It’s very promising to see the Army looking for Soldier and Small Unit Digital Ink Jet Printed Camouflage. The current Camouflage Improvement Effort is all about current state of the art wet printing and providing a static family of camouflage patterns that are within their own environmental zones of Woodland, Desert and Transitional, universal in nature. For example. When the Army selects a woodland pattern this fall, it will have to work in all green environments, which if you’ve spent any amount of time in different areas occupied by things green will know that they can be vastly different.
The real golden ring in this camo game is to be able to dynamically blend in with the background as you move around. Short of that you have two schools of thought; it’s either universal patterns or to be able to rapidly develop and produce into finished goods camouflage patterns for specific environments. The former is less expensive but easier to deal with logistically and operationally, the latter is expensive and difficult to manage.
This is where this contract award comes in. The US Army has awarded Rothtec Engraving Corp $1,334,156.00 to “develop a new highly innovative technology for rapidly designing and printing new and existing camouflage patterns with infrared reflective capability onto military textiles.”
