Mr. Rawles:
You made mention of the Army adopting some Multicam variants for standard [field utility] uniforms; I’m not too surprised by this. The Army’s move from BDUs (and DCUs for deployments) to ACUs, and finally Multicam, has an enjoyable history of stupidity and corruption (hard to imagine with the military, I know). Having worn ACUs in both garrison and deployment/combat, they’re wonderfully light to wear…and get easily torn up and ripped up, unlike BDUs/DCUs. ACU are also terrible at actually camouflaging the wearer, unless you spent all your time in a grayish pastel quarry….which, of course, are rarity in Iraq and Afghanistan. Overseas, we stood out like garish sore thumbs.
Multicam, on the other hand, is a camo pattern that’s actually effective at concealing folks, and best of all, it bears resemblance to former camo patterns, as opposed to the digitalized garbage. Perhaps Multicam will improve the ACUs as well (doubt it), but I don’t dread wearing them.
Downside is, this is many more hundreds of millions of dollars needed to be spent to outfit folks, to buy uniforms, and flood the surplus market with outdated ACUs. Oh, joy. If they take out the velcro and return to (quiet) buttons for things, that’ll work out well too (buttons last longer than velcro…who knew? ;-).
Anyway, just my 2 cents. Yours, – CPT C.K.