ACU | Military Times GearScout

Army moving forward on camo. UCP Is dead.

By: Rob Curtis

13-12-2010

The Army Times is reporting on last weeks Army Camouflage Improvement Industry Day in today’s paper. Lance Bacon attended the Dec. 9th event and heard from a range of Army officials speaking about the current and future camouflage programs.

A revelation about the Army’s current camouflage pattern came from Maj. Brett Lord, from the Maneuver Center of Excellence at Fort Benning, who spoke frankly about UCP. “The uniform I am wearing doesn’t do the best job of concealing our soldiers,” he said.

In it’s place will be a set of uniforms with three new patterns; a transitional, a woodland and a desert pattern. Industry will have till early spring 2011 to submit their patterns for an evaluation and wear test.

UPDATE: The plan calls for three submissions from industry and two from the government. Initially, I thought this meant Soldiers could end up in MARPAT or AOR, it means that Natick is working on a couple of patterns that will go up against the industry patterns. The currently fielded patterns will only be used as baselines.

There’s plenty more in Lance’s article, so go get an Army Times this morning and find out what your next uniform may look like and how the Army plans to develop it.

It’s official: Army adopts MultiCam for use in OEF

By: Rob Curtis

22-02-2010

Programatics

Updated: Now with more details from our Friday morning interview.

According to Matt Cox at Army Times, the Army announced Friday morning that it will begin fielding MultiCam ACUs to forces flowing into Afghanistan as soon as this summer. Program officials told us explicitly that we would begin to see MultiCam fielding in August. The Army plans to begin the fielding in two overlapping stages.

The initial push will be to get MultiCam on 4th Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division, at Fort Polk, La., and the Iowa National Guard’s 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 34th Infantry Division, both deploying for OEF this summer. Once that effort is underway, the Army will then concentrate on getting new ACU-MultiCam and selected OCIE to currently deployed OEF-A soldiers.

Boom.

According to the Army’s test results, MultiCam was the only camo pattern to rank first in all three categories of the Army’s photosimulation evaluation.

… UCP-Delta did well in the detectability, not as well as MultiCam, but pretty well. UCP-Delta did perform significantly better than UCP and it would have been cheap, but we didn’t want to go ‘cheap Charlie’ on the soldiers. If we can give them an edge, we wanted to give them an edge even if that meant spending some extra money.

Colonel Bill Cole, Project manager for Soldier Protection and Individual Equipment, U.S. Army, PEO Soldier

The MultiCam uniforms will have a few other improvements that are already headed for future ACU contracts. OEF-A bound soldiers will receive about $4,000 worth of gear including four sets of MultiCam uniforms, four combat shirts and matching combat equipment.

CSA approves MultiCam for OEF

By: Rob Curtis

17-02-2010

Business News, Programatics

Soldiersystems.net is reporting Gen. George Casey’s approval of a plan for the immediate fielding of MultiCam to soldiers in Operation Enduring Freedom. We haven’t yet gotten the official word but have no reason to doubt the report after confirming it with our own sources. We expect an announcement from the Army shortly.

UPDATE: This one is going all the way to the Secretary of the Army, the Honorable John McHugh, for approval. So even though General Casey has signed off on the recommendation, the fat lady hasn’t sung yet. We hope to have the final word tomorrow.

I wonder why the Secretary of the Army is weighing in? I don’t know if it’s a rubber-stamp sort of thing, but it seems like the chief’s signature would normally be enough to approve a uniform regulation. Perhaps it’s a play to put some political capital behind the request. The Army will need it if it goes up to the Hill to ask for help funding the camo change introduced by the recently deceased Rep. John Murtha.

Read the slides and FAQ from the ACU conference here

By: Rob Curtis

31-12-2009

Contracts, Programatics

It’s not as cool as being there, but the DLA just shared their PowerPoint presentation and a FAQ from the Dec 10, 2009 industry conference in Philadelphia about the Flame Resistant ACU (FRACU; a favorite on the Colonial Fleet’s Battlestar Galactica) and the Flame Resistant Permethrin (FRP-ACU). It answers a few questions about the uniforms itself and lots of questions about the acquisition process such as:

When will the Solicitation be issued?
How do we prevent knockoffs?
Is the Army planning on fabric solicitation to coincide with the decision on “New” Camo pattern?
Does the Government plan to license the IP on the current FRACU product to ensure multiple sources, or make this a performance based specification, thus eliminating the sole source situation that currently exists?
Has the fly pattern issues been corrected with the latest pattern?

Congress Doesn’t Dig UCP – Orders New Camo for A’stan

By: Rob Curtis

15-06-2009

Programatics

Congress is jumping into the camo debate. They’re ordering new combat uniforms for troops in Afghanistan after hearing complaints that UCP doesn’t work as well as it does in Iraq.

Army Times’ congressional corespondent Rick Maze found the language in a report accompanying HR 2346, the 2009 supplemental appropriations act. Missing, however, is the source of funding for such a refit. Here’s the whole article.

From the HR 2346 Conference Report:

The conferees understand that soldiers deployed to Afghanistan have serious concerns about the current combat uniform which they indicate provides ineffective camouflage given the environment in Afghanistan. Accordingly, the conferees direct that within funding made available the Department of Defense take immediate action to provide combat unifonns to personnel deployed to Afghanistan with a camouflage pattern that is suited to the environment of Afghanistan.

The conferees further direct the Secretary ofthe Anny to provide a report on the program plans and budgetary adjustments necessary to provide appropriate unifonns to deployed and deploying troops to Afghanistan. The report shall be submitted to the congressional defense committees by the end of fiscal year 2009.

Deal$cout- Mystery Ranch Unloading ACU Packs

By: Rob Curtis

08-06-2009

Off-Duty

It’s weird. I really thought this ACU UCP pattern would catch on. I mean if my neighbors are prancing around in Multicam bathrobes, why am I having such a hard time finding a UCP Speedo?

At least I’m not alone in overestimating the longevity of the Army’s latest fad. Mystery Ranch, like Arc’teryx last week. is selling off their stock of UCP gear beginning today.

Head over to MysteryRanch.com and stock up.

Army moving forward on camo. UCP Is dead.

It’s official: Army adopts MultiCam for use in OEF

CSA approves MultiCam for OEF

Read the slides and FAQ from the ACU conference here

Congress Doesn’t Dig UCP – Orders New Camo for A’stan

Deal$cout- Mystery Ranch Unloading ACU Packs

Contact GearScout

Recent Comments

Categories