Despite deliberations throughout this year, the 2015 NDAA aka the Carl Levin and Howard P. “Buck” McKeon National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2015 does not repeal the provisions of last year’s Enyart Amendment requiring DoD to move toward common camouflage patterns and combat uniforms.
According to the Joint Explanatory Statement to Accompany 2015 National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2015:
Revised policy on ground combat and camouflage utility uniforms
The Senate committee-reported bill contained a provision (sec. 352) that would amend section 352 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2014 (P.L. 113-66) that established a policy that the Secretary of Defense shall eliminate the development and fielding of Armed Forces-specific combat and camouflage utility uniforms and families of uniforms for specific combat environments to be used by all members of the Armed Forces.
The House bill contained no similar provision.
The agreement does not include the Senate provision. (Emphasis added)We note that the guidance for the military services and combatant commands required by section 351 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2014 (P.L. 113-66) to implement this policy is late and has not yet been delivered. We also note that the implementation plan is also late and necessary to ensure proper implementation of the Department of Defense’s guidance to establish and publish joint combat uniform standards and performance criteria.
For more info on the 2014 NDAA provisions for camouflage read this: soldiersystems.net/2014/02/03/joint-service-camo-national-defense-authorization-act-fiscal-year-2014-repost
Updated – What I understand this language is doing is tapping DoD on the head to let them know that they aren’t following last year’s NDAA by providing information Congress asked for. It looks like Congress is still very keen on the subject and that they need to get their act together.
Tags: Camo Wars
Let’s see how much money we can waste playing stalling tactics! Each branch will propose their own, with testing. Which must be counter-tested by every other branch. Then haggling over mission requirements and who owns the patents – I think we can spend more money fighting this than actually approving a working pattern (or patterns) for any one branch!
So… Are we all still down with the OCP?
Probably until they’re told to switch to whatever everybody else wants
the Army is…
The USAF will probably wear OCP if push came to shove. Like SSD keeps saying, they won’t switch right now since they have a ton of the current tiger stripe stuff laying around waiting to be used/sold at MCS. It should be used for something.
All you have to do for service wide acceptance is let them roll their sleeves, and find a way to keep the enlisted stripes huge and most airmen won’t even notice the difference. You could probably nix those ideas to as long as you don’t bring back starching. The USAF will just drape reflective belts over whatever uniform they wind up with anyway.
Yeah you know me
Around and around it goes and where it stops nobody knows
Yes! This guy ^ has got the stuff.
Yeah, I think I hear circus music and smell cabbage!
That can only mean one thing! C’mon everybody, it’s a polka!…?
I give up. The should just take the moral high ground and announce their willingness to adopt whatever the department of the navy decides on.
I’m still holding out on buying NWU Type I and just wear my Khakis. I’m hoping that the Type I are abolished before I get to a unit that forces me to get them.
Well the Army has about a million members (active, guard, reserve) and in this battle I think numbers are going to count. The USAF also uses multicam so I doubt that they would object to going that direction. That leaves the Navy and USMC who will not want to go with a uniform they did not develop. An easy compromise would be OCP for transitional areas, MARPAT for arid and AOR 2 for woodland/jungle. Then everyone could have a piece of the pie. A bigger challenge would be the physical layout of the uniform such as pocket size, shape, location, velcro or no velcro, etc.
Would have been an easy solution. Now the Army is up to its ears with lawyers trying to articulate their legal position on OCP. It should be noted while Naval Special Warfare and DEVGRU got the publicity credit for developing AOR camo patterns, Delta had some involvement in that too so it was actually jointly developed. I have a feeling the AOR patterns would be the area specific winners all around especially being that they supposedly perform better that MARPAT in naked eye testing and even better in the fancy spectrum’s of light.
Nothing against the Marines but obviously the Army has a lot more people to make recommendations on the utility aspects of the uniforms and the Marine Corps leadership seems to care a lot less about what the grunt “thinks” he needs. That just seems to be their stance on anything they didn’t come up with. The Army has constantly developed the ACU with changes and they are the largest branch and the land warfare branch so they should get the first bite of cake on that too.
Matthew Cox over at Military.com is quoting these same excerpts and is apparently drawing the conclusion that Congress scrapped the Enyart Amendment. I interpret the quote above to indicate that attention is being called to DOD’s non-compliance, not a resignation to status quo. Is that an inaccurate assessment?
Definitely points the finger
Yes, attention is being drawn. The language to repeal is not in the 2015 NDAA. It was in the Senate’s version but not the House’s and didn’t make it through conference.
I’m not sure what they were reading.
Please forgive me, if I missed the point. But, does this means the DOD has until 2018 to get all branches into one pattern?
No
That deadline to have a common pattern was stricken from the original Enyart amendment and the final text of it in the ’14 NDAA did not include any mandate for a common pattern. It required that moving forward there may not be any branch specific pattern. Any new pattern must be used by all branches but allows for a branch to continue using its current pattern, or a pattern already in its inventory. At the very least, it still prevented a branch from disallowing a sister branch from adopting its pattern, so the Marines can use OCP in the future if they want to.
There was another subsection that required I believe department secretaries to report back to congress within 180 days, as noted by SSD and in the article, as well as some other points that they neglected to do entirely, but the deadline to have a common military pattern is ancient history by now.
…in other words is the deadline back on?
What deadline? The 180 day deadline that DoD completely blew off to offer guidance on how they’d accomplish this task?
The DoD probably knows that Congress doesn’t really have their act together. If I was the DoD and they were messing around with my budget I would ignore them the best I could too.
Dear Congress . . . . Tap harder!
Let’s just work on a new pattern and uniform. It’d probably cheaper in the long run than continuing to produce all these different uniforms while they are debating it which will go on for years.