In a recent interview with the Army Times entitled “Straight talk from Odierno on uniforms, women in combat arms and PT tests” Army Chief of Staff GEN Ray Odierno answered a few questions regarding the Army’s impending switch to OCP as the principle camouflage pattern, ending 10 years of use of the so-called Universal Camouflage Pattern. His answers were rather interestingly worded.
Q. You expect the transition to the Afghanistan uniform?
A. I think the testing tells us that’s the best uniform, but we have not finalized that decision yet. You know that I usually don’t avoid questions, but it’s contractual, so I’ve got to be careful of what I say.
Ultimately, his comment’s support what I’ve been saying for months now; the US Army is adopting the Operational Camouflage Pattern.
However, I find two things funny about this article. First off, just weeks ago the Army Times published an article stating that the US Army wasn’t going to switch patterns.
The second thing is the very comment from GEN Odierno. He is speaking as though OCP (Crye Precision’s MultiCam) were a finalist in the Phase IV Army Camouflage Improvement Effort and the solicitation is still in source selection. OCP wasn’t, at least not as a candidate. It was however, a baseline pattern that the candidates were measured against. Additionally, Crye Precision was a finalist with a family of patterns that are quite similar in geometry to OCP. According to my sources, the Crye entry “won” the tests but due to ineptitude on the part of the Army no winner has been officially announced. It’s very important to point out that these are not the same thing.
Now, by even GEN Odierno’s admission, there is a law in place that restricts the individual services from introducing new camouflage patterns. It would seem that the years and millions of Dollars of development by both Government and Industry that went into Phase IV are now for naught.
“Congress has ordered that we can’t develop any new systems,” Odierno said. “Well, we have two, right now: the one that we’re wearing every day, and then the one that we use in Afghanistan. So, what’s the next step in how we transition? When do we start? Now, we want it to be as cost-neutral as possible.”
Instead of adopting a family of camouflage patterns for arid, transitional and woodland environments as planned in Phase IV, the Army is now set to forego the woodland and arid environmental patterns in order to field the solitary transitional OCP. It’s a compromise caused by inaction that has turned the most comprehensive camouflage study in history into no more than a report on a shelf. And while OCP is a fine pattern, the Phase IV winner performed better, offered more options and came with an inexpensive enterprise-wide license to print as much as they need. The make-it-up-as-they-go plan to transition to OCP on the other hand is more expensive and leaves the Army with a less advanced transitional pattern and no specialized patterns for desert and jungle.
Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing personally against GEN Odierno. But had the Army announced their winner when originally planned (June 14th), this all would have been water under the bridge. But instead, they hemmed and hawed themselves into a corner. It’s a situation that will cost them more to get less.
