literally any other alternative since then Congressional members have been pushing the Department of Defense to adopt one one camouflage hatch for all military branches which would theoretically have the triple effects of saving government money not getting soldiers killed unnecessarily and standardizing camouflage bikinis across all Spring Breaks and if you'd like to learn more about what it takes to coordinate the world's largest militaries have I got a deal for you Joseph from real life lore's modern conflict series details the world's most pressing conflicts of the last century like the war in Ukraine the US invasion of Afghanistan and even the greco-turkish Cold War which I bet you haven't heard of much and it's only possible because of nebula nebula is a crater run and create your own streaming platform that we and real life lore and tons of great creators are all part of 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Channel: Half as Interesting

Views: 5,205,748

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Id: WQYsmZ6AJdY

Length: 6min 26sec (386 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 15 2022