ABC News Chief Political Correspondent George Stephanapoulos wrote the coalition enforcing the no-fly zone over Libya looked like a “Patchwork of Camouflage” after seeing this photo yesterday of a Task Force ODYSSEY DAWN planning meeting aboard flagship USS Mount Whitney.
I get his sentiment but looking at the photo, I only see a few patterns. You want to see a real mishmash of uniforms check out a planning meeting during the height of OIF or heck even a current one in Afghanistan. The room will look like a military surplus catalog exploded.
Typo in the title there bud. 😉
The correspondent does allude to a deeper / wider issue though – namely, that military camouflage has become more about fashion or “branding” than about effectiveness and fitness for purpose. Its becoming like a modern equivalent of the Napoleonic era when uniforms became ever more guady as a way of differentiating and standing out from each other.
How about some NATO standardisation on uniform camo?
I saw that article and you are right, there are far better representations of the united colors of Benetton than that. Perhaps they are going for a more symbolic meaning for unification than a visual one.
“Everyday” camo uniform could express the vision of main goals of armies.
For example, Germans in their flecktarn definitely are going to fight in Central European broadleaf forests.
French army in CCE looks good in their fields and pine forests near Mediterranean Sea.
Army of Finland perfectly blends in Scandinavian landscape with conifers, moss, lichen and granite rocks.
But US Army ACUPAT looks good in the middle of sunny street with clouds of sand and concrete dust. I don’t think it resembles NY, Portland or Denver.
Fortunately for the United States its Army has done little to no fighting in its domestic environs since the Civil War.