Digital Camouflage Clothing: The US Army’s Universal Camouflage

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 U.S. military invested $5 billion 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 UCPs should have stood for useless, sticky 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.

Y2K Camouflage

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 do 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 illusions like Cubism to trick their enemies' eyes more better. The first pixelated or square-based pattern used in camouflage was dual-tex, which used individual squares rather than blocks of colors that could each blend into the environment at close range, known as the suit's micro- pattern, while 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 call 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 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 trendypixelation and striped lapels.

The UCP Camouflage Pattern

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 watches—that's not a joke, military officials actually went to Home Depot—theylanded on Ralph Laurence Coyote Brown, probably in commemoration of the skin tone of the people theyhoped to bomb. 

Coyote Brown became the centerpiece of two color palettes, one for forests and one for deserts. The arching 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 alethora of different prototypes, testing and development to make sure that its pixels 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 needed 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 Marines' great Marpat pattern, but because the Marines didn't want the Army steal their hardearned survival rates, the Marines had copyrighted their camouflage and instead of 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 Ratatouang–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, argument that these colors didn't exist in combat environments, and opt 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-years 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, but the problem was these blobs were actually too small and created an effect known as isolunans, 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 threedimensional 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 camouflage set for all military branches, which would theoretically have the triple effect of saving government money, not getting soldiers killed unnecessaryly, and standardizing camouflage bikinis across all spring breaks.

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