How American Camouflage Conquered the World
Design students don’t start out in the field or at a hunting stand. “You start in your Adobe suite, right? » said Thompson. “Go straight to digital, create it, print it, make uniforms out of it. Adjust, adjust, adjust, adjust, adjust.” It was a lot of guesswork. There really wasn’t a reliable measure to test the effectiveness of camouflage. “The human eye, the user and the man in the field know what is good or bad, but to make it a test that you could replicate with different strengths would be very, very difficult,” Thompson says.
And yet, Crye Precision was pretty sure it had found something special. In the early 2000s, they presented their multi-environment camouflage concept to the US Army. Crye made it clear that they intended to patent this design, one of the first designs of which was called Scorpion. In 2004, they did and called it MultiCam. Around the same time, when the Army put out a request for applications for a new military camouflage, Crye offered MultiCam. He was rejected.
Instead, the U.S. Army announced it had designed its own version of a versatile camouflage pattern that can blend into most environments. It was called the Universal Camouflage Pattern (UCP) – a pixelated digital pattern that made it look like someone had downloaded a very low-resolution camouflage image. When the UCP was widely adopted across the military in 2005, it became, in the words of costume historian and journalist Charles McFarlane, “one of the most permeated camouflage designs of all time.” Kit Parker, a Harvard professor and Army reservist who served in Afghanistan in 2009, wore a UCP. “These Chechen shooters were shooting at us from a long way away,” he told journalist Ilya Marritz. “It was like I had a flare stuck to my forehead.”
The only soldiers who could essentially choose not to wear the UCP were members of U.S. Special Operations Forces. Elite teams like Delta Force, SEAL Team Six, and the Green Berets have a little more leeway when it comes to their clothing. “Every unit, whether conventional or special, has what we call a tactical standard operating procedure, or blue book,” a paratrooper from the 82nd Airborne told me. The blue book will outline the “third party items you are permitted to wear.” For special forces, “they are generally quite lenient.” He says he has a buddy in special ops who wears sneakers, and he’s heard of someone who wears Vans high-tops.
As such, Special Forces were the ideal audience for MultiCam. This cutting-edge camouflage began to be worn by some of the U.S. Army’s most elite soldiers, many of whom had met Thompson and Crye during the duo’s numerous trips to Fort Benning. “These are people who have the ability to make their own decisions,” Thompson says, “and who are also maybe a little more open to some crazy things.” Crye began producing runs of its camouflage, selling its own MultiCam products in the early days of e-commerce and also licensing the pattern.
